A Bad Decision on a Good Cop

Thirty-one LAPD officers chronically miss the mark on the gun range.

Yet Alvaro G. Martinez, rifle and pistol expert for 14 years in the Marines, winner of the Marines’ highest peacetime medal for heroism, gets fired.

The LAPD is so anxious to pad out its ranks that it reportedly wants to annex 886 officers who now wear the badges of school police and transit cops.

Yet Alvaro Martinez, former Explorer Scout, squad leader of his LAPD academy class, racking up scores so high they look like summer temperatures in Chatsworth, gets fired.

Chief Willie Williams is reprimanded by the Police Commission for being dishonest about taking free Vegas hotel rooms.

Yet Martinez, who risked the hoots of the other rookies to show off the Christmas picture of himself at 7, wearing the toy cop hat and badge of the job he always wanted, gets fired.

There are killers and thieves who have been booted out of the LAPD. There are wife-beaters and drug abusers and power-trippers buried within its ranks.

Perplexingly, the LAPD says it has no place for the likes of Alvaro G. Martinez.

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In November 1977, Martinez, 18, left a family barbecue in San Fernando to pick up his sister from her nurse’s job. He had had too much beer; he had, in fact, had far too much beer ever since his mother, the family disciplinarian, the one all the kids wanted to please, died two years before.

The LAPD cops who pulled him over laughed when they saw his slippers were on the wrong feet. He laughed too, and blew a marginally drunk 0.11. It was reduced to reckless driving.

April 1978: He spun the tires on his new Mustang and got stopped. He blew a 0.13, again reduced to reckless driving.

September 1978: Driving five friends to play baseball, he stopped at a gas station and walked over to--what else?--a liquor store. Some of his pals stole a fan belt from the gas station, and when Martinez came back with his 40-ounce Coors, the cops were cuffing them all. Burglary charges against him were summarily dropped.

October, 1978: He squealed the Mustang’s tires and again got pulled over. Blew a 0.15 and a 0.13. This time, he knew it was jail.

In dramatic timing only the movies could make credible, his girlfriend’s brother showed up in Marine dress blues, talking up the corps. Martinez would have enlisted the next day, but the recruiter said he had to get rid of that DUI.

So he pleaded with a muni judge, who made it disappear. Martinez became a Marine. He earned plaudits as a drug and alcohol counselor.

In 14 years, he served in the Gulf War, and saw his best friend blown up there. He evacuated people from erupting Mt. Pinatubo.

In 1993, when he wanted to re-up, the Marines began downsizing, just as the LAPD was upsizing. The wish that a 7-year-old made on Santa’s lap came to pass.

His work in North Hollywood was so promising that, two weeks before his rookie year was officially up, his training officers made him throw the obligatory party.

It was premature. At one second past midnight on March 5, according to the city charter, Al Martinez would have become a fully fledged police officer, entitled to all the rights and privileges, including hearings and grievance procedures.

Less than six hours before that, Al Martinez the probationary officer, entitled to no such consideration, was fired for dishonesty.

*

The question the LAPD asked was, have you ever been arrested?

Martinez knew it was coming. He believed the judge had cleared his record in 1978. But he consulted his ex-father-in-law, the police chief of a Los Angeles-area city and ex-LAPD himself, to make sure his teenage misdemeanors had been “disappeared.”

Nothing showed up on the computer, and Martinez says his ex-father-in-law told him he could truthfully answer “no” to the arrest question. So, in good faith, he did.

Nothing evidently showed up in the LAPD check either, or he wouldn’t have entered the academy. Yet there are many law enforcement files--FBI, LAPD, CII, NCIC and more--and nothing is ever really gone. Whatever Martinez believed, whatever some computer showed, his had not been expunged.

Someone found an old case number, the number led to an arrest report, and on March 4, Al Martinez was fired for intentionally withholding information.

Since then, he has sat in his Sylmar apartment, unemployed, waiting for the phone to ring. Fullerton PD hasn’t answered his application. Home Depot hasn’t called about the security job.

Never mind the $58,600 of city money to send him through the academy. The premise of this country, and even law enforcement, is supposed to be about second chances.

Al Martinez did it textbook. Half his life ago, for a span of 11 months, he screwed things up. Not felony screwed up, just misdemeanor screwed up. Since then, an unbent hairpin couldn’t get as straight as Al Martinez.

If he isn’t the kind of cop the city wants, who is?