Hot Under the Collar Over the Great Cap Caper

When we last left Chris Neidrich, he was wearing an LAPD baseball cap and getting busted for it.

This was back in October, when a dogged deputy from a Florida county sheriff’s department put Neidrich under arrest for a form of impersonating a police officer, even though it was technically only an impersonation from the neck up.

I didn’t think of it as that big a deal at the time. Just seemed kind of a funny story, actually.

It all took place a few weeks after Neidrich graduated from a Tampa police academy, where, as he was telling me Tuesday on the phone from Florida, “I placed first in my class in defensive driving and in shotgun.”

My immediate temptation was to make a joke to Chris that out here in dangerous Los Angeles, defensive driving sometimes involves the use of a shotgun.

But he isn’t in a mood for jokes.

Because ever since all that publicity he got for the big cap flap of 1998, Neidrich hasn’t been able to find work as a police officer anywhere in his part of Florida.

Even though the charge was dropped and the deputy was reprimanded, Neidrich feels that he is now looked at as a guy who made trouble for the cops.

So now a lawsuit is pending, as a result of a young man going out in public dressed in . . . well, a law hat.

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Afew weeks ago, Neidrich, 25, put his LAPD cap on again.

He actually has two--the original, a gift from an ex-girlfriend who was aware of his ambitions in law enforcement, and a duplicate, which Chris--who has no personal ties to L.A.--had custom-made after his first cap was confiscated. (He later got it back.)

This time he was in Tampa, when a couple of local cops spotted the cap.

“Hey,” one called out, “you can get arrested for wearing that cap!”

The Tampa cop was kidding, not recognizing that this actually was Neidrich, whose face had been on the TV news.

“Yeah, I know,” Neidrich replied to the one who said a guy could get arrested. “I did.”

He is getting sick of it. In the beginning, it was just one of those things . . . a cop who got a little carried away, a case of something major being made of something minor.

To refresh memories, what happened was this:

Shortly before 6:30 a.m. on Oct. 25, 1998, a deputy named Richard F. Wright from the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office put handcuffs on Christopher Edward Neidrich of Largo, Fla., and took him into custody for “unlawful use of police indicia.”

For all I knew, “indicia” was one of those Italian words a symphony conductor uses to make his musicians go faster or play with more feeling.

Looking it up, I eventually found indicia to be “characteristic marks or tokens.”

Deputy Wright enforced a misdemeanor under state law that forbids a citizen to wear something that could fool a “reasonable” individual into believing that John Doe is John Law.

Wright, 44, apparently had warned Neidrich once about the black cap with LAPD in white. The second time, he made the collar.

“I even asked how he could be sure that LAPD didn’t stand for something else,” Neidrich says. “He told me, ‘You think I just fell off a truck?’ ”

Even so, since in no way had Neidrich represented himself as a cop, he was not brought to trial. On March 10 of this year, Wright was formally reprimanded by his superiors, in a letter placed in his file that “determined you failed to act reasonably and within the limits of your authority.”

Neidrich thought that was that.

He remembers a West Coast police officer quoted as saying, “If I wear a Denver Bronco cap, all that means is that I’m for the Denver Broncos.”

Chris says, “I’m for the LAPD. I’m for any PD.”

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John Trevena, his attorney, wrote last week to the Pinellas County sheriff, Everett Rice, claiming that the arrest has caused Neidrich “enormous embarrassment . . . loss of wages and the ability to earn wages in his chosen profession.” A board of county commissioners promises to investigate fully, but Trevena is miffed.

“Rice recently gave a TV interview attacking my client,” Trevena says, “by suggesting his difficulties in finding law enforcement employment are due to his ‘disreputable’ background.”

At 18, Neidrich was charged with misdemeanor battery after an altercation. Chris says, “A lot of cops must have one spot on their record from their youth.”

Since then, Neidrich has served in the military, graduated from a police academy and hopes to be a K-9 officer, working with a dog.

After I wrote on him last time, I was sent an LAPD cap by a friend on the force. “Do you wear it?” Chris asked. I do.

Maybe I’ll be arrested for indicia exposure.

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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