If you ever wanted to know how your clothes got to the mall, your iPhone arrived at the Apple Store, or the gas in your tank made its way from the Middle East to that Shell station, the best place to start without leaving the country is the Port of Los Angeles.
The scale of the place is nearly impossible to grasp. A broad expanse of concrete, it covers 7,500 acres, with 43 miles of shoreline that trace a labyrinth of channels, berths, and marinas.
Here and there freighters that stretch almost a quarter mile long and ten stories above the water float idle as skyscraping, four-legged cranes unburden them of multicolored stacks of steel containers. Against a backdrop so colossal, even tugboats and trash barges look tiny. Each year roughly 2,000 such freighters come through the harbor carrying 40 percent of the shipping containers that come to America, making it the busiest port in this country and the 19th most bustling on the planet. Make that the ninth if you combine it with the adjacent Port of Long Beach.
Tasked with patrolling this alien landscape are the 130 sworn officers of the Los Angeles Port Police. It’s an odd occupation. One moment a port cop could be ticketing a speeding semi or responding to a domestic disturbance call in Wilmington or San Pedro, the two neighborhoods that bleed into the port’s borders; an hour later he might be boarding a cruise ship to look for explosives or diving 50 feet down into water so dark and cloudy that he can rarely see more than an arm’s length in front of him. Which can pose a challenge when searching for a corpse or checking whether dope has been stashed beneath a hull.
“There’s a lot of activity here—a lot of people coming in and out of this harbor,” LAPP sergeant Ralph Edwards told me one morning this past November as he stood on the docks in Fish Harbor. The water was dead-still, and a seal could be spotted popping above the surface.
“You never know what you might find, especially underneath the big ships.” Edwards oversees the department’s dive team, a crew of four full-time members and 21 part-timers that was founded in 1989. Five feet, six inches and stocky with close-cropped brown hair, the sergeant speaks in a soft voice and often seems to be suppressing a smile.
The effect can be disarming, adding an extra tinge of earnestness to everything he says. As the captain of a Cal State Northridge marine biology research boat tended to his craft a few feet away, Edwards, who’s 46, explained that a small sunken craft had recently been reported by a commercial diver. “We’re going to measure it, try to get a name or serial number, and make sure it’s not a safety hazard,” he said. Beside him Sergeant Philip Heem and Sergeant Nathan Blair were each putting on a layer of tight synthetic fleece to stay warm.
Next they shimmied into black dry suits, which are kind of like astronaut suits but sealed at the wrists, ankles, and neck to keep contaminated water out. With his tank on, Heem affixed a GoPro camera to his mask, and Blair made sure it was snug.
The men checked their earpieces and mikes, then jumped in, flippers first, vanishing from view about six feet down. A thin column of bubbles was the only clue they were there at all.
