‘Another Little Vietnam’

They were dispatched to engage an unknown enemy in a tidy little war of containment, but everything got complicated fast. During the course of the conflict, the soldiers would come to be regarded as demons by the nation that had sent them to fight in the first place. Naturally, they became demoralized. They learned to hunker down, do time, get the hell out--to survive.

Inevitably, infected by the craziness of it all, some weaker ones went around the bend. And thus America confronted its Calleys and Medinas. This proved to be a great convenience: Bearing down on the atrocities of renegades was a way to avoid nastier questions of national morality raised by the war itself. We sent them to do a job, Americans could tell themselves, but we never said anything about mutilated corpses or village massacres.

And that was Vietnam.

They were sent into the city, a small, fast army of police officers equipped with helicopters, battering rams and other tools of war. Their orders were clear. Be hard-nosed, “proactive.” Do whatever it takes to keep the enemy pinned down, contained. Yes, another war of containment: The general idea--never overtly stated, for the obvious political reasons, but plain nonetheless to anyone paying attention--was to contain crime within certain neighborhoods. These happened to be neighborhoods the rest of the city would prefer to forget even existed.

This conflict, too, would turn out to be more complicated than first imagined. Again, weaker officers lost their way. The value of the Koons and Fuhrmans would be no different than that of the My Lai soldiers. Ripping righteously into rogue cops averted a more painful examination into why a city--not a police force, a city--would lay siege to a part of itself. We never imagined, citizens would exclaim, viewing the video, hearing the tapes. We wanted the cops to be tough, but nobody said anything about beating prone suspects, about spewing racist bile.

And that was Los Angeles.

*

One place to begin is 20 years back. In 1975, the last U.S. helicopter lifted off from the embassy in Saigon. A new L.A.-based cop show was introduced to the television watchers: Good old Joe Friday had been replaced by Lt. Hondo Harrison of “S.W.A.T.,” a drama that celebrated the employment of Vietnam-learned tactics on the domestic crime front. Also in 1975, Mark Fuhrman, home from the war, joined the Police Department, and a former LAPD detective named Joe Wambaugh published a bestseller.

It was called “The Choirboys,” and in a pivotal departure from most cop fiction it depicted the department in a way that, well, that Jack Webb would never have dared. Wambaugh’s cops did not have all the answers. They sometimes made up the rules as they went along. They were not always polite; they talked dirty and invoked, yes, the N-word on seemingly every other page. These also were cops who worked under enormous emotional strain, isolated, embattled, and sometimes they broke.

Interestingly enough, the novel begins with a scene set in Vietnam, where two future LAPD officers huddle in a darkened cave, alone, scared. Wambaugh had seen the parallels: “These were men,” he would say later of his characters, “who were going to be put into another crucible. . . . They were going to be put into another little Vietnam. And, like in Vietnam, there would be no heroes. No matter what they did they would be scorned, despised.”

Two decades and many defeats later, the current attitude among many LAPD officers seems to be: hunker down, do time, get the hell out. “Now you have cops in huge numbers,” Wambaugh said, “who are putting the hat down over their eyes, so to speak. Forget about ‘proactive.’ Just answer your radio calls. I think L.A. is on the verge of finally getting the Police Department it deserves, for not backing up the cops. . . . It’s become a no-win situation for cops. Is it any wonder they go nuts in large numbers?”

Now understand. This is offered only to help explain, rather than excuse, the behavior of the Fuhrmans and Koons. What they get, they surely deserve. At the same time, though, is it fair for the city at large to be blaming the Police Department alone for these atrocious failures?

Culpability for the war in Vietnam belonged to all America, not just the soldiers sent to execute it. The attempt to throw a thin blue line around certain Los Angeles neighborhoods--and then, hopefully, forget about them--was the work of the whole city. Blame for its dismal outcome goes all around, too. The thrust of the public roar created by Fuhrman would indicate that this view has yet to take hold across Los Angeles. The prevailing attitude seems to be the city has a police problem.

If only it was that simple.