Dan Cooke; LAPD’s Longtime Spokesman, TV Show Consultant

Dan Cooke, the spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department for more than two decades who briefed the news media on the Charles Manson murders, the Robert F. Kennedy assassination, the Hillside Strangler and Skid Row Slasher serial murders and the police shootout with the Symbionese Liberation Army after Patty Hearst’s kidnapping, has died. He was 72.

Cooke, who was also a key advisor on television police dramas and highly critical of what he viewed as inaccurate portrayals of police work, died Friday at his home in Rancho Bernardo of bladder cancer, his wife, Jane, said Tuesday.

Although part of Cooke’s thorny job was defending the actions of police to the news media and in turn defending reporters to officers, Cooke befriended the best of both. Wry and low-key, he was adept at marshaling deadline-driven TV, radio and print journalists during dignitaries’ visits to the city, as well as at crime or disaster scenes. If a reporter got it wrong, he or she immediately heard from an angry Cooke.

When crime or natural disaster occurred, assignment editors around town ordered: “Call Dan.” Official LAPD statements were attributed formally to “Lt. Dan Cooke,” and the tall, silver-haired and authoritative spokesman became as familiar on camera as the police chiefs for whom he worked--William Parker, Tom Reddin, Ed Davis and Daryl Gates.

Interspersed with his serious reports on major crimes, Cooke occasionally generated amusing stories.

During a Los Angeles visit by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meier, Cooke followed the suggestion of television anchorman George Putnam to ask for her recipe for chicken soup. She agreed, and Cooke and Putnam later made it available to some 200,000 viewers.

Cooke also related a 1979 episode in which the late City Councilman Gilbert Lindsay was issued a citation for stopping in a no-parking zone at the Triforium near City Hall. Lindsay angrily tossed the $15 ticket to Cooke and said, “Here, you take the damn thing.”

The spokesman walked the citation around Parker Center, first asking then-Chief Gates if he “wanted to take care of it . . . by paying for it, of course.” Gates, not averse to spats with city councilmen, smiled and said, “It’s yours.”

But Cooke found a police officer who volunteered to pay the ticket from his own pocket as a “dear friend” of Lindsay. A relieved Cooke told the councilman’s office he gave the citation to “a benefactor from the sky.”

Part of Cooke’s job--which never made him rich but did give him pleasure--was consulting with creators of television police shows. He became a close friend of producer, director, writer and actor Jack Webb and always rated Webb’s “Dragnet” and “Adam-12” the best police shows ever made. A “Dragnet” poster hung in Cooke’s office. Webb, in turn, created shows around a police media spokesman in Cooke’s image.

Cooke’s own badge was No. 714--a badge whose likeness was seen in the opening sequence of each “Dragnet” and as the syndicated name, “Badge 714,” for the early episodes of the show. Webb gave Cooke the Badge 714 used for television, and Jane Cooke said that badge will now be placed in the Webb Museum at the Los Angeles Police Academy.

As LAPD technical advisor, Cooke reviewed scripts for several TV programs and motion pictures about police. Aside from Webb’s shows, they failed to impress him, even if they were falsely portraying law enforcement agencies other than his own.

“ ‘CHiPs’ was bad,” he told Times TV critic Howard Rosenberg in 1981, but “several steps higher” than its predecessor, Broderick Crawford’s “Highway Patrol.” Worst of all, Cooke said, was “Kojak,” the Telly Savalas program set in New York.

“Never in the history of that show did they make one lawful arrest and seizure,” he told The Times. “Just once I wanted them to say they had a warrant before they kicked down the door, but they never did.”

Cooke didn’t like Jack Lord’s “Hawaii Five-O,” either. “They called me once for some information,” he said. “I asked why they were calling me, and they said they wanted to get the show accurate. I said, ‘Why start now?’ ”

After a couple of years in the Santa Monica Police Department and a brief stint with the California Youth Authority, Cooke joined the LAPD as a foot patrol officer in 1953. He retired in 1998.

He was born in Oakland and reared in Brooklyn, N.Y., and served in the Army during World War II.

Cooke is survived by his wife of 49 years; a son, Philip, of Alta, Utah; and a daughter, Army Maj. Laurie Harding of Clearwater, Fla. There will be no services. The family asked that any memorial donations be made to cancer research.