Patt Morrison

The New LAPD Chief, and Finding Love at the Animal Shelter

By Patt Morrison | Nov. 5, 2009

Police chief-designate Charlie Beck won't officially become the next chief of the LAPD until the City Council votes on November 19, but as council president Eric Garcetti told me earlier this week, he wouldn't be surprised if the vote is unanimous.

Chief Beck joined me in what I hope will continue the tradition of ''Ask the Chief'' segments we began with Chief Bill Bratton. Chief Beck is an LAPD ''lifer,'' and his family has three generations in the department. He talked about being a bottom-up kind of chief, and certainly he's worked his way up through the ranks, in the busy South Bureau, among other assignments, and undertaking a cleanup of the Rampart Division after that scandal.

He talked about the value of transparency, about the changes wrought by the federal consent decrees the department had operated under, about his love of his championship Motocross pursuits, and his wife's love of horses, in which his role mostly involves a ''one-wheeled'' implement -- a wheelbarrow -- and mucking out the stalls. Good preparation, he joked, for his job.

The Nobel laureate novelist Orhan Pamuk waxed lyrical -- of course! -- about his love for storytelling, both when he heard them recounted by his grandmother as he was growing up in Istanbul, and the stories he now writes. He also had thoughtful things to say about how even writers of literary fiction find themselves expected to address political issues -- something he's done, even in the face of criticism, in his native Turkey, when it comes to sensitive topics like the treatment of Kurds and the Armenian genocide.

For National Animal Shelter Appreciation week, I asked you for your stories about creatures you've rescued from shelters -- and who have turned out to be wonderfully enriching in your lives. Our engineer and I couldn't meet each other's eyes when we heard from Lorena in Burbank, who started talking about her own beloved rescue dog and was so moved she began crying. We were afraid we would, too!

Loads of you called with other pet-testimonials, and as a dog rescuer, I still want to hear them all -- cats, dogs, birds, horses, snakes, pigs. Please blog your November valentine to your little loved one on the Patt Morrison page.

Next time: maybe you were in Berlin in 1989 for the fall of the Wall. I was. Let's share some stories, shall we? My photos from that world-changing event will be on our website on Friday. [Yes, I know, you can see my shadow in my pictures; what can I say? I'm no Ansel Adams. I'm not even Weegee.]

''Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me'' is pitching its tent here in Los Angeles, and Peter Sagal and Carl Kasell will be here with me at KPCC. Got limericks?

-- Patt Morrison