Love him or loath him, it’s a sure bet that Steve Cooley is going to be LA’s district attorney for a third term. His opponents are non starters and he gets along with both law enforcement and city hall. With all this in mind, my pal, KPCC reporter Frank Stolz, did this mini-portrait of Cooley, past and present
Here’s a transcript clip of one of the more…um…interesting moments in which retired LAPD Detective Jimmy Trahin, who trainedCooley as a reserve police officer in the early 1970s, tells what our DA was like in those years.
Jimmy Trahin: First thing I noticed about Steve is that he was one of these gung ho types. He just couldn’t wait to get out there and pick up bad guys. We’d stop and jack ’em up, and they were scared of us. And they were scared of Steve.Stoltze: Trahin recalls one backyard encounter with three robbery suspects.
Trahin: It was an all knock out brawl. And it ended up, other officers came in and Steve backed off, and then he came back in with his baton, and he was doing his number to try to keep these people down, and he ended up hitting half of the other cops that were there with his baton, and we all end up getting medical treatment after that.
Okie-Dokie. (By the way, Cooley swears he didn’t pull his baton.)
All in all, the anecdotes in this intriguing group of audio snapshots may please some, irritate others. But they suggest a complex, interesting man who, in our complex and interesting city has managed to get along well with and be respected by law enforcement, city hall, and the defense bar—-and most of (but not all) of the town’s most outspoken activists.
In any case, he’s our DA for the next four years so click, listen and enjoy.
Photo by Anne Cusack for the LA Times
Just like with Johnson, you dig into things for which people were accused thirty years ago and when they were young. If we go back futher, we can find out that they wet their pants at some point.
If no one changes, do you think that anyone should give former gang members a second chance?
Hmmm. Woody, I actually like Cooley. I don’t think he’s perfect, and I don’t agree with everything he says, but I do agree with a lot of it. This was not meant to come off as that critical. I think I’ll update it.
Oh, nuts. If you do an update, then I’ll have to change my position.
Sad that Albert Robles, who’s not even an attorney and had the endorsement of no one, plus has some skeletons in his closet, got 20% of the vote because of his surname, while Steve Ipsen, a 20+ year veteran of the DA’s office and elected President of the 1000-member Union of Asst. DA’s, got only 15.6%.