THE HUE AND CRY : Olive-Colored Uniforms Have Some Officers Singing the Blues

About color. Not the melanin kind of color. We have all ranted and grieved over that lately, and for centuries before then. I can’t imagine there’s anything to say in the 750 bloviating words on this page that could begin to address that suppurating wound of humankind. At best, we grope feebly toward equilibrium, the way Crayola purged flesh from its palette.

The kind of color I’m speaking to comes off a strand of fabric, not a strand of DNA. The armed and uniformed officers of the East Bay Regional Park District in Oakland don’t like the color of their uniforms.

Now, there are uniforms, and there are uniforms. The nearest this country came to a military coup was when Richard Nixon wanted to put absurd, Ruritanian uniforms on the White House guards.

For these officers who patrol the parks in the other cities by the bay--Oakland, Berkeley, Fremont and the like--the problem is not the uniform style, it’s the color. They so loathe their user-friendly tan and olive that they’ve filed an official grievance to switch to the seriously hard-ass, midnight-blue uniforms that real cops wear.

There must be some deeper reason that park rangers would rather pull on the wool-blend inky blues of the LAPD, which these days must come with a built-in “kick me” sign on every pair of pants.

To be fair, even parks are tough venues nowadays. That probably says more about us than about our park rangers: Cover me, Martha, while I go for a coupla Sno-Kones.

But this is about more than people whining over being mistaken for Smokey Bear in tent canvas. It’s about Black Shirts and royal purple, Crips blue and Bloods red. It’s about the color of authority.

Why don’t gangbangers in the palmetto latitudes embrace Miami Dolphins aqua the way their West Coast brethren embrace Raiders black and silver? Why does Van Halen insist on the “brown ones” being culled from the M&Ms; laid out in its dressing room? Why is the appliance department at Goodwill full of discarded refrigerators--every one of them in avocado or harvest gold?

Remember Ronald Reagan’s brown suit, the one that looked like it came straight off the shelves of a downstate dry goods shop? From the hooting inside the Beltway, you’d have thought the Leader of the Free World had shown up for work in a Paddington Bear costume. And when it came down to who ran the show--the gentleman in brown or his lady in red--we know now, don’t we?

Face it--earth tones are wimp tones. Just look at the Earth itself. We squirt a few CFCs into the air, and the ozone falls apart. Cut down just a few gazillion trees, and it gets overheated. Smog hasn’t stunted our growth, but check out those weak-sister L.A. pine trees that get only so tall and then start growing sideways. No authority, the Earth. No command presence.

No one salutes anything the color of a doormat. Run it up the flagpole. No really tough country has earth tones in its flag. Red, white and blue, gold and black--now those are flag colors. Fighting colors.

But back to Oakland: Peter Sarna, parks director of public safety and former Oakland cop-in-blue, notes that the CHP and the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, no badge-carrying shrinking violets, wear tan. “I don’t think color,” Sarna says, “is the prime determinant of how competent an officer is, how compassionate, how caring.”

“Our park rangers, the people who cut the grass and service the chemical toilets and mend the fences, wear the same uniform we do,” grumps Fred Michael, president of the district’s police union.

Tell it, Fred. Better to be taken for storm troopers than tree-huggers. No respect from the criminal class otherwise. I can hear the bullhorn now: “YOU THERE! IN THE SUN HAT! IN THE SUN HAT! PICK UP THOSE ABBA-ZABA WRAPPERS OR THE SWAT TEAM MOVES IN!” The littering thugs snicker insolently: “Getta load of that dude in tan.” And the thin olive line cracks.

We can’t let it happen here. Hell, we can’t even let it happen in Oakland. Give the officers their midnight-blue uniforms. While we’re at it, issue them chainsaws--in case they see some spotted owls roosting lawlessly in those trees and miss them with their M-16s.