After police raid, bitterness replaces pride for LAPD officer

A SWAT unit rousted Randolph Franklin from his South L.A. home in 2006. They found nothing. Today, still on the job, he wants to know why they came that morning.

By Joel Rubin
LA Times
May 28, 2009

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.

(More here.)