Tony Alba’s 31-Year Marriage to the LAPD

Every time there was a scene of a crime, he seemed to be there. Cops could be seen in back of a sawhorse or kneeling over a chalk outline beyond a strip of yellow tape. A horde of media would be blatting on the opposite side, with a helicopter overhead. A suspect would be in custody or on the lam.

Take the bank robbery of Feb. 28, 1997, when heavily armed men opened fire on North Hollywood’s streets. “I was right in the middle of that,” LAPD Lt. Anthony Alba remembers, it being one of those days even a seen-it-all veteran doesn’t forget.

By the time the gun smoke cleared, Alba had a clear vision of how a bad situation could bring out the best in its bystanders. There was a police radio operator, seven months pregnant, who wouldn’t leave her post during several desperate hours. There was a neighborhood dentist who volunteered to assist anyone wounded.

“And here’s a little-known story,” the lieutenant says. “There was an armored car transport that happened to be in the Valley that day when the robbery was going down. And the individuals inside it, they either knew or guessed that a vehicle like that might prove useful to us in that kind of situation.

“It so happens there were millions of dollars inside it at the time. So their driver insisted on doing the driving, but we were indeed able to use that armored car before the day was done.”

Life on the beat.

Alba, as familiar a face in L.A. crime as anyone on either side of the yellow tape, this Friday is hanging up his gun.

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If you watch the local TV news, you probably have seen the guy 100 times. He’s that official “spokesperson” you hear so much about, the one who stands there in the glare of the lights, microphones thrust toward his mouth like spines from a pack of porcupines.

Alba is no spin controller, though. He’s a plain old peace officer, a 31-year vet with a no-nonsense Jack Webb face who’s done pretty much every duty the department has to offer--patrol, vice, watch commander, community relations. Tony Alba could be one of those L.A. cops authors such as Joe Wambaugh or James Ellroy modeled characters after, the ones who take care of the picayune details when they aren’t catching a double homicide.

He was a kid in Chino when a cop named Ray Martinez came to his high school daily, because things there had a tendency to get a little rough from time to time.

“He pointed out the possibilities,” Alba says.

A police officer, he began to see, could pull all kinds of assignments, not just chasing bad dudes with sawed-offs down dark alleys, but dealing with kids, discussing safety precautions with parents, even becoming a media liaison who could communicate to the communicators what the cops needed from them, while simultaneously translating to the cops what the media could do for them.

His first image of copland--”that whole ‘Dragnet’ persona,” as Alba calls it--was a strong influence. He wanted more and more to become a part of something that was being bragged about as the greatest police department in the world.

So he set out to be the first of his family to join the force. It followed a tour in Vietnam with the 9th Infantry, where being part of a combat platoon gave Alba an appreciation for staying alive.

“Then to come home and be spat at, be called names. . . ,” he says. “Soldiers today don’t know what it’s like to come home from war to that kind of treatment.

“And then I trade in my M-16 for a six-shot revolver, and I’m still unpopular to some segment of our society, because I’m a cop.”

So why do it?

Alba says, “I love pain, I guess.”

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He must, dealing with the media. Alba, 54, for the past four years has been the LAPD’s officer in charge of media relations. He takes pride in removing the adversarial part of the process, so the public can benefit from valuable information.

They’re going to miss Tony Alba down at Parker Center, even though they rarely lay eyes on him, since he’s usually out in the field. The man’s been to more L.A. crime scenes than Columbo. As he often tells Carol, his wife, “My first wife’s the LAPD.”

When his own son, Kyle, was diagnosed with cancer as an infant, Alba quit a child-abuse LAPD unit he was with at the time.

“That was too painful,” he says.

But that son and another are healthy grown men now. “They see me as a survivor,” says Tony Alba, a man who merits a last salute as he’s seen leaving the scenes of the crimes.

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Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com