Information Is Their Beat : Police Press Officers: Pipeline to the Public

When Dan Cooke was first named a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department, the terms of his new job were simple.

“You are permitted one mistake,” the late Chief William H. Parker told Cooke. “And that one gets you transferred.”

Cooke does not claim to be perfect. But 21 years later, he still has his job.

And over the last two decades, Cooke has helped inform the public about some of the biggest stories of a generation.

He provided Police Department briefings on the Watts riots, the Robert F. Kennedy assassination, the Manson murders, the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, the Symbionese Liberation Army shoot-out, the Hillside Strangler murders and comedian John Belushi’s drug overdose death.

The 58-year-old lieutenant runs the day-to-day operations of the department’s Press Relations Unit, and he is the press corps’ most accessible news source on the daily crush of events that require police involvement in Los Angeles.

Cooke’s boss is Cmdr. William Booth, 53, who is in charge of the Press Relations Unit. Booth handles media inquiries on the inner workings of the department, its disciplinary matters, its controversies. He is also a member of Chief Daryl F. Gates’ personal staff and one of the chief’s closest advisers.

Every day, Booth and Cooke talk to dozens of reporters from the local, state, national and foreign press. They answer questions about breaking news stories, accompany Gates to press conferences and interviews, and direct reporters to officials who can answer specific questions about the operation of the Police Department.

In addition, Booth, Cooke and their four assistants--Officers Willie Wilson, 39, Rod Bernsen, 36, Sergio Ortiz, 30, and Margie Mastro, 30--brainstorm with television and movie script writers at work on police-related screenplays.

Working Relationship

The Press Relations Unit tries to accommodate the media. And by most accounts, the relationship between reporters and the press relations unit is satisfactory.

“I’ve never known them to lie to me,” said Jon Goodman, a veteran reporter with radio station KNX. “I know there are times they won’t tell you something, but they won’t lie.”

“They will go out of their way to help you,” added Erwin Washington of the Daily News. “They’ll either get what you need or steer you in the right direction.”

“They know that if they don’t deal with me squarely, it becomes part of the story,” said John Marshall, a reporter with television station KNBC. “If I don’t deal with them fairly, they don’t talk to me again. So I’ve got to be fair, and they’ve got to be square.”

But another reporter, who asked to remain anonymous, offered a less enthusiastic assessment.

“Whenever it involves promoting something for the department, they will bend over backwards to help you,” the reporter said. “But whenever it involves an internal investigation . . . they are a little reticent to lay the cards on the table.”

Not Always Informative

Added Gene Gleason of KABC-TV: “If you need a place to go shoot the breeze, the press relations section is great. But if you want information, it’s not the place to go. They give you the barest of essentials.”

Cooke admitted that “there are a great number of instances” in which the unit does not provide all the details on the story because “we don’t want to compromise an ongoing investigation.”

He said the unit’s job is to give only “the most general information” on breaking stories, and if reporters want more, “they’ve got to talk to the detectives.”

The department spends $288,000 a year for the salaries of the six officers who staff the office from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Booth and Cooke are on call virtually 24 hours a day, and almost every reporter in town has their home phone numbers.

By comparison, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Information Bureau runs its press operation around the clock, including Sundays and holidays, at a cost of $612,000 annually for the three sergeants and nine deputies who run the bureau.

Salaries Add Up

The New York Police Department’s Public Information Bureau, staffed by a deputy commissioner (the equivalent of a deputy chief in Los Angeles), a deputy inspector, one lieutenant, seven sergeants, eight officers and three civilian employees, spends $500,000 a year on its operation.

The Chicago Police Department handles press relations with a civilian director, two civilian clerks, one detective and two police officers. Their salaries amount to about $140,000 a year.

Los Angeles’ unit was created in 1957, when Chief Parker became upset with the inaccurate death and injury figures on a Santa Fe Railroad train crash. Initial radio news accounts inaccurately reported that hundreds of people had been killed or injured, when the toll was actually far less.

“The radio was reporting that the Police Department was requesting that anybody who was a nurse or a doctor should respond to the scene,” Cooke said. “It was a classic case of exaggeration because of a lack of any kind of control on our part.”

Coping With Disasters

Realizing that the department was not equipped to handle the press in the face of such disasters, Parker appointed former Inspector Ed Walker to set up the Press Relations Unit.

But the demand on the press team has grown to include more than just getting the facts to the public on train wrecks, natural disasters or mass murders.

Scandals and internal problems--from the burglary scandal in which 12 Hollywood Division officers were fired, to the charges that two Devonshire Division officers carried out a contract murder, to the spying abuses of the Public Disorder Intelligence Division--have led reporters to sharpen their focus on the Police Department itself.

Booth joined the press relations unit when those controversies, beginning with the 1979 slaying of Eulia Love, a South-Central Los Angeles woman who was shot by police when she threatened officers with a knife after a dispute with utility company employees over her gas bill, started to gather momentum.

“I came along into this assignment at a time when the media was beginning to question a lot of things that we did, question our policies, question our efficiency and question our reputation as one of the great police departments,” Booth said.

‘Bandwagon Effect’ Noted

Asked if he feels that some reporters might be out to attack the department, Booth said he has seen a “bandwagon effect” on the part of the media.

“I suspect it is what the profession of journalism, or a reporter or an editor, sees as what the public is being interested in,” Booth said. “And there is an element of selling newspapers . . . and getting the ratings.”

A former lieutenant in the department’s Internal Affairs Division, Booth served as a commander in the Personnel Division before former Chief Ed Davis appointed him the commanding officer of press relations.

Speaking guardedly and often taping his interviews with reporters, Booth gets the call when “something has happened that we don’t consider good, but needs to be talked about by the department.”

When reporters seek to interview Gates, they go through Booth, who is a member of the chief’s personal staff and is also a personal adviser to Gates.

Gives His Opinion

“I don’t know if anybody could really tout himself as being an adviser to the chief,” Booth said. “He’s a smart fellow, but there are occasions when the chief and I do discuss things, and I provide counseling. I just toss it in as input.”

Although he is almost always referred to by reporters as the “department spokesman,” Booth said that there is no single spokesperson for the department. Any member of the department who has expertise in a certain area, such as a detective working a murder case, is free to talk to reporters, Booth said.

Gates himself often handles the press on some of the big stories, both on the major crimes and during some of the department’s most embarrassing moments.

The chief conducted a press conference, for instance, to break the news on the Hollywood burglary scandal. The red-faced Gates also was the first to announce that a Los Angeles police officer had been charged with deliberately planting a bomb on the Turkish Olympic team’s bus.

On most big stories, however, Cooke is usually assigned to assist in answering reporters’ questions.

Stories of the Old Days

With a personal style that contrasts markedly with Booth’s, Cooke, a 32-year department veteran, is a squinting, pipe-smoking humorist who sometimes sprinkles his interviews with anecdotes from days when he walked a beat on Skid Row.

A reporter and cartoonist for his base paper when he was in the Army, Cooke was asked to move from a Westlake post to press relations when Inspector Walker expanded the unit in 1964. During his two decades on the job, Cooke has been the department’s principal spokesman on some of Los Angeles’ more sensational stories.

He vividly recalls the day of the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, when he met with patrol officers in the San Fernando Valley at a command post below the Van Norman Dam, which was in danger of collapsing.

“I get to the scene and the sergeant has set up the command post out of the trunk of his car,” Cooke said. “I asked him, ‘Why are we here? Do you think maybe we can move this thing above the dam?’ ”

Chief’s Little Joke

Later in the day, when reporters wanted to get a closer look from the downside of the fissure, Cooke recalled what was to be the press relations section’s philosophy under Chief Davis.

“It was his belief that every reporter had the constitutional right to get himself killed on a story, and furthermore, that they were long overdue,” Cooke said, smiling.

But the media’s desire to get as close to a story as possible has sometimes worked to the department’s advantage, he said, citing the 1974 shoot-out between SWAT officers and SLA fugitives holed up in a South Los Angeles house.

“The media was there, and it was a television reporter who said that the first shots came from inside the house,” Cooke said. “That is the classic example, as far as anything this department does, for why you want to have the media there.”

But Cooke, recalling the day that comedian John Belushi’s body was found at the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Hollywood, has found that it sometimes works to his detriment to have a crime scene swarming with reporters.

Couldn’t Really Say

Asked by a reporter if Belushi had died “a violent death,” Cooke replied: “We don’t know the cause of death yet. It appears to be death by natural causes. But we won’t know the cause of death until the coroner conducts an autopsy.”

An ABC News “20/20” report later accused Cooke of deliberately misleading the press, “and I was sort of angered,” Cooke said. “They just showed me saying, ‘It appears to be death by natural causes,’ and I called them up and told them they took the quote out of context. They asked me what I wanted them to do about it, and I said, ‘I want you to apologize to me.’ They did. I said ‘OK,’ and that was it. That’s all I wanted.”

Story Broken Prematurely

Cooke also became upset with the media when they prematurely broke a report that police had cornered kidnaped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst and two of her abductors, William and Emily Harris, in North Hollywood.

“I alerted the press to meet me at a command post and to stay out of there until we secured the area,” Cooke said. “When we got there, the streets were solid with people. Kids were sitting up in trees.” It turned out that the media had broken the story after monitoring police radio frequencies.

And it was a great story, except for one problem. Hearst and the Harrises were not there.

But for the most part, both Cooke and Booth say they respect most local reporters and that most do a good job.

Cooke said he counts many longtime Los Angeles reporters among his friends, including veteran KCBS commentator Bill Stout, whom he first met during the Watts riots, when Cooke was briefing the press every day.

In the midst of the burning and looting, Stout, at a police command post, borrowed Cooke’s phone and engaged in a shouting match with his news director.

“Vietnam? What do you mean, Vietnam? This is 53rd and Central!” Stout shouted into the phone. But the Channel 2 news director apparently was not buying Stout’s story.

“So he handed me the phone and said, ‘Tell this S.O.B. where I am!’ and I did,” Cooke recalled. “We’ve been friends ever since.”

One of the more enjoyable aspects of the job, Booth and Cooke said, involves helping movie and television script writers develop ideas on police stories. Jack Webb, the late producer of the old “Dragnet” and “Adam 12” TV police shows, was a regular pal of Cooke’s.

Cooke has been threatening for years to write a book that will tell all about the media, but in the meantime--along with Booth--he has no plans to retire.

“What?” Cooke said. “Leave show business?”