It’s a Dump They’re Going to Miss

The Los Angeles Police Department’s oldest standing station is a place of peeling paint, squeaking and broken chairs, rats and cockroaches, all jammed together in a brick building a few miles south of downtown.

In a month, the officers of the Newton Division will pack up and move from their hidden Newton Street station to a plush, $17-million, two-story building on busy Central Avenue.

Despite the amenities--more space, more technology, more visibility--some veteran officers will leave with a nostalgic pain. The history, camaraderie and gallows humor ingrained in the old walls will be difficult to transport.

The station that laconically dubbed its neighborhood “Shootin’ Newton” is a place where the telephone earpieces are often rigged with dollops of shaving cream, and strangers and visitors to the station are prime targets of the fun.

It is a place where no one was shocked when a couple of homicide detectives packed one officer’s locker to the brim with sawdust a year ago. Or when other officers lined a riot helmet with fingerprint ink and tricked a whole host of their buddies into trying it on, leaving a mark on their foreheads.

The move is making many Newton officers realize how much they are going to miss the dump.

“We’ve grown to love what the city has ignored,” said the station’s captain, Jim Tatreau. “We take pride in doing well, despite the conditions.”

Officers have worked elbow to elbow, underneath piles of paperwork. In such close confines, there was no choice but to befriend the officer next to you.

“We have a lot of levity here, probably because we’re all jammed together,” said Dick Heidesch, a juvenile crimes detective who has been there 25 years. “If we didn’t get along, we’d all go nuts.”

In 1992, when the officers union called for a sickout during a contract dispute, everyone at Newton came to work. It was the only one of the department’s 18 divisions that could make that claim.

The irreverence is everywhere. A line of severed neckties belonging to promoted officers collects dust along one wall. Five plastic dinosaurs hang from the ceiling above equally ancient-minded detectives who refuse to work on computers. A half-inflated Tweety-Bird doll hangs from above the robbery desk.

Newton has averaged 100 homicides a year in a relatively small geographic area.

“There’s two ways you can react,” said station commander Tatreau. “You can clam up, or you can react to it the way these guys do. When you see what they see, dealing with killers, you realize it’s healthy what they do.”

The old building, surrounded by bottling and food-processing plants, will remain, serving as a patrol substation.

The new station, at Central and 34th Street, is more centrally located. Like all divisions, especially those that serve largely minority communities, Newton is under pressure to improve its relationship with citizens. The warm tributes other divisions may have enjoyed on the recent Police Appreciation Day were noticeably missing at Newton.

“There will definitely be greater public access,” said Newton Lt. Jim Voge of the new facility.

The new building will have glistening counters and natural light flooding through its windows. The lobby will feature a formal display, complete with silver plates, of promoted honorees’ cut-off neckties. The architects commissioned a photographer to take pictures of the civilian employees, which will hang on the new Newton’s walls.

But alas, there appears to be no way to accommodate the plastic dinosaurs.