A Rapid-Fire Turn of Events

Who would have imagined anything that could make Los Angeles feel this way about its Police Department?

Who could have blue-skyed an incident going down on the battering-ramming, Thin Blue Lining, citizen-spying, SLA-barbecuing, O.J.-coddling, Rodney King-whomping, SWAT-swarming, gorillas-in-the-misting LAPD . . . that would make us feel bad for them?

In the course of an hour of live TV, two misfit Gen-Xers--one of them a Jenny Craig dropout, both of them outfitted with a Soldier of Fortune wet-dream arsenal--managed to take a quarter-century of ragged police PR and wheel it around 180 degrees into a U-turn.

The LAPD we saw on TV in North Hollywood wasn’t an LAPD we recognized.

We were well-acquainted with the one-take LAPD of the Jack Webb mold, cool and imperturbable, an LAPD that practiced a professional courtesy bordering on contempt for us mere citizens: Thanks, ma’am, now just calm down and get out of the way and let us do our job.

We knew the high-handed derring-do LAPD of Daryl Gates, outnumbered but never outdone, the my-department-right-or-wrong force whose officers always had the upper hand, always had the drop on the bad guys, and sometimes on the not-so-bad guys.

But this--this was a new LAPD. This new force we were rooting for was a plucky little outgunned band of underdogs. There are towns in Idaho with more caliber power per person than the LAPD mustered in North Hollywood. We winced and cringed as we saw them forced to take cover behind black-and-whites that were being shredded into Christmas tinsel by an automatic weapon that can fire 10 rounds each second.

And there they were, some of them in shorts, for heaven’s sake, plinking away with mere pistols, police spread thin as peanut butter before payday--all that stood between a whole suburb and these chubby Darth Vaders.

*

It wasn’t enough that the LAPD looked beleaguered. The other guys had to look invincible. Bullets bounced off them like they were comic book characters. Their sheer, relentless, jaw-dropping bravado held us riveted--Larry Phillips walking toward the cops, arm straight, firing a handgun again and again after his Kalashnikov jammed.

The two robbers may have been many things--wacko, for starters--but they were formidable adversaries.

Commentators kept nattering on about Wild West gunplay. Roger McGrath, a UCLA scholar of the frontier, saw in it a rare parallel: “As they would say in the Old West, they died game. They gave no quarter and asked none.”

Your run-of-the-mill modern-day perp is possessed of more low cunning than smarts. He is a coward who shoots unarmed 7-Eleven clerks and little boys coming back from Dodger games and 3-year-old girls in cars lost on a dead-end street. He is not the stuff myths are made of. It is not for the likes of that that people giddy with their own aliveness scrounged for talismans, spent cartridges in North Hollywood and posed for photos alongside the bullet holes.

True outlaws, says McGrath, “were of an entirely different stripe” from common criminals. “They would pick targets that were institutions--banks, railroads--that people had ambivalent feelings about. So outlaws represented a certain kind of popular sentiment against some of those institutions.” And something in the American character, “a certain kind of perversity and defiance and rebellion in all of us,” can hold a sneaking admiration for boldness and panache, for the likes of D.B. Cooper and Bonnie and Clyde.

But if an outlaw hurt an innocent bystander, insulted a lady, that exalted status was instantly forfeited. In North Hollywood, 11 cops and six bystanders were hurt; no one will be writing folk ballads about Larry and Emil. They were not admirable, but they were remarkable.

“That’s why I think L.A. went so hysterical,” muses McGrath. “Banks are robbed every day, guys are shot every day.” But these two--”they were willing. They had intelligence. And they’re fearless. Which equals dangerous.”

*

The last time I saw the house on 54th Street, there was no house. There was a sodden hole, black and raw as the cavity of a tooth, charred and still smoking. Six people and one cat--the majority membership of the grandiosely deluded Symbionese Liberation Army--had been burned or shot to death here in a two-hour fusillade the day before. Its ghetto Gotterdammerung offered us, in 1974, live TV unmatched until North Hollywood.

“It took 500 cops,” taunted the next day’s graffiti.

In North Hollywood, it took 350 cops.

Over the years, dozens of cops have complained that it’s always the firefighters who get romanced by the press and the public, the firefighters who get the cookies and the thank-you notes and the testimonial luncheons. Today, the North Hollywood police station overflows with doughnuts and homemade lasagna and flowers. And perhaps, one day soon, a note: “Come home. All is forgiven. For now.”