Roy Bean

Birthplace: Spanish Fork, Utah

Career: 1941–1965

Rank at Retirement: Sergeant

Divisions: Harbor, Hollywood, Training, Administrative Vice, Robbery

I'm going back fifty or sixty years, but we used to tell this story in the academy. There was a streetcar situation in Los Angeles back in December 1942. This streetcar was full of women and children. Also on board was a drunk, Stanley Beebe, who was mistreating the women. The motorman saw a policeman on the corner, stopped the streetcar, and hailed the officer. The policeman could see that Beebe was drunk and obnoxious. He got Beebe off the streetcar, and in doing so, Beebe fell and hit the back of his head on the street. The policeman reached down to pick him up, and Beebe spit in the officer's face. The policeman stepped back and kicked Beebe hard in the stomach. The kick was enough that the man later died as a result of a ruptured bladder. The policeman was charged with murder, but the trial resulted in a hung jury, and the charges were dismissed. We told that story in the academy to impress upon the cadets, "Don't do this."

My dad and my grandfather were attorneys, and later, my grandfather became a judge. My dad died when I was twelve, and my mother passed away when I was thirteen. I went to live with my dad's brother, but he wasn't like my dad. I guess from birth, there were probably never two people closer than me and my dad. Just before my parents passed, we lived on Brighton Avenue in Los Angeles. One day, I was on my way home, and a neighbor was standing on his front-yard knoll, watering across the sidewalk onto the parkway. When I walked by, he didn't turn his hose away, and I got the full brunt of that water. Of course, I was a typical snot-nosed, spoiled little brat. I went home and got a big bucket of hot water. I took the bucket of hot water over to this neighbor, rang his doorbell, and he got the water. One of the last defense cases of my dad's life—me.

When I was twenty-one, I read in the newspaper that there was an examination for the police department. I had always been attracted to the police—to get a pension more than anything, but I also liked the legal aspect because of my dad and my grandfather. I passed the examination enough to get an appointment in the fall of '41.

I don't think I was a standout except physically. I was physically capable of doing more than most in my class. I was fast; there wasn't anybody who could outrun me in the seventy-five-yard dash. There was an obstacle course at the academy, and I held the record for five years or so, until some young kid who was a hurdler came along. This kid beat my time, so his picture replaced mine in the main hall of the academy.

While I was at the academy, there was a big strike on Terminal Island in San Pedro. On Terminal Island there was a big shipyard with four hundred men working inside and four hundred outside on strike. The unions had something to do with the strike, of course. At noon, the whistle was set to blow, and the monstrous gates would open. A clash between those inside and those outside was expected. Initially, there were only fifty policemen there, so men were brought in from other divisions. The department also knew where they could get a hundred men in a hurry—right from the academy. We had 105 in my class. All we were told to do was to keep these guys from killing each other. It was stupid to allow this thing to take place, but it did.

When the gates opened, fistfights and mayhem began. A policeman named Reeves and I saved one man from drowning. There was water in a big, deep ditch, and one guy was drowning another guy. We had to fight one to keep him from wanting to get more of the other. I don't know if that's a save or not, but the man didn't drown. Guys were fighting for different reasons, and some didn't know what they were fighting about. We always thought some jackass union leader had decided to do this, and some other union leader had said, "No, you have to do that." That was a problem: the unions fighting each other. The situation was over that afternoon. On the way to the shipyard, I had wondered what in the heck was going to happen. I was sure glad to be going home.

After the academy, I went to Harbor Division and was there until late '42. I don't remember having any training officers. We learned as we went along. My classmate and I worked a radio car for four or five months until I got a detective job inside. We thought young policemen working together was normal. We were expected to be policemen.

I was working uniform patrol when the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred. We tried to secure Terminal Island because the shipyards were vital to the defense of our nation. Hundreds of Japanese lived and worked there. There was concern that the Japanese would conduct sabotage of the shipyards and refineries. We evacuated the Japanese off Terminal Island, and it was my understanding they went to camps. I spent most of my time either evacuating the Japanese or examining and registering people as members of the neighborhood watch. That was the process for many months.

When I finished probation, I was invited to work as a plainclothes detective in the Detective Bureau. One case in particular stood out—the rape of a seven-year-old boy.

Longshoremen used a hand tool called a longshoreman's hook, which had a sharp, curved piece of steel attached to the handle. It was common for a longshoreman to carry one on the street. We'd arrest him for it, or if he relinquished it to us, we took it to the station and put his name on it. He could pick it up later on his way to work. It was a perfect tool for handling hay or picking up bundles, but it was a terribly dangerous thing when used against a human being. I'd already had some experience with those hooks on that union strike when I was in the academy.

In the case of this seven-year-old boy, our process was to find whoever had committed the crime before the family found him. If the family found him first, you can guess what might happen to this guy. We worked day and night for two days to try to find the perpetrator of this crime. On the second day, we found the person lying on the steps of a hotel in downtown San Pedro. He was ripped from the rectum up to the top of his head with a longshoreman's hook, and he had bled to death. The family had found the perpetrator before we had.

In late '42, my number came up, and off I went into the navy. I went to San Diego for processing, training, and so forth. After two or three months of training, if you boxed two or three rounds with any opponent from any of the other classes, you got the weekend off. So I was the Friday-night entertainment for the fellas and got some weekends off. I trained to operate LCM boats, and by '43, I was in Hawaii. In '45, the atomic bomb went off, and the whistle was finally blown. When I returned, I went back to work at Hollywood detectives in Robbery.

I never got into a gunfight with anybody, but I was in several physical confrontations, mostly with people who didn't want to go to jail. In the middle of town was the Hollywood Ranch Market, which was open 24-7 and never closed. One time, we were looking for a guy who frequented this market. Bookmakers, prostitutes, and other types also frequented the market. It was late at night, and we were driving by the market when my partner, Meredith Bimson, said, "Roy, pull over—I think we got this guy."

I pulled over, and the guy started to run. I was still in reasonably good shape and chased him into a dark parking lot, and he stopped between two cars. I showed him my badge, and he said, "Yeah? Where do you want me to put that badge?" That sort of conversation went back and forth. I put the badge away, and the next thing I did—I later taught this at the academy because I thought it was effective—was get his hand up behind his back with my arm around his neck, choking him. He was as big as I was. I was about to break his arm when he gave up. Meredith pulled the car around, and off to jail we went. We didn't have all the rules that officers have nowadays. If we saw somebody who needed to be interrogated, we went and did it. There wasn't all the worry. I don't think I could be a policeman today. Anyway, it was a constancy of "It's time for you to go to jail."

"Oh no. Not me—I'm not going to go."

"Well, you're going."

I don't remember losing a fight.

One night, my partner and I got a call to come to the station. My regular partner, Meredith, was off that night. The watch commander of the uniform part of Hollywood Division happened to be a rather close friend. He had seen my ability to control belligerent people in various sets of circumstances, and he liked the way I worked. We arrived at the station, and there was a taxicab with a nude woman in it parked in front. The cabbie had picked up the woman in Huntington Park, and she wanted to go to Hollywood Boulevard. She was drunk—far drunker than most women get. She'd thrown her shoes out the window. Next had been her dress, then her bra and her panties, and so forth. She was totally nude, and the cabbie hadn't known what to do, so he'd driven her to the police station. At least two radio cars were there; they couldn't get this woman out of the cab. She had locked the doors and was kicking at the windows.

The watch commander called old Roy Bean. "Roy, I got a problem here. Can you solve it?"

I said, "Well, give me a couple of minutes." Right next door to Hollywood station was an emergency hospital. I asked my partner to get a blanket and a roll of gauze from the hospital. He came back, and we got the cabbie to open one door. I told my partner, "Go open one of the other doors, and when you get that door open, I'll jump in with this blanket, put it over her, and then get her cuffed." He did, and we threw the blanket over her, and immediately she was covered head to foot. I told her, "Turn over, and give me your hands behind your back." She wasn't cooperative at first until I had her hand and her hair. We got her handcuffed, and we wrapped her feet together with the roll of gauze. At the city jail, we walked in with this gal bare—she didn't want any blanket around her. Up to the jail she went, eyes and wonderments galore.

In '48, I asked to go to the academy. I wanted to get into the physical-training aspect of police work. I was at the academy for a good fifteen years, and I really enjoyed working with those young men. We put through classes of policewomen too, but not as often as the men's classes. I was a physical-training instructor. I also taught the penal code, the vehicle code, and chemical agents, and I was a shooting instructor. I had a sincere desire to make sure what I taught them was effective.

My philosophy as an instructor was protection of the officer first: "What can you do in this case?" I told them that when physical force was necessary, it must be quick and easy. That was why the LAPD always had two officers. It was a lot harder for one man to take another man down and handcuff him than it was for two men. Two men were going to take him down easier and get the job accomplished without anybody really getting hurt. One on one, chances were that one of them was going to get hurt. You just didn't want it to be a policeman.

When I was in charge of the unit, all the instructors knew my position: "If you can't do the exercise, don't call for the cadets to do it." I believed if an instructor was going to call for fifty push-ups, he needed to make sure he could do them right along with the cadets. My instructors could always do one hundred if we had to keep going. I would not allow anyone who worked for me at the academy to stand back and count. The instructors did the exercises along with the cadets—or more than the average cadet did. A cadet could never say, "Well, he stood there and blew the whistle."

I thought the attitudes of the cadets were always good; I was never disappointed. If I saw a change in someone, I'd call him aside. I would say, "Find yourself, and realize what we're trying to do here is to make you a better, more capable, physical specimen. We can't adjust our program for a guy like you. You better adjust to it, or you're going to find yourself out on the street. If you don't like it or if I think you can do better selling shoes or picking tomatoes, I'm going to tell the captain that's what I think you ought to do." I did that with a couple of them.

We also did some retraining of policemen with ten or more years on the department. Well, nine out of ten of them thought the academy was of no particular value one way or another. I'd say, "I recommend this type of hold."

"Well," they would respond, "that won't work."

"If you don't like this," I would say, "you had better make sure you got something that you know will work. Because I know this works."

Regarding staying in shape, I tried to make it clear to these policemen: "You could be sitting in that radio car for five, six, seven hours, and all of a sudden, you have to chase somebody. Not very many of you will be able to get out of that car and chase one of these fleet-footed escape artists. So what do you do? Now here's something you can do," and I'd go from there.

I was on the department's exhibition shooting team for about three years. We put on lots of exhibitions. Those were the days when we shot chalk out of each other's fingers, ears, and mouth. We considered ourselves exceptional marksmen, and we had the utmost confidence in each other. You had to in order to stand there and let a guy shoot at you.

From the academy, I went to Administrative Vice as a sergeant. I investigated bookmaking. About every fourth weekend, you and your partner had to cover the office for the weekend. One weekend, my partner and I were in the office, and it was raining cats and dogs. The phone rang, and my partner said, "Roy, you better answer this."

"Hello?" I said.

"This is Lieutenant So-and-So in Inglewood. We got a young man here that has some information regarding bookmaking that you might be interested in."

"About bookmaking?"

"Yeah. I wouldn't bother you, but it sounds to me like he knows what he's talking about, and I think you ought to come and talk to him."

"All right, we'll be there as soon as we can get there."

We got the guy out of jail and started chatting with him.

The kid said, "You know so-and-so?"

"Do I ever—he's one of the biggest fish in the pond."

"Well, I slept with his daughter for six months."

"You what?"

"I slept with his daughter."

"Well, did you know they were bookmakers?"

"Of course."

"What was your part in it?"

"All I was there for was to be a partner to his daughter."

"Was she bookmaking?"

"Of course."

"Well, you must have some names and information."

"Better than that—I was with her when we dumped a whole sack full of names and addresses and so forth in an underground waterway down in Huntington Park."

"Can you take me there?"

"Yeah."

He told us they had lifted a big sewer lid and dropped the information down into the sewer. Well, we got there in time before the floodwaters got to all of the material. We came back to our office, and we had a twenty-foot-long table with nothing but bookmaker information on it. Within a day or so, we knocked down a door and found the daughter sitting there, bookmaking. We arrested and booked her.

The next night, we were at Taix's Restaurant. I saw her dad, the bookmaker, and he came over to the table. He said, "I just wanted to thank you, Sergeant. My daughter told me how decent you were with her. I appreciate that. Let me pick up the tab here."

"No, no, that's all right."

A week later, we kicked in another door. Dang, if it wasn't his mother. She made a big fuss—oh, was she mad. Off to jail she went. We had the benefit of a relationship between this kid in jail and a bookmaker's daughter for the information that was thrown down a sewer. We kicked a few doors on that case for quite some time.

Eventually, I ran out of information in general, and we weren't knocking down many doors. I called Chief Robert Houghton and asked if he had an opening somewhere. He said, "How would you like to go to Robbery?" I went to Robbery for the rest of my days—about three years. The first thing they did was take me to the hat store.