Incident with the Los Angeles Police December 2, 1996

How the LAPD "helps" foreign visitors.

During our overnight stay in Los Angeles, November 9, 1996 on a vacation trip to New Zealand and the Cook Islands, our backpack was stolen at the front porch of the hotel while unloading luggage from an airport taxicab.
This piece of our hand baggage contained photographic equipment as well as insulin and blood test units, both required for the intended three weeks' program.
On the site, its value was estimated between US $ 6,000.00 and 8.000.00, later confirmed to be $ 5,720.00 when purchasing receipts were available.

The luggage was insured to a maximum value of $ 2,400.00.

As a diabetic, my first concern was to find the appropriate insulin and blood glucose monitoring equipment. Fortunately, neither of these requires a prescription in the USA, so I was able to buy similar products at a supermarket drug store, the time being one o'clock in the morning on Sunday. However, the blood glucose monitors available all had displays in ml/g, a unit long outdated in Europe. After drawing a calibration curve in mmol/liter - not an easy task after 12 hours of flying time and a total of 28 hours without sleep - and returning to the drugstore for needles, missing from the injection pen, at least the danger of a health problem could be avoided.

In an attempt to find out what the taxi driver had seen when he was asked by hotel personnel to move his car from the crowded hotel front, I spent two hours at the LAX taxi dispatch station looking for the driver of the green + white cab without success. At my request, the hotel manager on duty filled out an "Incident Description Statement" form for use with my insurance.

I did not contact the police that night, because the hotel manager advised that this would be "useless". Another reason was that time before our onward flight was too short to go to the police headquarters.

After we had decided to continue on our trip to New Zealand despite the loss, we drew up a list from memory of the material contained in the backpack.
While in New Zealand, we made up our minds to go to the Los Angeles police on our return flight stopover, despite the hotel manager's previous recommendation.

On December 2, while staying at the same hotel, we were advised by the management that it is not necessary to go to the police headquarters, rather someone would be sent to the hotel. When the police officer arrived, I gave her a description of what had occurred three weeks ago and offered to fax a complete list of the stolen articles including their serial numbers available only at home. My idea was that an exact identification of the photo equipment may be of help to the police in case part of it turned up on their computer.

To our incredulous bafflement, the interview developed into a traumatic experience of a kind we never even remotely expected. We were told by the police woman that "You looked like crooks to me from the moment I met you".
Every piece of information we volunteered was immediately turned against us. It seems that the conclusion had been established: We were out for insurance fraud.
At first the police officer grudgingly filled out a report while mentioning it would contain her view that insurance fraud was involved. At this time the report was given a "Regarding Case Number".

Shortly after, the police officer returned, this time to our room and in company of another police officer. She showed us a hotel report, not identical with the hand-written statement, in which the management had entered the backpack contents as "Insulin and other possessions, value: $ 40.00 or less". I do not know how they arrived at that figure. Perhaps it is the maximum value that does not require police involvement? We had never seen this statement before. To the El Segundo police officers this was "proof" that the theft concerned only the insulin and that the photo equipment was our invention "thought up during your stay in New Zealand", as she said.
Harassment continued when we had to open all our luggage, already packed for departure home. When the second police officer found the Nikonos camera I had bought second hand in New Zealand as a replacement, carrying the same name as the one on our provisional handwritten list, the case was made for him. Even when I finally managed to dig out the receipt from a Wellington photo shop, he remained unconvinced. Moreover, the police woman had made a note of some of the equipment on our list, which included one telephoto lens 200 mm "Canon". When the second officer found my Canon camera, which had been neither in the back pack nor on the list, it was impossible to explain to him the difference between a telephoto lens and a camera, both of which carry the brand name "Canon".
Whenever I tried to help my wife by translating bits of conversation she didn't catch, into our own language, I would be ordered with a threatening gesture: "Speak English !". This distrust very much reminds one of the worst methods practised in the interrogation rooms of a now defunct horror state in the East of Europe.
After an ordeal worthy of the worst B-movie, we were finally left with the choice: "Either you drop the case or if you insist we'll call a detective and then you'll be in real trouble." With this threatening alternative doubtlessly leading to our missing the homeward bound flight and all its connections, we were left with no options but to agree to withdraw the "case". This was acquitted by the police woman to her fellow officer by a "Didn't I tell you so!"
When the two had left, we discovered that they had removed the provisional list of the stolen goods from my wife's notebook. This must have occurred while we were made to go through our luggage. The notes were taken without asking for our consent.

After negotiating the theft with our insurance at home, what remains of this episode during our LA stopover is the memory of outrageous treatment. My wife, having flown the world for many years with the national airline, cried and was close to a breakdown under the constant accusations.

The crime rate in Los Angeles may preclude the part of police work which is called "help" in Europe. Nevertheless, treating United States visitors the way we were in Los Angeles is very bad policy by any standard. We came as visitors trying to help and left accused of crime!

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