The Long Fang of the Law

Good news. Law enforcement agencies in L.A. County are increasing their efforts to protect us from the terrors of the night by declaring war on those elements of society that threaten our peace and security.

Well, no, not Uzi-armed gang-bangers, drug dealers or blood-lusting psychopathic killers exactly, but graffiti-painters, kids with fake IDs and dogs that bark at night.

You all know about the crackdown on graffiti-painters and on young people who use bogus identification to buy beer. Law and order advocates feel that if you take away their spray cans and their beer cans you’ve taken a great leap toward a better world.

In declaring war on graffiti-painting alone, our boys in blue (the cops, not the Dodgers) are serving not only L.A. but all of humanity by protecting the ozone layer. Pretty good for a bunch of guys who can barely spell perpetrator.

Now about the barking dogs.

Dogs, as we all know, have no sense of timing. They do not know to stop barking at 9 p.m. and even take perverse delight in beginning their barking schedules just about the time we are settling into a peaceful evening.

Which is why today we salute Municipal Judge Josh M. Fredricks of Torrance, who knows a crime when he hears one. He dealt with the horror of a barking dog by sentencing its owner to jail for 45 days.

The dog owner’s name is Bill Goodman. He is an amiable, 60-year-old retired teacher who lives in the Riviera section of Redondo Beach, a cluster of homes on a hillside with a smashing view of Santa Monica Bay.

Bill loves animals. At various times during the 25 years he has lived on Via La Soledad he has kept rabbits, chickens and goats on his property and combined them into a sort of petting zoo for children in the neighborhood.

This worked fine in those days because there were fewer homes and more open land and Redondo Beach had not yet aspired to Malibuism. The kids loved the animals, Bill loved the kids and the mockingbirds sang in the old pine trees.

If there was a portent for trouble, it lay in Goodman’s own puckish nature. One day a neighbor wanted to know what kind of an animal his Nubian goat was and Bill, the old devil, said it was an African dog.

He didn’t really expect the lady to believe that, but she did. A few days later, she mentioned the African dog to dinner guests looking over the fence into Bill’s yard and they went crazy with laughter. She was mortified.

Bill isn’t sure this particular woman was behind his subsequent problems, but he isn’t sure she wasn’t.

The neighborhood itself was changing. The kids grew up and moved away, property values soared, old-timers sold out and tense, high-achieving yuppies moved in.

Well, Bill had two dogs and they barked. This kind of thing, while annoying, is usually solved with a phone call. Barking dogs do not cause cancer, nuclear war or a tendency toward serial-killing.

The ancients knew that. An Arabic proverb says, “The dog barks but the caravan moves on.”

This caravan didn’t.

No one called Bill. Instead, five neighbors signed a petition that charged him with violating a city ordinance against keeping noisy animals.

Bill is an easygoing guy. He has to be. Eight years ago he had a five-way heart bypass and figures that statistically he’s got only about two more years of life.

“You’ve got to go with the flow,” he says. “You’ve got to stay calm.”

But this was too much for him. He asked for a jury trial, defended himself and lost. The sentence: pay a $1,200 fine and spend 45 days in jail.

“I was stunned,” Bill says. “I never dreamed it would go that far.”

Even city prosecutor John Lord was surprised.

“I wanted him to see the inside of a jail,” Lord said, “but didn’t think he’d get 45 days. Probation wasn’t good enough. This isn’t the first time this has happened.”

Judge Fredricks won’t talk about the case, but during the trial said he felt Goodman ought to be taught a lesson. On the day Bill got 45 days, a man convicted of a knife assault got three days. Well, lessons vary. Bill served six days and is appealing.

The judge, however, ought to be congratulated for the clarity of his message to dog-owning felons everywhere: the day of loud-barking crime is over. Knife-fighters may come and go, but in Redondo Beach, when dogs bark, the caravan stops. And an uneasy silence settles over the place where birds once sang.