Up All Night

"They say you're not supposed to take it personally, but it was personal. It was a personal goal of the both of us to eventually get that guy, and it worked out perfectly. He went to juvenile hall. I remember driving him back to the station, and both of us had these huge grins on our faces, and it'd get to the point where we'd say, 'What did you call us last time?' 'Remember, partner, he called us this last time.' You're not even really steamed or anything. You're reliving from the very beginning, from his insults to catching him with a gun. 'Pigs. Assholes.' The words don't matter to me. It's that he would regularly challenge us. Eventually he's the one who lost. In the end, the bars are shut on him, and we win for that day. Now, he'll get out, and I'm sure he is out already, but there will always be that memory that we were able to catch him that one day."

In reality, most of a patrolman's shift consists of anything but fun. It usually involves crisscrossing the division, bouncing -- though often at slow speeds -- from one radio call "for service" to the next, rarely encountering a crime, let alone making an apprehension or an arrest. It involves separating former business partners squabbling over the couches and computers in a Miracle Mile office tower. It involves answering a false alarm at a coffee joint near Third and Fairfax. It involves rousting a bum who's passed out in the bushes of a quiet side yard on Stanley, near Olympic (and nagging yourself afterward over how it was you didn't see him lying there when you pointed your flashlight straight at him). It involves calming an irate wife who has just discovered her husband plying another woman with drinks on another woman at a bar on La Brea. It involves placating an upstairs neighbor whose downstairs neighbor is deliberately playing the television loudly enough to rattle the walls of their Blackburn Avenue four-plex. It involves telling a hostile, acerbic 40-something with a Carol Channing rasp to take her nattering indoors, because it's 3 a.m. and the rest of the people living on Croft would like a break. At its lowest ebb, it involves baby-sitting a trio of ADT private security cops standing on Washington near Western, who've called the LAPD to register a complaint of a hit-and-run against a woman who tapped one of their brand-new cars, they admit, at "maybe 3 or 4 miles an hour." The night ends in the stillness of the 4 o'clock hour. Not gloomy, just hollow.