The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is the police department of the city of Los Angeles, California. With 9,925 officers and 2,879 civilian staff, covering an area of 498 square miles (1,290 km2) with a population of 3,792,621 million people as of the 2010 Census, it is the third largest local law enforcement agency in the United States, after the New York City Police Department and the Chicago Police Department.
The LAPD has been copiously fictionalized in numerous movies, novels and television shows throughout its history. The department has also been associated with a number of controversies, mainly concerned with racial animosity, police brutality and police corruption.
Read more about Los Angeles Police Department: History, Organization, Rank Structure and Insignia, Chiefs of Police, Work Environment, LAPD Awards, Commendations, Citations and Medals, Fallen Officers, In Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the words los angeles, los, angeles, police and/or department:
“The freeway experience ... is the only secular communion Los Angeles has.... Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)
“... when I finish reading People, I always feel that I have just spent four days in Los Angeles. Womens Wear Daily at least makes me feel dirty; People makes me feel that I havent read or learned or seen anything at all.”
—Nora Ephron (b. 1941)
“In Washington, the first thing people tell you is what their job is. In Los Angeles you learn their star sign. In Houston youre told how rich they are. And in New York they tell you what their rent is.”
—Simon Hoggart (b. 1946)
“A sure proportion of rogue and dunce finds its way into every school and requires a cruel share of time, and the gentle teacher, who wished to be a Providence to youth, is grown a martinet, sore with suspicions; knows as much vice as the judge of a police court, and his love of learning is lost in the routine of grammars and books of elements.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“The African race evidently are made to excel in that department which lies between the sensuousness and the intellectualwhat we call the elegant arts. These require rich and abundant animal nature, such as they possess; and if ever they become highly civilised, they will excel in music, dancing and elocution.”
—Harriet Beecher Stowe (18111896)