When All Else Fails . . .

I got stopped the other day by a cop who thought I was speeding. I saw him in my rear-view mirror and pulled to the curb in front of a taco stand. Cops are superstitious. They’ll never shoot a Mexican in front of a taco stand.

He motioned me out of the car and stood off to one side, hands on his hips. He was a big guy and his mouth hung open slightly, the way Quasimodo’s did in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” Thank God, he didn’t drool.

He studied me for a long time and then said, “Operator’s license.”

I am about to reach for my wallet when it occurs to me if I move too fast or too unexpectedly, the guy might assume I’m going for a gun and pow! I’ll be lying on my back watching Frank Capra beckon from above.

So I say very slowly, “I am reaching for my wallet,” and give him time for the message to reach his brain before actually taking my wallet out of my hip pocket and producing my driver’s license.

As it turns out, he’s a pretty nice guy who doesn’t give me a ticket. He cautions me to “Drive slow” and hands me back my license. I almost say, “You mean ‘slowly,’ ” but catch myself in the nick of time. You don’t bait lions at a watering hole when you’re a fat little eland.

“I’ll drive slow from now on,” I assure him, wagging my tail. By the time he leaves, I realize I was terrified of the guy. And then it hits me: I’m terrified of a man who’s supposed to protect and serve? Who’s supposed to be a role model for orderly conduct?

What the hell’s going on here?

I’ve been asking that ever since, and I’ll tell you what’s going on. We’ve got a town encapsulated by fear. We’re afraid of cops, cops are afraid of gangs, gangs are afraid of dogs and I’m afraid of them all.

L.A.’s not a laid back place anymore. Our mellow has drained away like dirty water from a bum’s tub. Every third guy owns a gun and every fifth guy wants to use it. A uniform doesn’t scare them. Nothing scares them.

There was a photograph in Tuesday’s editions of a multiple-murder suspect. He was sticking his tongue out at the camera. That, the cops in the street will tell you, is what they’re up against, a screw-you attitude.

So how do they react? By shooting first.

“When all else fails,” a cop said to me, forming a gun with his hand, “bang.”

“How do you know when all else has failed?” I asked.

“When beer cans begin looking like Lugers,” he said.

“Cops are afraid out there,” a 21-year LAPD veteran said to me. He’s command level. “You’ve got to have enough smart and confidence to know when someone’s going to shoot, and the guy on the street doesn’t have that anymore. He’s lost his confidence and has nothing to rely on but his gun.”

Not all cops buy this. “Confidence has nothing to do with it,” a homicide detective said. “There were seven murders in one eight-hour period the other night in a single division. One guy was killed over a cigarette. We’re at war. You’d be a damned fool not to be afraid.”

He’s of the shoot-first category. We had guys like that in the Marine Corps. Stump killers, we called them in combat. Fear rustled behind every bush and peered at them from the darkness. They shot at dead trees. They shot at the wind. Sometimes they shot at each other.

Of all passions, a wise man once said, fear weakens judgment most. True. It weakened the judgment of the stump killers. They never learned. Instead of ultimately realizing how bad their judgment was, it only grew worse as the shadows deepened.

“You’d be a damned fool not to be afraid,” the cop said. That’s true too. But I was becoming more afraid of the stump killers in our midst than the enemy on the hillside. It works that way with cops too. Some of them have become dangerous. They’re no longer the kind of people every kid wants to grow up to be.

Ask them in the ghetto. They’ll tell you cops are crazy. Ask them in the barrio. They’ll say cops are worse than gangs. A woman in East L.A. wonders aloud, “When did we become the enemy?”

But wait. A USC professor who trains cops says there’s hope. Terry Cooper thinks ethics training might be working. Policemen aren’t covering up for each other as much. That’s why we hear more about the bad stuff. It isn’t being handled in-house. Turning in your partner doesn’t make you a rat anymore. Things improve that way.

“There may be more cause for hope than despair,” Cooper says.

Maybe. The shoot-first attitude scares hell out of me. It’s bad enough being afraid of thugs. I hate the idea that a traffic cop might mistake my nose for an Uzi and shoot it right off of my face.