To most Americans, our only personal contact with the police comes
when the motorcycle appears out of nowhere and the officer writes a
ticket. If we had been really speeding instead of just doing maybe ten
mph above the limit, it wouldn’t be so bad. But clearly we are being
made a martyr to the police quota system. The cop hands out so many
tickets a day or they take his shiny bike away from him.
On almost any highway anywhere in the U.S.A., you can get into quite
a brisk argument on this topic with the arresting officer. Most
policemen piously deny that there is any such thing as the quota
system; but, surprisingly, LAPD makes no bones about it. “They write
tickets, or they don’t ride bikes,” Chief Harold W. Sullivan says
frankly.
Furthermore, as far as he is concerned, his men will continue writing
some thirty-three hundred citations daily, more than 1,200,000 yearly.
Almost half a million are for illegal parking, but nearly all the rest
are for the “moving” violations which range from speeding to running
red lights and stop signs. And these are what cause accidents.
In Los Angeles, where the populace lives and often dies on rubber,
there are more than 130 auto crashes daily and an injury toll of about
ninety-four, some eight of them pedestrians. During the week eight of
the victims die.
Yet, by comparison with other metropolises, the carnage is
restrained. One survey shows that the Los Angeles rate of traffic
injuries per 10,000 vehicles is 27.7—only a third to a half that of
comparable cities (Detroit, 55.9; Chicago, 75.9; Philadelphia, 90.6).
And the death rate of 1.6 contrasts with 2.3 in Detroit, 3.4 in Chicago
and 3.0 in Philadelphia.
“There is a direct relation between the number of tickets issued and
the accident rate,” Chief Sullivan says in defense of the quota. “We
have charts to prove it and surveys to back up the charts.”
Once, for example, Traffic set up a speed check on one of the city’s
fastest thoroughfares and stopped scores of drivers. They were given
three types of treatment: a mere warning, a ticket, or a ticket and a
short talk on the dangers of speeding. Then motorcycle policemen tailed
them to see what the effect would be on their driving habits.
Of those who had escaped with the warning, two-thirds were blithely
speeding again after a mile. But in the two ticketed groups, only a
third were speeding after five miles. Sadly, Traffic is convinced that
tickets talk louder than words.
At least since 1873, when unhitched horses were first recorded as a
problem, traffic has been a major headache to Los Angeles. In its
rambling length there is practically no mass transportation, and the
average Angeleno is forced to drive farther and faster to work than
city drivers anywhere else in the world. He logs 10,000 miles yearly on
his speedometer, and travel of thirty to forty miles daily to and from
work is not uncommon.
Mostly he rides the freeways which were threaded through southern
California only a few years ago to serve both as inter- and intra-urban
facilities.
At first the congestion and pile-ups were spectacular, and out of the
Hollywood TV studios came a spate of gags that on them you were either
“quick or dead.” “Driving the freeways is like going into combat.”
Between neighborhood cars, inter-city drivers, and coastwise
transports, the chances seemed excellent for either a multiple-car
crash or bumper-to-bumper waits while an overturned alfalfa transport
or a burning oil tanker was towed out of the way.
The first city to do so, Los Angeles quickly met the problem by using
its own motorcycle corps for large-scale patrol of the freeway system.
Uniquely, the freeway within the city limits was deemed part of the
city streets and the same traffic regulations applied with one
exception. Theoretically the state speed limit of fifty-five miles per
hour applied, but in practice LAPD’s motorcycle officers have tolerated
whatever speed the traffic will bear. Within reason.
To avoid bottlenecks caused by accidents, Traffic relies on
“Sigalert,” an electronic town crier devised by Lloyd Sigmon, now a Los
Angeles radio executive. When a major traffic problem (or any other
emergency) develops, LAPD throws a switch in its radio network which
sets off a subaudible tone. The tone actuates a relay at all the local
radio stations and, as the policeman broadcasts instructions to the
driving public, receivers in the radio station record the message.
A red fight tells station personnel that a Sigalert has been
received, and it goes on the air immediately, taking precedence over
any program in progress. Speed in reaching the motorist is the secret
of Sigalert’s success because a delay of only five minutes in diverting
traffic can over-fill a paralyzed sector of the freeway with thousands
of additional cars.
During one disastrous flood, thirty Sigalerts were aired in a single
day to warn motorists of road hazards and brief them on new emergency
routes. In fact, Sigalert has been so helpful as a sort of
super-traffic cop that LAPD uses the system in all kinds of
public-communications situations. Once a Sigalert “want” resulted in
the capture of a murder suspect, and an explanatory Sigalert broadcast
while civil defense tests were being conducted reduced the usual number
of alarmed inquiries to police by ninety per cent.
Specifics.
The man behind the man who writes you a ticket in Los Angeles was
born in a house which now nestles alongside one of the freeways he
polices. Chief Sullivan was in the class of forty which joined the
force in 1937. During their winter of training, Los Angeles almost
froze over, and in the department they were nicknamed “the penguins.”
It wasn’t very prophetic. Sullivan and one other rookie of ‘37 went on
to make Deputy Chief, four of their classmates became Inspectors, two
rose to Captain and there is a good sprinkling of Lieutenants and
Sergeants. No other Academy class has produced so many departmental
leaders.
The year war broke out, Sullivan was transferred from the Harbor
Division to Traffic as an accident-investigation Sergeant. During the
war the police shortage prevented LAPD from adopting a number of
traffic suggestions made by the International Association of Chiefs of
Police. “But traffic looked like a good future for a young man,”
Sullivan recalls now, and LAPD’s postwar traffic progress has borne him
out. From almost total reliance on the man on the bike, Traffic has
mushroomed into a four-division Bureau known cryptically as TED, PIC,
AID, and TSD.
TED (Traffic Enforcement) does the dirty and hazardous job of patrol.
With six thousand miles of street and only 324 men, the task is almost
frightening; especially since Traffic has been forced to reduce its
street patrol personnel by five per cent in a period when vehicle
registrations increased by almost half a million cars.
Only with the help of his other divisions has Chief Sullivan been
able to avert an accident-injury breakthrough. The 190 PIC officers
(Pedestrian and Intersection Control) are especially chosen on the
basis of youth, manners, and prepossessing appearance. “Everybody is an
expert when it comes to pedestrian control,” Chief Sullivan says
philosophically. “They all have the answer. But unfortunately there is
no panacea. We need the thinking of all elements of the public—and
then daily cooperation in day-to-day problems.” It is the handsome
young PIC officer in direct contact with the public who tries to win
this cooperation and break down the old American distrust of any
regulations and particularly traffic rules.
TSD (Traffic Services) propagandizes on a broader scale, presenting
more than 1,400 traffic safety programs yearly and distributing
pamphlets with such titles as “How Far Behind Are You?,” “Accidents
Don’t Happen!” and “So You Have a Motor Scooter.”
As a matter of fact, TSD drops to its knees to implore the Angeleno
to drive more carefully. In saturation educational campaigns, the
division borrows department store windows for safety exhibits which
often include life-size replicas of a LAPD motorcycle policeman and
offers driver-aptitude tests under laboratory conditions. In city
traffic, the division preaches tirelessly, regularity in driving rather
than bursts of speed gets you there sooner as well as safer. As a
matter of fact, under such driving conditions, tests show, thirty miles
an hour more open than sixty mph is the quicker way between two points.
An uncomfortably large proportion of Los Angeles drivers seem
determined that their community will live up to its name—the City of
Angels—and that is when AID (Accident Investigation) rolls.
With traffic camera, special slide rule, distance measuring devices,
sketch pads, flares, and recording equipment to take statements at the
scene, AID men make scientific investigations into almost all
accidents, even when fellow policemen are involved. They are called out
some one hundred and twenty times daily, and their reports not only fix
responsibility, but also provide the raw meat for future
accident-prevention work.
Thus, with colored pins and enormous wall-sized maps, Traffic follows
the shifting locale of accidents, plots the time and cause and then
readjusts its motorcycle beats accordingly. If, in a given street,
failure to signal turns has been the chief trouble, the man on the bike
there is quick to hand out tickets to such offenders. With a scrap of
legal paper instead of a gun, he cleans up his variation of “the crime
mile” which is the careless mile.
Fortunately for the undermanned patrol, most Angelenos are
cooperative when they are caught and submit passively to the citation.
A few try to challenge the ticket in court and, of these, only about
three per cent are successful. Some may try to square the ticket, but
Los Angeles has made its system as fix-proof as is humanly possible.
Now and then, just often enough to keep the bike men edgy, something
will happen. One April midnight TED Officers Blass N. Skvicalo and
Lloyd Thomas ticketed an aircraft worker in the Wilshire district for
having followed the car ahead too closely. The man accepted the
citation without protest, and the TED men drove off on their cycles.
Three blocks farther on, the motorist rammed them from behind,
hurling Skvicalo fifty feet and Thomas twice as far. Both received
internal injuries, and only their white crash helmets saved their
lives. The motorist drove on till passers-by forced him to the curb. He
protested that it had been a pure accident, but he was ordered held for
assault with a deadly weapon—an automobile.*
*He was later convicted for hit-and-run felony.
An open-minded man, Chief Sullivan will experiment with anything that
promises to save lives or facilitate the movement of traffic on four
wheels or two legs.
One innovation was “Scramble,” the pedestrian control system used in
a few cities. At the proper signal, walkers can cross an intersection
any which-way instead of just one way.
In a large city, LAPD had established, there are sixteen variations
of traffic movement which must be anticipated for effective control.
Hoping that “Scramble” would simplify this pattern, Traffic installed
the system at twenty-two intersections. While it solved some of the
eternal conflict between auto and pedestrian, in other ways “Scramble”
has seemed to slow car movements. It works best when traffic is light,
poorest when it is heavy. It was found, however, that because of Los
Angeles’ distinctive traffic problems “Scramble” was not feasible.
Early in 1958 the city’s Traffic Commission voted to abandon the plan
after a trial of nearly a year.
Traffic has also tried to persuade the motorist to help himself by
lightening the load on the freeways. On an average day of the week, the
freeway system criss-crossing through the heart of Los Angeles hauls
600,000 cars through the downtown area. So a “park-and-ride” service
was offered motorists from the San Fernando Valley. They were given a
parking area near Hollywood Bowl and bus service to carry them downtown
from that point. Only a thousand fainthearted drivers weekly patronized
the buses, and the service had to be dropped. The average Angeleno is
just too game to accept that kind of solution.
However, in most ways, Traffic has conquered its freeway problems.
Accidents are being kept to a minimum, and congestion is reduced by a
helicopter patrol during peak hours. LAPD was the first American police
department to utilize the whirlybird in traffic control. Its
three-place Hiller is manned by a crew of Korean War veterans who spot
bottlenecks and potential hazards which they relay by radio to surface
police units.
In fact, the way things have worked out, Traffic is a little annoyed
that the stale jokes about the “quick or dead” still persist,
especially among visitors. Their mathematicians have calculated that
the odds against getting killed in a freeway accident are
twenty-to-one, compared to five-to-three in a crash on the streets.
Now and then, to get away from it all, Chief Sullivan himself takes
to the helicopter, and there his problems seem reduced to little
multi-colored bugs darting in various directions. But, like the other
Deputy Chiefs, he is never permitted to relax long in the abstract. The
specific is always close at hand.
There was, for example, the telephone call that had to be answered
politely when Traffic utilized Sigalert to avoid serious congestion on
the inbound Hollywood freeway.
“I just heard Sigalert about that accident,” a woman said worriedly.
“Would you please tell me what color car that is? I’m worried about my
husband. He was going to Los Angeles on the freeway and…
Specifics.