This whole issue: whether the LAPD is any good at its job, and when it falls short, why, is one of those touchy issues that the city of LA seems to struggle with in a fashion that no other big city seems to. Perhaps it’s that we’re in the land of make believe. We’ve had not just the Rampart scandal, but the Biggie Smalls murder, and the whole intersected criminal action (documented rather thoroughly in the book LAbyrinth). And for whatever reason we get these absolutely silly criminal incidents where the most egregiously silly questions are asked as if they actually make sense. For instance, you get police officers accused of racial profiling in neighborhoods where the ethnicity of the residents is monolithic. A friend of mine used to teach junior high school math. The student body of his school literally was 99.5% Hispanic. One child in 200 was black, instead of Hispanic. Yet some moron is going to complain about racial profiling if white and Asian kids from the neighborhood aren’t questioned, too, whenever there’s a crime.
Our latest silliness is the Grim Sleeper killings. I didn’t come up with the name, and I agree it’s rather flip, but it’s handy, so I’ll use it. It was invented by LA Weekly. Apparently someone leaked the existence of a serial killer to the media. The police have been investigating for more than 2 decades. The killer murdered a number of people (I don’t have the figures in front of me, but it was 7 or 8 people, I think) back in the 80s, and then stopped for 13 years (hence the Sleeper reference) before restarting his crime spree in 2002 or 2003. The problem here, of course, is that media attention doesn’t catch serial killers; unfortunately, they’re usually caught by meticulous record-checking (Son of Sam), stakeouts (the Atlanta child killings), or sometimes dumb luck. If the community gets outraged, however, you have a large “task force” formed, which sops up money that would go towards fighting other sorts of crime, which wind up suffering as a result. This is why police officers are so reluctant to admit a particular set of killings are the work of a serial. They’re almost impossible to catch, regardless of what you see on TV, and the money can often be better spent elsewhere.
Be interesting to read what Mr. Dunphy has to say about this latest “scandal”.
