An hour or so later, driving back to Los Angeles, I picked up a newscast on the radio: Student riots at Duke, Wisconsin, and Berkeley; oil slick in the Santa Barbara Channel; Kennedy murder trials in New Orleans and Los Angeles. And suddenly Edwards Air Force Base and that young pilot from Virginia seemed a million miles away. Who would ever have thought, for instance, that the war in Vietnam could be solved by taking the fun out of bombing?

Pageant, September 1969

The Police Chief

The Professional Voice of Law Enforcement

Weapons are my business. You name it and I know it: guns, bombs, gas, fire, knives and everything else. Damn few people in the world know more about weaponry than I do. I'm an expert on demolition, ballistics, blades, motors, animals -- anything capable of causing damage to man, beast or structure. This is my profession, my bag, my trade, my thing. . . my evil specialty. And for this reason the editors of Scanlan's have asked me to comment on a periodical called The Police Chief.

At first I refused. . . but various pressures soon caused me to change my mind. Money was not a factor in my decision. What finally spurred me to action was a sense of duty, even urgency, to make my voice heard. I am, as I said, a pro -- and in this foul and desperate hour in our history I think even pros should speak up.

Frankly, I love this country. And also, quite frankly, I despise being put in this position -- for a lot of reasons, which I don't mind listing:

1) For one thing, the press used to have a good rule about not talking about each other -- no matter what they thought, or even what they knew. In the good old days a newspaperman would always protect his own kind. There was no way to get those bastards to testify against each other. It was worse than trying to make doctors testify in a malpractice suit, or making a beat cop squeal on his buddy in a “police brutality” case.

2) The reason I know about things like “malpractice” and “police brutality” is that I used to be a “cop” -- a police chief, for that matter, in a small city just east of Los Angeles. And before that I was a boss detective in Nevada -- and before that a beat cop in Oakland. So I know what I'm talking about when I say most “journalists” are lying shitheads. I never knew a reporter who could even say the word “corrupt” without pissing in his pants from pure guilt.