The Force Is With Her : Television: Karla Kay Bair, co-producer of Fox’s reality series ‘Cops,’ researches the show on the streets and in squad cars.

Three years ago, Karla Kay Bair traded her apartment for a suitcase and her nightlife for evenings in a police car.

Since then, as co-producer of the Fox reality series “Cops,” she has traversed the country, spending nearly all her working hours with police officers. With no home save a parade of hotel rooms, she’s in pursuit, as it were, of a good pursuit.

On a September night, as Santa Ana winds bring suffocating heat to Southern California’s crowded urban neighborhoods, Bair relaxes in the front seat of a squad car in Lynwood. In the driver’s seat is sheriff’s deputy Sgt. Bob Rifkin, piloting the car around bends, through parking lots and down residential streets. Neighbors sitting on front porches or gathered around card tables look up and stare as the black-and-white passes.

Bair and Rifkin banter in street-speak. “You’re dissin’ me,” she tells him, and they laugh. This is their second night on patrol together. They’re looking for homicides.

The idea, Bair explains, is to accompany Rifkin to the scene of a murder and film the aftermath to show during a special “Cops” edition scheduled for November sweeps.

Fortunately for the people of Lynwood, no one was knifed, shot, beaten or otherwise led to an untimely death during the two nights Bair and her camera crew were there.

The next day, she would move on to Ft. Worth, where “Cops” has temporarily based its production office. Crews there and in Jersey City, Miami, Los Angeles and Washington State continue to patrol for homicides.

“It’s amazing how quickly the abnormal becomes normal,” Bair said blandly of her vagabond life, speaking more about the traveling than the nights spent scrounging for crime. She’s spent 827 of the last 862 nights in hotel rooms, she announced suddenly, a feat she considers a tribute to human resiliency. (The other nights were spent visiting family and friends.)

A former legal secretary who fled a failing marriage in Texas to start over in Las Vegas, where she worked her way into producing local TV shows, Bair was hired to work on “Cops” as a free-lance producer when the show’s crew came to Vegas nearly three years ago. Promotions have made her the highest-ranking woman on the series.

Along the way, she acquired a “road kitty” named Baby Ray--a cat she found covered with grease and water in a rainstorm at a Miami gas station--and learned how to think like a cop.

“I have a lot more respect for the job that they do,” said Bair, who was raised in Kansas City, Mo., and gives her age as 30-ish. “I have a lot more respect for the stress and the pressure that’s involved, and it’s made me a bit more cynical.”

To stay sane on the road, she said, she works out four or five times a week, and reads. At the moment she’s immersed in horror-meister Clive Barker’s new book, “Imajica.”

Bair keeps her blond hair short and wears very little makeup. She stays away from mini-skirts and glamorous clothes, saying it makes for better treatment from the cops. This night, she’s wearing black jeans, boots and a white blouse.

“Cops read people,” she said. “They get a read on you, and decide whether they think you meet the stereotype of what they think a Hollywood person is or whether you’re down to earth.”

“Cops”--which airs on Saturday nights at 8 on KTTV-TV Channel 11 and XETV-TV Channel 6, with reruns showing in syndication at 11 weeknights on KTTV--is a gritty, low-tech look at the world of law enforcement.

The show’s footage comes from photographers with hand-held video cameras who ride along with police--often accompanied by producers like Bair--and record what happens on a night’s rounds. The narrators of the program are the officers themselves, describing scenes as they and the photographers encounter them.

Rifkin said he and his wife are big fans.

“I watch it all the time,” said the mustachioed officer, whose short-sleeved uniform reveals just the tip of a tattoo of a skull and dagger.

“Cops,” he said, tells it like it is--from the police officer’s point of view.

“I like the action of watching it and not knowing what’s going to happen, which is also what I like about being out here (on the beat),” Rifkin said. “It’s an adrenalin rush. It’s what a lot of us like about police work--the excitement.”

Mostly, according to Bair, the program shows situations that officers encounter all the time: domestic disputes and abuse, robberies and narcotics arrests.

Typically, Bair and other members of the program’s staff move into a community for about two months, following officers every night until enough material has been gathered to fill several half-hour shows. Bair’s job is to ride with officers as part of pre-production, and then to supervise the crews who are shooting and editing footage for the show.

Most often, it’s poor neighborhoods where “Cops” goes for its stories. Wealthy areas, while often host to the very same domestic abuse and robbery problems that make up the program’s stable of policing situations, are disdained as not crime-ridden enough.

“Traditionally, we don’t go and ride in those areas,” Bair said. Things that happen in places like Beverly Hills, she said, “aren’t the kinds of things that are stories for us on the show.”

Her constant exposure to law enforcement seems to have rubbed off, giving Bair a police-oriented point of view. When asked by a reporter about Lynwood residents who seemed nervous or uncomfortable around the squad car, she suggested that their reactions had something to do with “the area we were in and the people who were there.”

“I’m never nervous about being around cops, but I’ve never been arrested,” she said. “If you haven’t done anything wrong, why would you be nervous about having a cop around?”

She said that she is even considering police work herself--that several departments around the country have invited her to apply for a job.

“Law enforcement does kind of get in your blood,” she said. “When the show comes to an end, and all things do come to an end, it will be interesting to see how happy I’ll be (working as a TV producer) sitting on a sound stage watching the same thing over and over again.”

Now, at least, Bair prefers to be on the move, living a life that makes a career as a producer in a place as insecure as Hollywood seem like a boring, stable job.

Her hotel in Ft. Worth is right by the zoo, she said, and when she comes home near dawn, after a night of riding with the police, it’s usually feeding time. She hears the lions roar from her window.

She likes that.