The Smiling Policemen

by Rebecca Schoenkopf

As cited in LAObserved this morning, July's issue of Governing magazine has a bit of art review-slash-Police-League history of LA's coppers and their new, community-friendly stationhouses. Question 1: Does LAObserved's Kevin Roderick rely completely on people sending in their links, or is he actually regularly trawling Governing magazine? There is no Question 2.

The piece, by John Buntin, moves quickly through the history of architecture for local police stations, starting with the Skid Row station that the fuzz had nicknamed "Ft. Davis," for Police Chief Ed Davis and for the fact that it was a windowless bunker which projected a sense of martial occupation instead of service to the community.  

Buntin uses the new, open architecture of all the rebuilt divisions as a jumping point to discuss community relations and the history of policing (the earliest US police forces, in the 1840s, were also in charge of pulling weeds and housing local homeless in their hellish cellars). 

It's a swell piece. Click through, and stick around for the Flickr slideshow of the most artistic of the new stations, a fine treat all by themselves.

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