One can imagine the angst in the Los Angeles Times newsroom (if such a place still exists). “We haven’t had a good hit piece on the cops lately,” an editor might say. “Who can cook one up?”
How else to explain a story the Times ran on Wednesday, a piece ostensibly about a mildly inappropriate exchange between LAPD officers, one of whom had just shot a man wielding a machete? “LAPD officers caught joking about earning overtime after shooting someone,” reads the headline. The story, which runs to more than 1,500 words, follows a familiar L.A. Times formula: take a trivial event and use it as a vehicle to regurgitate chapters from what people at the Times consider to be the LAPD’s sordid history.
The precipitating incident in this case was the August 2022 shooting of a Christian Arriola-Gomez, 24, who had been behaving strangely while carrying a machete in a San Fernando Valley residential alley. A resident called police and when officers arrived, Arriola-Gomez refused to stop and drop the machete. The officers followed him as he rode his bicycle around the block before returning to the same alley, failing to comply with the officers’ orders all the while.
When Arriola-Gomez dropped his bike and approached an officer still seated in his patrol car, wielding the machete as if prepared to attack, the officer fired two shots. Arriola-Gomez ran a short distance away before collapsing. He was taken to a hospital but died from his wounds.
The Times reports that while standing over the mortally wounded man, two officers “started making ‘jokes regarding overtime as a result’ of the shooting, according to the chief’s report on the incident.” The officers’ exact words are not reported, and the chief’s report referred to is not linked. The LAPD’s public briefing on the shooting, including video from officers’ body-worn and in-car cameras, can be seen here.
Thus is presented the blessings and the curses of ubiquitous video cameras capturing every moment of a police encounter. The public can view video of a given incident and see the unfolding circumstances that prompted an officer to use force. But, as here, the cameras can also capture the behind-the-curtain conversations that, to the uninitiated, may be unseemly. Who among us would choose to have his private conversations recorded and broadcast to the world, especially those captured in the most stressful of conditions?
Still, following their formula, the Times uses the overtime conversation as a launching pad from which to rehash “a string of incidents involving LAPD officers caught making inappropriate remarks.”
Inappropriate, that is, in the minds of our sophisticated betters at the L.A. Times, who take the overtime remarks and conflate them with the 1991 Rodney King incident and with racist attitudes exhibited by police officers in Torrance, Calif., Philadelphia, and Revere, Mass.
Related: Riot Act! NYPD Ordered to Pay Mad $tacks to George Floyd Insurrectionists
To the paper’s credit, the writer did seek comment from a former LAPD officer who offered a defense for “gallows humor.” “A lot of officers tend to speak after situations as a way to relieve stress,” said former SWAT officer Steve Gordon, “and they might say some silly things, and to try to display to their peers that they’re OK, they’re fine, that it’s nothing.”
But it’s still the L.A. Times, of course, so the reader is presented with the opinion of an “expert” to refute Gordon’s appraisal. The role was filled in this story by Christina Gisler, a forensic psychologist in Georgia. “More often than not,” she says, “when you curse, you’re perceived as aggressive, out of control, demeaning. Perhaps not surprisingly, whenever police use harsh language, it is negatively viewed by the public in that both men and women more often identify the officer’s (actions) as being excessive.”
There is some truth in that, but the wise police officer knows how to calibrate his language and his tone for the desired effect on his audience. The cop who conducts himself at all times as though he were a guest at a Buckingham Palace garden party will have difficulty gaining compliance from any but the most docile suspects. There is a place in police work for earthy language and a brusque tone, and I resorted to both many times during my long career with the LAPD.
On one such occasion, I responded to a backup request from a unit following a stolen car in South Los Angeles. The driver of the stolen car attempted the not-uncommon tactic of pulling into a gas station in the hope the police would simply drive past. Alas for him, he soon had six guns pointed at him as he alit from the car. He then made another common attempt at evasion by feigning innocence and bewilderment.
Most cops but few others will understand that at that moment, the car thief was weighing the risks of running away, performing the instantaneous mental calculations as he looked at each cop. Which of them looks fast enough to catch me, and which of them looks scared enough to shoot me?
As it happened, among the cops gathered for that tense moment in the gas station was the division captain, a man known as a harsh disciplinarian. It was clear that some emphatic language was called for if the car thief was to be arrested without a foot chase or use of force, but the two cops who had initiated contact with him were reluctant to say or do anything outside the book in the captain’s presence. I was not so constrained.
“Get your hands up,” I shouted, addressing him with a common vulgarity implying an improper Oedipal relationship with his mother. I went on to warn him in words to the effect that if he did not comply, he would soon be lying on the pavement and his reproductive organs would be lying elsewhere.
The change in his attitude was instantaneous and dramatic. He was quickly handcuffed without further fuss, and a lucky citizen had his car returned to him. The captain approached me afterward and said, simply, “It worked. Good job.”
The Los Angeles Times would not have approved.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member