One Cop’s Link to the Long-Ago Lawmen of Los Angeles

Maybe it’s the movies’ doing, but in these parts, we tend to take our history in little dollops, ladled out in easily digestible portions, flavored with more spice than subtlety, heavy on the myth.

We like the long and large shadows cast by archetypes like The Cowboy, The Military Hero, and The Marshal, pretty much free of shadings or equivocations that might blur the clean outlines of square shoulders and square deeds.

But the delight, like the devil, is in history’s details, and if those huge, clean silhouettes get a bit fuzzy, well, we are the better for knowing they’re a little bit closer to us, those iron men, and we come a little nearer to them.

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When a street with your family’s name on it runs through your hometown, you get an inkling right quick that history is no mere recitation of the dull dead.

The Alaniz family settled in McAllen, Tex., before it was McAllen, failed cotton farmers and successful cattle ranchers who cast their lot with the Texas side in the 1850s because of the bandits lurking across the uncertain new border in Mexico.

A century later, Roberto Alaniz took notice of family history, both in Texas and then here. When he was 6, his mother moved them to an apartment in the Fairfax district. Unlike the changeless horizons of Texas, around him was a city whose history was being created and destroyed every day. “I was always fascinated by history, ever since I was a kid. I grew up on Fairfax. I saw the transition: the big May Company that I used to go to all the time, the tar pits. I used to play there before they fenced it.”

Nearly 18 years ago, he signed on with the LAPD. And then, as he puts it, “I became part of history.” He stuck up for his pal and onetime patrol-car partner, Mark Fuhrman.

The next thing Alaniz knew, he was the hot interview booking--here and there and 12 times on the Geraldo Rivera show. There he sat, with some Fuhrman critic on the other side of the split screen hitting him with data about police abuse and minorities, and there was Alaniz with his blue police notebooks with the rundown on brutality complaints and ethnic diversity, and wondering where this all began.

“That’s how I got into the history,” the chapter and verse of the long-ago lawmen of L.A.

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Write what you know, the teachers say, and what Alaniz knew was being Latino in the LAPD, and that is where he began, looking for Latino cops from the time when the flags of Spain, then Mexico and, finally, the United States flew over L.A.

All he could ferret out of the archives were two sentences on Juan Carrillo, more famous in Santa Monica, where he helped organize its police force and set up city parks. And that’s how police history hooked Alaniz like a bag of salted peanuts. He went about his study the same way he investigated crime as a detective.

He ignored hearsay except as a starting point--”you’re getting quotes from quotes from quotes”--and went to the sources: original documents, letters, civil and criminal records, court transcripts, arrest files, the old Star newspaper, his articles published in the LAPD’s historical society magazine, The Link.

He has turned up cultural curiosities. Spanish authorities prosecuted crimes against the church, such as staying on horseback during religious processions. A man named Tiburcio Vasquez, convicted of stealing a mule and nine horses, was sentenced to five years; another man, convicted the same day of attempted murder for slitting a fellow’s throat, was fined $50.

Law enforcement could be as haphazard as the city was. Its cops, or marshals, sometimes were paid a salary, sometimes a percentage of the taxes they collected. The law was a far deadlier trade then. “I personally get tired of hearing about Tombstone and Dodge City,” says Alaniz. “Our law enforcement did a lot more than those guys.”

You can tell a real historian--Alaniz goes all soft-eyed and hushed at the intimacy of old documents. “Here’s a piece of paper that another human being wrote 150 years ago,” such as the letter from one marshal, in its margin a note about a request by the mayor’s wife for tinned fruit: “Please tell the mayor I have canned peaches.”

Alaniz has flown to Sacramento and the Bancroft Library in Berkeley on his own dime, looking for data on such dark episodes as the city’s militia and vigilante groups occasionally stringing up someone.

“The premier police department in the world,” he says with blue-line loyalty, “started from a backward department.” And yet, from his present post as field supervisor in the Southwest Division, he can see that some things do not change. Questions about use of force, good collars and bad, sound tactics and poor ones occupied police time then as they do now, as did a complaint that sounds right out of today’s newspaper: “They cried for more police officers and all they heard from the city was, ‘There’s no money in the coffers.’ ”

One thing, it is true, has changed. Most of the lawmen Alaniz has researched would never make it in today’s LAPD: “They wouldn’t qualify--not by our hiring standards.”

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Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com