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
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“There are two modes of transport in Los Angeles: car and ambulance. Visitors who wish to remain inconspicuous are advised to choose the latter”
—Fran Lebowitz (b. 1951)
“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)
“In Washington, the first thing people tell you is what their job is. In Los Angeles you learn their star sign. In Houston you’re told how rich they are. And in New York they tell you what their rent is.”
—Simon Hoggart (b. 1946)
“There was never a man born so wise or good, but one or more companions came into the world with him, who delight in his faculty, and report it. I cannot see without awe, that no man thinks alone and no man acts alone, but the divine assessors who came up with him into life,—now under one disguise, now under another,—like a police in citizen’s clothes, walk with him, step for step, through all kingdoms of time.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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—Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)