A Street Cop Who Just Does His Job

For the past few months, Eric Rose, who is sometimes a source of my political news, has been urging me to write about the Los Angeles Police Department reserves.

The young and enthusiastic Rose, a political campaign manager and lobbyist, has the most difficult volunteer job I’ve ever heard of--unpaid public relations adviser to Police Chief Daryl F. Gates.

Obviously a man who avoids life’s easy roads, Rose is also a reserve LAPD officer. That means he puts on the department blue and a gun in his spare time and chases crooks for the token wage of $15 a month.

He first brought up the subject early in the furor over the Rodney G. King beating. The department was in turmoil and the chief was at war with--to name a few--the Christopher Commission, African-American and Latino community leaders, the AFL-CIO, Mayor Tom Bradley, the Police Commission and the press.

Chief Gates isn’t the whole story, he said. Write about some hard workers at the bottom, far from the battles at the top.

That’s not an unusual request. The press often is accused of focusing on the famous, ignoring less prominent ordinary types. Daryl Gates, critics of the press complain, isn’t the only cop in L.A.

Such criticism ignores the fact that big shots like Gates run things. That’s why they’re covered so intensely. But Rose was so persistent that I finally caved in. I joined LAPD reserve officer Jim Lombardi in a ride-along.

Lombardi, 57, is a solemn-faced, serious-talking man who is one of 500 reserve officers, half of whom work the streets and the rest in support jobs.

He’s been a reserve cop for 23 years. Most of the time, he’s a water district manager and land developer in the Lancaster area, where he moved after a decade of running two Lombardi’s restaurants in downtown L.A.

He and his wife live in a house on a half-acre golf course lot. But once a week, he leaves his semirural tranquillity to work an eight-hour shift in the Central Division, which covers downtown and the rough streets of Skid Row. Another day of the week, he drives into L.A. to handle administrative affairs for the department’s 500 reserve officers.

Police friends dropping into his restaurant gave Lombardi the idea of becoming a reserve cop. The department was upgrading the reserves at the time, requiring them to take regular Police Academy training. The idea of being a part-time cop appealed to Lombardi’s sense of excitement and civic duty.

On my ride-along, Lombardi drove me through downtown, past the sidewalk encampments of the homeless--their faces lighted by curbside bonfires--drug dealers, robbers, ex-cons, addicts, the mentally ill, the drop-out unemployed, all the people condemned to L.A.’s own hell.

Lombardi also checked out downtown, deserted in the evening; the blocks of toy, clothing and fish wholesalers around Skid Row; the housing project to the east.

Of all the things we saw on that relatively quiet night, one incident stands out.

A woman living in Angelus Plaza, the large, low-rent housing complex for seniors and the disabled on Olive Street, reported that a neighbor had threatened her.

When Lombardi arrived, she was being comforted by her son, who’d come over from his own home. The man across the hall, she said, had not only been threatening her, but had been harassing some other women on the same floor. He was a man of about 30. He seemed mentally ill, she said.

The woman showed Lombardi a note the man had shoved under her door. Scrawled on it were the words, “I’m going to kill you.”

The neighbor sounded dangerous, but maybe he was a harmless nut. Maybe Lombardi was taking it too seriously. Maybe not. Whatever the case, Lombardi wasn’t going in alone to question him. He said he’d better talk to the supervising sergeant, who saw the danger, too.

The sergeant called in two regulars, who knocked on the man’s door. The man said he hadn’t been taking his medicine, that his mind was disturbed, filled with images from watching C-Span. The cops asked him if he wanted to see a doctor. He did, and they took him to the psychiatric ward at County-USC Medical Center.

“I did the right thing,” Lombardi said, as we drove away.

Reservist Lombardi’s presence on the streets gave Central Division another officer, and shortened the time it took for police to reach Angelus Plaza. The episode also illustrated the way the reserves and regulars work together. Unknown people, quietly doing a good job, just as Eric Rose had promised.

Lombardi made the same point as we talked. The officers on the street don’t care what’s happening at the top, he said. They want to be left alone, away from the noise, so they can do their work.

Great, I thought. That’s the way it should be. All we need now is a chief who will let the cops do their jobs in peace.