You Have to Hand It to Him
When his left hand made its belated debut, the classy maven of everything law enforcement revealed two well-dressed hands bearing flashy, jewel-encrusted rings. Polishing his fast-paced patter as he went, he was at once chatty, folksy and disarmingly educational, which happen to be his three favorite talents. While the capacity crowd at a West L.A. restaurant still was buzzing over his leadoff zinger — “Always great to be here and see the new hairdos” — Mr. Cooke repeatedly converted conventional wisdom into badly burned toast. Each time his audience settled in to relax, he sped up their heartbeats. Among his nuggets:
“Politicians are nuts,” Mr. Cooke charged. They may be well intentioned but they are misinformed. “We get into a lot of nonsense conversations with politicians,” he said.
Denigrating the wildly popular DNA proof tests that have reversed thousands of convictions in recent years, he suggested the tests are made out of fairy tales. They should take their place alongside Mommy Goose. For the benefit of skeptics, Mr. Cooke gave the controversial subject one more whack. “Not one of these guys is innocent,” he said. “All it is, is a scam.”
“If you put one burglar in jail for one year, you are preventing 780 to 1300 burglaries.”
Since many of the women were from Santa Monica rather than Culver City, they may not have fully appreciated this zinger: “I used to do my budgets at Dear John’s.”
“The idea that prisons are schools for crime is another one of those urban legends,” prompting him to comically drop his voice. “Yes,” he proclaimed with a half-grin, “I am a proud graduate of the University of San Quentin.”
“Another myth: civil control of a police department is necessary for fear that we might take over. The idea that the 353 police chiefs in California or the 48 police chiefs in Los Angeles County would ever get together and agree on anything is crazy. Not only that, we would agree on who would be in charge. I can tell you, if I am not in charge, ain’t going to be anybody else in charge. The idea of civilian control implies, somehow, that police officers are now in the military. They are not.”
“The idea that people believe (crime dramas) on television or in the movies drives me nuts.”
“I have arrested 600 drunk drivers over the years. Every one said he had had three beers. Not two. Not four. Everybody had exactly three.”
In a rare flash of self-deprecation, Mr. Cooke said he was as green as the rawest rookie when he entered law enforcement. “I couldn’t catch an elephant in the snow with a nosebleed.”
“Sexual predators do not recover.”
Neither,apparently, does another kind of criminal. “Burglars are burglars when they go into prison, and they are burglars when they come out.”
“My idea of complete waste is a busload of lawyers going over a cliff — but three seats are empty.”