Until it all went bad, Randolph Franklin used to talk with pride about his life in the Los Angeles Police Department. Wear a badge for nearly half of your 50 years and somewhere along the way it becomes more than just a job.
He was proud as well of the life he built on Woodlawn Avenue -- an unremarkable street set amid the gang violence and poverty of the city's southern swath. It's an odd place for a cop to live. But it was where a black kid from a Mississippi trailer park managed to buy a real house. It was where he turned an old, beat-up bungalow into a real home with dark red trim, marble fireplaces and trendy bamboo stalks along the edge of the lawn.
In the early morning darkness of May 25, 2006, Franklin's two worlds -- his life on Woodlawn and his life in the LAPD -- collided.
The phone in his upstairs bedroom woke him from a dead sleep at 4 a.m. His wife was away visiting her family, and their two small children slept down the hall. The voice on the line identified himself as a lieutenant with the LAPD's elite SWAT unit. The house, he told Franklin, was surrounded. Peering out of the bedroom window, Franklin saw it was no joke: a knot of heavily armed officers were pressed up against the house. Snipers were perched on the neighbor's porch. A helicopter hovered overhead.
Franklin had no idea what his own Police Department would want with him. He asked for time to roust his 7-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son. He had 20 minutes, the SWAT officer said, or police would come in and get him.
Before Franklin pulled open the front door and walked into the blinding glare of spotlights, he put himself between his little boy and girl and took their hands in his own. "I wanted the police to be able to see our hands," he recalls. "I didn't want to give them any reason to shoot us."
Franklin is a tightly wound man. When he describes the LAPD's six-hour search of his house, his jaw clenches and he seethes words like "degrading" and "humiliating." He recalls how he was made to sit in the back of a police van with his children, guarded by someone wearing the same uniform he wore each day. He remembers how neighbors gathered to gawk as drug-sniffing dogs were led inside, dogs that left paw prints on his bed. He talks about the quiet fury he felt as his demands for an explanation were ignored.
"They came into my house," he says. "That's my family. My reputation."
What happened that morning is not in dispute. Why it happened, however, is.
