Calvin Drake
Birthplace: Glendale, California
Career: 1952 - 1976
Serial No: 6952
Rank at Retirement: Sergeant (Detective Ill)
Divisions: Parking and Intersection Control, Newton Division, Administrative Vice Division, Metropolitan Division, Bunce - Forgery Division
Do I remember how much money I made when I first came on? I certainly do. That is very vivid in my mind. Three hundred and nineteen dollars a month, gross. That was all there was then, gross. When I graduated from the Academy, we were given a raise from three hundred and nineteen dollars to three hundred and forty dollars. It was a cost of living index raise, the first time they ever had one. When I left the phone company, I was making about fifty dollars a week, and now supporting a wife and a kid, I just thought I had died and gone to heaven. I remember when we got up to around five hundred dollars a month, Chief Parker said, "One of these days, a cop will make a thousand dollars a month." I said, "Chief Parker's gone crazy. No cop is ever going to make a thousand a month."
When I was sixteen years old, which was not too long after my mom remarried, I told my mom I wanted to go in the Marine Corps. She fixed my birth certificate to make me look seventeen rather than sixteen, and I went in the Marine Corps with her permission.
I was working for the phone company and took the test for policeman, but I didn't make it. I got married, and took the test one more time and passed. My oldest son was one month old the day I started the Academy in '52. The Academy was a lot like the Marine Corps boot camp, except you got to go home at night. When I graduated, I went right to PIC, Parking and Intersection Control. You get to stand downtown and suck up all the smog from the buses and cars. I stood at Fourth and Hill almost the whole time, four or five months.
When I came on to the Department you spent six months in PIC and six months at the jail, then maybe you can get out to a patrol division. They changed that when I had five months at PIC. I went to Newton Street Division.In '57, I went from Newton to Metropolitan Division. Part of Metro's job was to saturate an area with policemen to suppress crime, and to work stakeouts for detectives. We did a stakeout for about a month on twenty liquor stores throughout the city because there were bandits that were just hitting liquor stores all over the place. I think Metro killed about ten suspects. I didn't kill anybody, but the robberies stopped.
Policemen at Metro were occasionally loaned to various units for a good period of time. I went on several loans to detectives. One loan was to Forgery Division. In those days, it was separate from Bunco Division. Eventually an opening in Forgery came up and I spent the next sixteen years there.
While I'm at Forgery, the Watts riots started. The day after it started, we were told to report downstairs to Central Division to work patrol. We didn't have uniforms at the station. We worked in a radio car that day and we were just handling calls in suits, no helmets, no nothing. Out there with a suit on was going to get you hurt. That night I went home, I told my wife, "Get that uniform out and lets' make it fit." The next day, I'm in uniform and we got helmets. We were working four men to a car. It was the middle of August, it was hot, and the police cars did not have air conditioning. We had to keep the windows up because there was word that rioters were throwing bottles of acid at policemen. We had four shotguns in the car, which came from other departments. I had a Remington that looked like a Browning semi-automatic. We're out there answering calls, although they weren't assigning them. It was "Any unit in the vicinity, handle this call."
We were down in 77th Division, when a woman hailed us down. It was about 4 o'clock in the afternoon. Her daughter was having a seizure of some kind. She said, "I can't get an ambulance." I said, "You're not going to get an ambulance. Get in the car and we’ll take you to Central Receiving." We went Code 3 to Central Receiving. As we're driving toward the hospital, there were these guys pulling in front of us trying to slow us down. They're thinking we're going to answer a call related to the riot. That's what they tried to do, slow you down. This woman was livid and she's screaming, "You goddam niggers get out of the way. My Daughter’s sick”. She was really upset. We made it to the hospital. She was told her daughter was going to be sent to the county hospital by ambulance. She was going to go with her daughter. I said, ''Remember 6 o'clock is coming up and you're not going to be finished over there at the hospital. The curfew is going to come into effect. You are going to have to stay there tonight until the curfew comes off at 6 o'clock tomorrow morning because you'll get put in jail if you're out on the street." I told her, "It doesn't matter if you haven't done anything wrong. You're out after curfew; you're going to go to jail." She understood and thanked us and we went back to work.
After the riot was over, detectives from all over the city were tasked with recovering stolen property and booking it at Property Division. There were calls about property that was stolen during the riot being found at a certain place, or being found at somebody's house, or somebody who had the property calling in because they didn't want to get caught with it. If people were returning. property voluntarily, we weren't making arrests. We spent a couple of days doing that. When I drove down around 103rd Street in Watts, to recover property, it reminded me of pictures from WWII of German cities that had been bombed. Some of the buildings were burnt to the ground. There were places, with "black owned" written on the front of the building that were all busted up too.
In '66 or '67, Willy Gough, one of the guys at Forgery Division, said to me, We're putting together this little group, a sniper type thing," and asked me if I was interested. He was on the police pistol team, a great shooter with almost any kind of weapon. I said, "Sure." So I ended up going to the forerunner of SWAT. It wasn't called SWAT then, it actually wasn't called anything. We got together on weekends or after work and practiced. We used our own equipment on our own time. After about a year of practicing and doing various things, it was decided we were going to make it an official Department unit. There were sixty of us from across the Department. We spent two weeks up at the Academy training and formulating ideas about the unit. On one of the days, we talked about what to call the unit. The consensus was to call it "Special Weapons and Attack Teams." That name was presented to Darryl Gates, who I think was a Deputy Chief at the time. He said, "You guys are crazy, you can't call it attack teams." It was kicked around some more and the name Special Weapons and Tactics Team was selected. We formed four-man teams, sniper, spotter, point man and tail guy, kind of like a military fire team. I was a rear guard position. We'd go down to Camp Pendleton for three, four, five days at a time to train at their recon base, Camp Hondo. For some of our training, we used to go to the old drunk farm up in Saugus, it was empty and nobody was using it. We spend weekends up there doing various types of training. One day up there, Bob Smitson and Mike Bergman had a little thing going. They were friends, but they were teasing each other. The next day, Bergman, a big motor cop, was still picking on Smitson. Smitson had enough, bar-armed Bergman, took him to the ground, and wrapped his legs around him. He pulled Bergman's head back and said, "Say something nice to me." Bergman says, "Your mother dresses you funny."
We didn't get involved in too much for a period of time. In '67, President Johnson came to town. We had high ground cover and my team was on the roof of Century Plaza. There was a big demonstration out in the street, all afternoon and night, a bunch of protestors; well lets' call them protestors. Anyway, they were marching up the street carrying their signs. We didn't pay any attention to that. That was somebody else's problem. We were up on that roof from before the time Johnson arrived until probably ten or eleven o'clock that night. It was quiet for us on the roof.
At a Watts Festival, I believe the first one, in '67, we were up on a roof of a building near the command post as an observation post. The building was on the corner of 103rd Street and Central Avenue. We were watching this crowd when all the lights went out in the park. We see this white guy, he's running, and I mean he's running as fast as he can go. He comes underneath us and there must have been a hundred people chasing him. He passed us, and he's heading into our command post below us on a corner. The people backed off. There wasn't anything we could do, other than tell them by radio what we were seeing. A little later, a policeman was shot in the park. We could see him come out of the park being helped by two other policemen.
The first major thing we got involved in was with the Black Panthers. In '69, we got a call to bring our gear and meet at the armory in Elysian Park at 4:30 in the morning. We were told that search warrants were going to be served at the Black Panther headquarters on Central Avenue at 41st Street. There was also a secondary location at a house on Exposition and University. After our orientation to what our assignment was going to be was given, we were told, "Go home. We'll call you." We came back the next morning and I was assigned to 41st Street and Central. Lou Riker and I got the job of ramming the front door to the location.
We formed up at Newton Street Division. We're standing out in the parking lot getting ready to head down to the location and I was talking with some guys. I said, "Somebody is going to get hurt in this thing today." They said, "Aw they're going to surrender. They're not going to do anything." I said, "I'm not too sure of that." We went down to 41st and Central. We had three or four rifle teams that were up on the roof of the building across the street. We all had gas grenades in case we needed them. We had guys around the back and we came up on the front. It was quiet, and there was nobody around. This Volkswagen came down the street, and the driver looked at us and just hauled out of there. We're at the front door, and there was a screen door in front of a wood frame door with a glass center. We took that ram and we hit the door and the glass shattered, and the screen hung up a little on the ram. We missed the actual jam on the first hit, and we hit it a second time. The door opened and we backed off and hit the deck. Our job wasn't to go in; there was a team behind us tasked with making the entry. When we hit the deck, all of a sudden the world exploded. There was shooting everywhere. I was lying down next to a foundation wall just in front of the door. There was shooting coming from inside the place and through these portholes in the window. The rounds were going over my head. One round hit me in my ankle. I could feel it. My foot went up in the air and flopped down. There were only four of us that had flak vests. Lou and I had two and two of the entry guys who were going to be the first ones through were wearing the other two. Ed Williams's team was going in a door just north of the main door that led to a stairway to the second floor where the Panthers slept. They took that door down and he entered and started up the stairs. Somebody upstairs fired a shotgun and Ed caught a load of double aught buckshot. He didn't have a flak vest. His shotgun was at port arms, fortunately, because most of the buckshot hit the shotgun. It bent the trigger guard so much that later we couldn't eject a shell out it. He still has one pellet in him all these years later. He was brought out and he's bleeding rather profusely. Some guys came down to where I was laying down, and I said, "Grab my shotgun and give me a pull." As I was being pulled, I didn't realize it at the time, but I was being pulled right through Ed's blood. They loaded me into an ambulance and away we went.
At California Hospital, I was able to walk in. My ankle was sore, but it wasn't broken or anything. But I have this blood all over me and the nurses were having a fit, asking me, "Where else were you hit?" I said, "I was only hit in the ankle. That's somebody else's blood." I ended up being in the hospital for about three days, my foot and ankle in a cast. The doctor told me he found pieces of my boot and cloth from my sock inside the wound. The bullet entered the right side of my ankle, over the bone, underneath the tendon, and out the other side. For thirteen years, it was causing me problems when I walked. Apparently, it did cut the tendon, and the two bones were rubbing together. I had it operated on later and they made a new tendon using muscle from another part of my leg. The ankle is stiff, but its' fine except when it rains.
The shooting went on for almost four hours. The Panthers finally surrendered. Once inside, it was discovered the Panthers had been digging a hole to tunnel to a house behind their building on the next block. It was going to be an escape route. They poured the dirt from the hole into the walls to make it tough to shoot through. It was a business building, and the storefront windows were for displays. They sandbagged the windows and hid the sandbags behind posters in the windows. They put gun ports in the side windows next to the front door. The informant had pretty well laid out what it was and we knew it was almost a fortress. The thing that started it, a captain from Newton, I can't remember his name, went down there in uniform and walked in. Somebody pulled a gun on him, and threatened him. Search warrants were obtained and that led to our operation. When I worked Newton years before, it was just a business building. The Panthers came in later and had taken it over.
Twenty-one of us got the Medal Valor for the Panther shootout. We stayed as four-man teams until 1971 when Metro took the unit over. Most of the guys were sent wherever they wanted to go, or back to wherever they had been working.
Frank Besser and Manual Bustamonte worked a specialized team, all check problems from banks, hotels, and airlines. When Bustamonte retired, I became Besser's partner. We had some good cases. One time a bank had a customer service program where if you wanted to cash a check of 25 dollars or less, they didn't need to verify your ID. They were willing to take the chance that the check would be good. The thieves figured out real quick where the weaknesses were in that promotion and they opened accounts with a small amount of money. They start writing checks for small amounts without the banks verifying their ID's because that was their process. Some of these guys had non-sufficient funds checks up to three or four thousand dollars. The banks eventually shut the program down, but not for quite a while. They made their report to us and we worked with their special agents from their security details. We would take the case, work it up, get a warrant and go after the guy. The banks would always send them a letter, telling them they were overdrawn and to come see the bank and straighten it out. Bank of America once sent a letter out and it was returned unopened, with "Fuck you" on the envelope
Whenever I was looking for a suspect on a case, every place I went I would always leave my business card. If it were somebody that knew this guy, I'd say, "Now if you see him, here's my card. You tell him to call me. If he calls me and he comes in and surrenders, he's going to go to jail. I'm going to book him, but I will immediately take him over to court for arraignment and I'll talk to the public defender and he'd probably be released on his own recognizance because he came in and surrendered." A lot of them did that, they came in and surrendered. Lou Riker, who was now my lieutenant, said, "Well you guys make a lot of arrests, but you get them to come in and surrender. You don't go out and kick doors." I said, "No, Lou I don't kick doors in anymore. Get the guy in custody is the main thing." I said, "How I get them here is nobody's business but mine isn't it? If I can talk them into surrendering, I'm doing my job.” My career as I look back? I loved it. Not everybody can be a policeman, some are just not cut out for police work. You have to learn how to handle the stress of the job without driving yourself nuts and not all people can do that. I'm as proud of being a policeman as I am being a Marine. There's no such thing as an ex-marine or an ex-policeman. The job was good for me.
The day I retired, it was a little scary going to Personnel Division and turning in my badge. I had known for two months prior because I had accepted an offer for another job. But as I was standing there, I thought to myself, "You have had a really good job for twenty-four years, do you really want to do this?"
