This Police Captain Yearns for the Beat

VAN NUYS — While growing up in the notorious Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, Ann Young used to marvel at the cops walking the beat through her neighborhood, where street gangs rumbled day and night with baseball bats, switchblades and zip guns.

She was awed that the policemen knew everybody on the street by name, the gang members as well as the choirboys. She was impressed that the guys in blue asked about family members and seemed genuinely concerned.

“Seeing how those policemen went through the neighborhood, it was one of the big reasons that made me think I wanted to be a cop,” said Young, who in April became the first female African American captain in the history of the Los Angeles Police Department.

In 1967, when she was a teenager, her family left Brooklyn for what they had heard was the good life in Compton.

“This was the ‘60s, when you could walk around at night in Compton and not worry about a thing,” Young recalled. “It wasn’t bad back then. You didn’t worry about crime on the streets.”

Yet the memories of the cop on the beat in Bed-Stuy never left her.

And when the streets of Compton spawned Crips and Piru Bloods and the gangs became prominent, Young’s thoughts of being a police officer resurfaced.

But when she first considered joining the Los Angeles Police Department in the 1970s, she encountered an unexpected obstacle: She wasn’t tall enough. At 5-foot-4, Young was four inches short of the minimum height for an officer.

In 1981, after learning that the height restrictions had been lowered to 5 feet, Young joined the force.

Today, the 125-pound Young stands tall in the LAPD, commanding more than 80 sworn and civilian personnel as captain of detectives at the Van Nuys Division. Second in charge there to Capt. Robert McNamara, Young is one of about 70 captains in the LAPD, which has more than 9,000 sworn personnel.

During her police career, she has disguised herself as a hooker, wearing mini-dresses and outrageous wigs. She has played the part of a drugged-out zombie desperate for PCP and cocaine. She has seized kilos of dope and helped bring down many a dealer.

“It was interesting, it was fun,” she said of undercover life.

She has worked all over the city, from the gang-infested corners of South-Central to the beaches of Venice, from South Bureau traffic duty to tracking serial rapists for the elite Robbery/Homicide Division downtown.

At every assignment, she has excelled, her bosses said.

“She is very well-liked by her detectives. She’s a people-oriented person. She is very effective at getting results,” said one of her supervisors, Cmdr. Val Paniccia. “In a department burdened by Rampart, she has been so good at getting the morale up.”

Young, 48, the youngest of six children, might never have joined the force if not for an illness in her family.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in kinesiology from UCLA and a teaching credential from UC Irvine, she moved to Las Vegas and took a job as a high school physical education instructor.

But then her father became ill.

“My parents wanted me to move back to Compton because my dad was sick,” Young said.

She returned home, and still cherishes that decision because she got to spend so much time with her father before his death in 1988.

She took a teaching job at Willowbrook Junior High School in 1981, when gangs were taking up automatic weapons as crack began to spread havoc.

A friend informed her that the LAPD had lowered its height requirement. Young was accepted into the Police Academy and began her rise through the ranks.

It has been a rise accompanied by the skepticism of older detectives. But Young, who was previously a lieutenant in Van Nuys, quickly defused that concern. The detectives in Young’s command acknowledge that they wondered about their new boss, as they would any, but said her personality won them over.

“It didn’t take long for the detectives here to show her respect,” said LAPD Homicide Det. Roberta Moore. “What I like about her is she’s proven herself in a very quiet but self-assured way.”

Moore, a 17-year LAPD veteran, said Young’s humanity shines though.

“She genuinely cares about each person here. She really is concerned about everybody. . . . I’ve seen the morale go up since she’s been here. She’s phenomenal,” Moore said.

Moore’s supervisor agreed.

Young “really listens and cares about her people,” said Det. Al Aldaz, coordinator in Van Nuys Division homicide. “When she leaves, I’m leaving too.”

So what advice does the captain from Brooklyn have for young people in Los Angeles?

“You’ve got to work hard, even if it’s an assignment you don’t want,” said Young, who is single and enjoys reading detective novels and working out. “To be frank, I didn’t want to come to the Valley. I don’t hang out here. I don’t know a lot of people here. But to me, it is an opportunity to work hard for the city.”

Young still remembers the guys walking that beat in rough old Bedford-Stuyvesant. She went back to Brooklyn last year for a visit.

“We don’t do that--walk the beat--out here much,” the soft-spoken Young lamented.

“Things aren’t like they used to be. Maybe they will be again someday.”