IVIV (12): LAPolice Reserves

[kelber at mindspring.com]

[Sorry I've been kind of AWOL - the week's been a little more complicated that I thought it would be.]

Fritz has looked up the plate numbers of some of the cars seen in Spike's film footage of the Wolfmann abduction.  They turn out to belong to members of the LA police reserves, "like a little private militia the LAPD uses whenever they don't want to look bad in the papers."

Here's the officially sanctioned history of the reserves:

http://www.joinlapdreserves.com/history.html

The LAPD site doesn't give any specific dates.  Basically, the reserves started up during WWII as kind of a civilian defense thing - people were pretty jumpy about a west coast Japanese invasion (could Japonica be a very very veiled reference to this?).  The volunteers had to be pretty affluent because, over time, they acted like regular cops, were even paired with working cops, but were unpaid and supplied all of their own equipment (read: guns).

As Fritz points out, the Watts riots were a great recruiting tool for the reserves, which is confirmed a few pages down, when Doc pays a call on Art Tweedle [the Tweedle Dum to the LAPD's Tweedle Dee?)

Browsing around, though, I found a real-life counterpart to Art [yeah, yeah, I know, life imitates ...].  Note what it was that drew him to the reserves:

http://www.loans4officers.com/noel.htm

Laura