Where Are We Now?
“… In the weeks immediately after the four deaths, the emotionally charged follow-up investigation sometimes lingered on fault-finding, but ultimately achieved the desired catharsis - a completely revamped set of procedures to be followed during high-risk and felony stops, with emphasis at every step on officer safety. If there can be such a thing as a silver lining in a cloud this dark, it would be the renewed focus on officer safety - a concern still uppermost even thirty years later.
“Firearms procedures have changed fundamentally, physical methods of arrest have been perfected, the police baton has become a more integral element of enforcement tactics, and new protective tools (such as pepper spray) have become part of the officers’ standard equipment. Along with these have come far more comprehensive training - all combining to make uniformed personnel more alert and better prepared for the inevitable dangers faced by CHP officers …”
—“The Newhall Incident,” California Highway Patrol website
“Police Shootouts: How Soon We Forget.”
—Police Magazine article title, 2007
In March 2011, deep into the process of researching and writing this book, I visited the site of the Newhall shooting and walked the ground, imagining the terrible events that transpired there almost 41 years earlier. When I was done, I traveled two and a half miles north, up The Old Road, to the location of the present-day Newhall Area Office of the CHP.
Four cypress trees stand vigil over the entrance to the parking lot and a simple brick memorial with a plaque that recognizes the fallen officers of the Newhall shooting. It’s the second such memorial (the first having been erected at the second Newhall Area Office—now a Caltrans building—where the original four cypress trees remain standing). While the Memorial Fountain at the CHP Academy in Sacramento lists the names of the officers and recognizes their sacrifices, the spiritual home for those who wish to remember these special four is tucked into the corner of this little parking lot.
As I approached the memorial for the first time, I was immediately struck by the fact that it had been neglected for some time. The grass around the brick memorial was green and neatly trimmed, but the sprinklers that kept the grass healthy had also done significant damage to the bronze plaque that bears the names of the slain officers. The plaque was caked and stained with hardwater deposits that clouded the names of the officers, and the seven-pointed star in the center that had been reverently polished by somebody long ago was now tarnished.
Heartbroken, I fished in the trunk of my car and came out with a spray bottle of glass cleaner, a mostly empty bottle of metal polish left over from some detail work on the car, the toothbrush from my shaving kit, and a T-shirt from my suitcase. With these meager items I did my best to clean the plaque that boldly proclaimed, “Killed In the Line of Duty,” promising myself that someday I would return with the tools to do it properly.
As I worked on the memorial that Saturday afternoon, with nobody around, I wondered if the department and the greater law enforcement community truly understood and remembered the lessons from this long-ago shooting, or had they been forgotten and neglected like this plaque had been? In one month exactly, it would be the forty-first anniversary of the Newhall shooting, and the question that kept popping into my mind was, “What have we really learned?”