The Fight Against Crime Notes From the Front : Here People Really Hand It to the Cops

Earlier this month in Sherman Oaks, a woman calmly walked up to a police officer on Ventura Boulevard and handed him a grenade.

She was not a terrorist. She was just stupid.

“She reached under her jacket and said to him, ‘You should have this,’ ” said Sgt. Cliff Boyer, the watch commander on duty that night in the North Hollywood Division. “Then she handed him a grenade that had the spoon and the pin still in it.”

Whatever her reasons for carrying a grenade around Sherman Oaks (she said something about her boyfriend leaving it behind when he left the country), the woman was following a long-held tradition in the San Fernando Valley.

“People turn the craziest things into the police out here,” said Sgt. Ken Johnson of the Foothill Division station. “Sometimes they just bring stuff into the station, toss it on the desk and it turns out to be a few sticks of dynamite.

“They say, ‘Hey, I found this when I was cleaning out the garage.’ ”

The grenade incident ended not with a bang, but with a lot of interrupted pastrami sandwiches. The officer who was handed the grenade quickly called for backup help and the bomb squad. Patrons of nearby Art’s Deli and other restaurants on the block were ordered away from their dinners and the squad, decked out in their Michelin Man duds, exploded the top off the grenade, rendering it harmless.

Indeed, officers at Los Angeles Police Department stations in the Valley said they couldn’t recall an instance of someone turning a dangerous object into the police ending in tragedy.

But some of them had stories. Especially at the Foothill Division.

“I remember here in the late ‘70s a couple guys who had been out riding motorcycles came into the station,” said Johnson. “They had been out in some canyon and they found a bomb out there, an aircraft type of bomb.”

Neato. The guys decided they just had to have it, and so they strapped the bomb to the back of one of the bikes and rode it on into town.

“They brought it to us, parked right in front of the station,” Johnson said.

The police cleared the block and brought in the squad, which determined that the bomb was a dud.

It was probably a stray from a military practice field north of Los Angeles.

But in 1987 the contents of a paper bag that a woman brought into the same station were anything but duds.

“She had apparently been out walking with her son and she found this sack,” said Sgt. Dan Mastro, who back then was a senior lead officer at Foothill.

“She drove down to the station with her kid, walked up to the desk officer and slapped it on the counter.

“The officer looked inside and it was three sticks of dynamite.”

When the squad arrived, they took one look and cleared everyone out of the building. The dynamite was covered with a waxy substance that indicated that the nitroglycerin in the sticks had crystallized and was highly volatile.

“They said they were amazed the whole thing didn’t explode when it was slapped on the counter,” Mastro said.

Even the most innocuous of finds can strike some conspiracy-minded citizens to suspect wrongdoing.

Way back, Burbank Police Lt. Don Brown said, one man brought in a “suspicious door.”

It seems the door, which looked at least 20 years old, had pry marks on it.

“He said he couldn’t find a building without a door, but he was sure it had been stolen,” Brown said. “So, he brought it in and wanted us to check all the buildings in Burbank for this missing door.”

Police took it, and behind the do-gooder’s back, chucked it in the trash. They didn’t quite believe the dusty planks were proof of a crime.

“We told him that when we found the building we’d bring him in to testify in court,” Brown said. “He seemed satisfied.”

The lesson in all this is that if you happen upon something dangerous (not doors, of course) while doing your spring-cleaning, just leave it alone. Disposal of such things is what the police officers on the beats and behind the desks are trained to do.

“Over here, we hire crazy people to take care of these things,” said Johnson.

“They’re called the bomb squad.”