Did You Know Our East and West Coasts Have Two Different Approaches to Policing?

On this episode of Our American Stories, sergeant Bob Alaniz, formerly of the LAPD and the cop who helped catch the infamous “Night Stalker,” explains how our two coasts developed entirely different styles of police work. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Did you know that the East and West parts of
our country have two entirely different approaches to policing. Here
to tell that story is former LAPD Sergeant Bob Olinez,
the officer who fingerprinted the hands of serial killer Richard Ramirez,

(00:34):
otherwise known as the Nights Talker. Let's take a listen.

Speaker 2 (00:38):
I was working in West LA in the Brentwood area
and actually a few blocks from where Ojay actually lived
off of Rockingham. That's right in a very affluent area
of LA and the pretty large mansions and homes. So
it was around two or three in the morning and
on our radio frequency, the other officers contact us, says, hey,

(01:02):
come on back and back us up. We see some
suspicious vehicle and they observed this car was a seventy
four for Penzo and it was pretty much a jelapy
at that time. So rich Ramiers was driving down the
street and he looked like he was pulling into a driveway.
He would look out it back up, go to another residence.

(01:23):
So here's case in the homes, and we pulled them
over we order him out of the car. He's cooperating
with us, and he looks a mess. And so that's
the edge of law enforcement. And that's where you have
to decide what you want police officers to do. Do
you want them to wait until a crime has occurred

(01:43):
and then apprehend the person, or do you want them
to do what we do and be proactive and stop
these guys. You guys are asleep at night and you
don't want to be murdered in the middle of the night.
And so I would expect people would want their police
officers in their neighborhood to be proactive and figure out
what's going on, What is this guy doing in the
neighborhood and at the very least, if nothing happened, we

(02:05):
would chase him out. So that comes up to the
concept of policing. And there's two concepts. One, when policing
started in the eighteen twenties, it was by a guy
named Sir Robert Peel Pee l and he designed policing
in London. Now we've become a modern city, how do

(02:26):
we regulate and control just a massive amount of people
in this little area. So he came up with this
idea of reactive policing. So you have a police officer
that is assigned to a footbeat and it's one or
two block in distance, and he would walk up and down.
He becomes familiar with the neighborhood or with the businesses,

(02:46):
and then when a crime occurs, you summon the police officer.
He would come over and he would either stop a
crime that's occurring, or if a did occur, then they
would get a hold of the detectives at Scotland Yard
and they would Scotland Yard would come out take over
the crime scene, and then the police officer would continue
walking up and down. This speak that's called reactive policing.

(03:07):
You react to a crime that just occurred. So in
the east coast of our country, that is the system
that we have. So in New York you have an
insane number of people. You know, I think right now
there's like forty six thousand police officers because it's very
labor intensive and that in the Philadelphia, Boston, all of

(03:28):
those guys have that concept. As we started developing our
country and going to the west, we started into proactive
policing and that's where you see Dodge City and Tombstone
and you see the Wide Herbs and all those guys,
because we know that we have criminals coming into the town.
They're escaping the East coast and so now they're coming

(03:50):
into the west. You got all these bandits coming in,
So we're not going to wait for them to come
in a crime. We know what they're doing. So now
that's proactive policing. We're going to have the wide RBS
out there confront these guys, stop them, kick them out
of town, and get rid of them. That's what it is.
And so Los Angeles was built on proactive policing. And
so the difference is that when I was a police

(04:11):
officer in the eighties, we had sixty four hundred police officers.
And at the time that I made that arrest in
nineteen eighty four, Chicago had seventeen thousand police officers. New
York had twenty six thousand. But when you look at
the FBI crime stats, LP arrested one hundred thousand people

(04:31):
more a year than New York did. So how do
you do that? We have sixty four hundred officers versus
twenty six thousand, and how does that happen? And that's
because we're proactive. We're doing what we did that night
with the Knight stuck there. We see something, we're going
to be proactive. We're going to find out what's going
on there. And in this case, we made an arrest.

(04:52):
In New York, they would just let them drive by
and just wait until something happened, or they hear a
window break and maybe respond, and that that's reactive. So
those are the two concepts in law enforcement. And we
see a change in law enforcement when Willie Williams was
hired from Philadelphia. That was right after Chief draw case.

(05:13):
So our city managers decided that maybe we should start
doing the reactive policing, and since then it's been this
long struggle to actually today I'm reading in the paper
where the city council is looking into removing the pretext stops.
Pretext means I see that broken tail light, I'm going

(05:35):
to use that as a reason to stop investigating and
find out what's going on. And I think that the
proactive policing is the where to go, especially now we've
got all these illegals that have come through that we
have no idea who they are, but they're coming from countries,
third world countries that hate us, and so I think
that reactive policing is not going to work. Proactive policing. Well,

(05:58):
so that's the whole thing about rich Ramiers and you know,
for me, it's a lesson on policing. And you know,
what do you want the police officers to do? And
when they do do something like we did, are they
going to be vilified? And that's where the officers are today.
They're not doing productive policing because now they're accused of
being racist, like this judge. You know, he's accusing us

(06:21):
of basically pulling over because he's Oh that was the
other thing he said. If rich Ramiros got into an
argument with his wife or girlfriend and he decided to
get in the car and blow off steam and he
should be able to drive anywhere in the city, and
that gets stuffed by the police just because he's in
a white neighborhood. That was his scenario that he gave
us at that time. Theoretically, yeah, you're right, but you're

(06:43):
going to pull into a neighborhood and you're going to
drive around and stop and pull into driver get out.
So that's where you're going to rely on professional guys
like me and my partners to determine the difference between
somebody that's desponding and blowing off steam and somebody that
looks like he's break into a house, and we should
have that ability to make that investigative stop. Otherwise you

(07:06):
would have killed somebody in Brentwood.

Speaker 1 (07:09):
And a terrific job on the editing and storytelling by
our own Greg Hengler and a special thanks to LAPD
Sergeant Bob alinas the story of two different styles of
policing East and West Coast. Here on our American Stories.
Here are our American Stories. We bring you inspiring stories

(07:32):
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(07:52):
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