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accident.”
    One of the first training officers assigned to rookie Bynum was Charlie Beck. He would later become LAPD chief in November 2009. This enabled her to say, with that incandescent twinkle in her eyes and a charming smile, “Now I can call him Chief Charlie.”
    The city of Venice had originally been designed and named to emulate the famous Italian site on the Adriatic Sea. But the canals in California’s Venice had long since dried up, turned into receptacles for trash, and were finally paved over. The city’s wide stretch of sand and palm trees earned the sobriquet “Muscle Beach” in the 1950s. Over the decades, a series of amusement parks sprang up on oceanfront piers, the last one, in 1958, called Pacific Ocean Park. But they all failed and vanished. Notable musicians, from Lawrence Welk to Spade Cooley and even the Doors, performed for television from local venues. Venice Beach’s famed boardwalk, with its eclectic lineup of merchants, still attracts throngs of visitors throughout the year. For the most part, the community is safe, but some of the rougher edges are plagued by crime.
    â€œVenice was an eye-opening experience,” Vicki Bynum recalled. “I was assigned the night watch, and stupid me, I rode my bike to work all the way from Hermosa Beach, about ten miles. I was very much in shape at the time. But my training officer scolded me and put a stop to that because he said it was too dangerous.”
    After three years in the beach area, the brass reassigned Bynum to LAPD’s Communications Division downtown. “It was really disappointing to do desk work after being a gunslinger out on the streets. Right before the 1984 Olympics in L.A., they pushed us out because they needed a lot of cops on the street.” She found herself working skid row, patrol at first and then vice, from 1984 to 1988. After that came an administration assignment, to ease the strain on the widowed mother. Another patrol job came next in the Hollenbeck Division, which contains some tough areas in East L.A. “I got tired of that because there were big fights every night.” Another move took her undercover for five years in the vice squad, in which Bynum participated in the arrest of the notorious Heidi Fleiss, known as the “Hollywood Madam,” who allegedly provided prostitutes for the rich and famous.
    More undercover work followed in the Rampart Division West, of downtown Los Angeles. “We tackled slumlords, drug dealers and gangs. Jeans and tennis shoes were my uniform.”
    Finally Bynum took the test to become a detective and aced it. She worked Hollenbeck again, partnered with Tom Herman. He later headed up the investigation of Rebecca Salcedo and her two cousins, Alvaro and Jose Quezada, who conspired to kill Rebecca’s husband, Bruce Cleland ( Honeymoon with a Killer, Kensington, 2009).
    Regarding Detective Herman, Bynum laughed. “He was kind of a cowboy type, like George Jones, and always wore his jeans too tight. In one of my last days working with him, a request came for units to assist in a perimeter. Some suspects had been pinpointed in a specific area, and they needed officers to cover different points. Tom and I somehow got separated. A helicopter gave instructions from overhead. I heard its radio saying, ‘Female detective, female detective, suspect running your way.’ I look around and I’m all alone. The guy came right toward me and almost ran into me. I start chasing him, running. The chopper overhead. I’m thinking, ‘What am I doing?’ I’m yelling at this guy, ‘You had better stop. I don’t want to shoot you.’ I wasn’t going to, but I figured I’d better scare him. In this high, little-girl voice I’m yelling, ‘I’m going to shoot you. You better lay down.’ I turn around. ‘Where’s Tom?’ I had lost him. For years afterward, I kidded him, and said the