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    Ronnie’s former sergeant suggested that in these repressive times, supervisors like Treakle were harder to get rid of than Rasputin and jock itch. He thought she ought to have a talk with the boss of the Hollywood Division Community Relations Office, or CRO, pronounced “Crow” by the cops. “CRO is a good job, Ronnie,” he told her. “You’ve done enough hard-core police work for a while. Being a senior lead officer in CRO will give you a leg up when you take your sergeant’s oral.”
     
     
    It had surprised Hollywood Nate to learn that Ronnie Sinclair was seeking the job that had opened up at the Community Relations Office, a job that Nate coveted. The CRO was composed of eighteen cops and two civilian workers led by a twenty-two-year sergeant. Eleven of the officers, both men and women, were senior lead officers, or SLOs, pronounced “Slows,” and were given a pay bump and wore two silver chevrons on their sleeves with a star beneath them. The SLOs acted as ombudsmen or community liaisons for the Hollywood Division captain. Five were Hispanics and could translate Spanish as needed, and three others were foreign born and could communicate in half a dozen other tongues, but that was only a fraction of the languages spoken in Hollywood. The coppers called their bailiwick Babelwood Division.
    The Community Relations Office was housed in a one-story rambling old structure just a wedge shot across the police parking lot. It was dubbed Hollywood South by the troops in the main station, to which the Crows referred as Hollywood North, and which, like all LAPD police facilities, had the architectural charm of a parking garage in Watts.
    Among other duties, Crows handled calls from chronic complainers and Hollywood loons, and they could pretty well set their own ten-hour duty tours in their four-day work week. The major efforts of these cops were directed at quality-of-life issues: chronic-noise complaints, graffiti, homeless encampments, abandoned shopping carts, unauthorized yard sales, and aggressive panhandlers. Crows also had the job of overseeing the Police Reserve Program and the Police Explorer Program for teenagers and directed the Nightclub Committee, the Homeless Committee, the Graffiti Committee, and even the Street Closure Committee.
    In 2007, the city of Los Angeles’s love for committees was almost as overpowering as its lust for diversity and its multicultural mania, and it would be hard to imagine anywhere with more social experimentation involving the police than LAPD’s Hollywood Division. African Americans were the only ethnic group underrepresented in Hollywood demographics, but young black males arrived on the boulevards in large numbers every night, traveling on the subway or in cars from South L.A., many of whom were gang members.
    The Crows also had to organize events such as the Tip-A-Cop fund-raiser, the Torch Run for the Special Olympics, and the Children’s Holiday Party, and were tasked to help police the antiwar demonstrations, the Academy Awards, and all of the red carpet events at the Kodak Center. In short, they were doing jobs that caused salty old-timers to shake their heads and refer to the CRO as the sissy beat. Crows were often called teddy bears in blue.
    They were also called much worse, but there was some envy involved in all of the pejoratives aimed at the Crows, because these officers of Hollywood South had relative freedom and the choice of wearing uniforms or street clothes depending upon the assignment, and they almost always did safe, clean work. Crows generally chose to stay in the job for a long time.
    Ronnie had beaten out Hollywood Nate for the first opening in the Community Relations Office and was sent to senior lead officer training at the recruit training center near LAX. An unexpected retirement occurred a month later, and Nate Weiss ended up following Ronnie to the CRO, thinking he had found the spot where he might remain happily until retirement or