Police Photographers Focus on Normalcy, Train Lens on Horror

After a day on the job snapping pictures of bloody crime scenes, one Los Angeles police photographer has a ritual for cleansing body and soul.

He washes his hands--and the bottoms of his shoes.

“Washes it all away,” said Ronald Campise, who’s been with the Los Angeles Police Department’s photo section for three years.

During his three decades as a police photographer, Arthur Parra has seen the most gruesome spectacles the city has to offer, starting with the Manson Family murders of actress Sharon Tate and others and continuing through the O.J. Simpson case.

A hardened veteran, he has seen heads detached from ghost-white bodies, oozing stab wounds, corpses riddled with bullets, the stuff of horror films.

But a few months ago, even this unflappable professional was shaken.

A little girl had been sodomized and killed. Detectives thought they might be able to take pictures of the attacker’s fingerprints on the girl’s body and Parra dutifully accompanied one of his photographers to the hospital. The sight made him sick.

“This was a little 3-year-old girl,” said Parra, now a night supervisor in the LAPD’s photo unit. “It’s incredible what mankind does to mankind. When it comes to children, it’s revolting.”

LAPD photographers, as in most other big-city police departments around the country, are charged with the sometimes unsavory task of visually documenting every major crime in the city. They jump from one crime scene to another, camera in hand.

They see more criminal violence up close than anyone--except perhaps the county coroner. The work can be grueling, monotonous, funny and sickening all in the same day.

In the LAPD unit there are 24 civilian field photographers. Sworn officers serving as photographers were phased out in 1971.

Parra, a 51-year-old grandfather, is one of the senior members of the staff and has practically grown up with Parker Center, the LAPD’s aging downtown headquarters.

Some photographers have either transferred to another unit or simply quit because they’re not able to cope with the nature of their work.

“As a group, we tend to know the frustrations and concerns of one another,” Parra said. “The department is beginning to open up its eyes on our role as civilian photographers. They’ve become aware of the hazards of our job.”

According to Dr. T. Shelley Duvall, an associate professor of psychology at USC, people who deal with violence regularly at the workplace objectify what they see and may find a new way to interpret their feelings.

“You try to dull the emotional experiences,” Duvall said. “You reinterpret your emotions so you respond with this macabre humor when you’re actually about to throw up the first time. It’s an attempt to transform the emotion from disgust to something else.”

A photographer’s well of feelings can sometimes be stirred not by the gore, but by seemingly harmless sights that make the crime seem more real, said Dr. Jeff Mitchell, a psychologist who counsels members of police and fire rescue teams in Maryland.

“There are little things that can get to them,” Mitchell said. “Taking pictures of a child’s crumpled bicycle can get to some. For others, a teddy bear. They say it’s not even the actual victim. The person may be gone from the scene. Things like that make them relate very personally.”

In the last year, the department has made psychological counselors available to the unit, a measure the photographers acknowledge may be necessary.

“My wife notices I get short with people with my temper,” said Campise. “You can get cynical about everything. But when you’re out there, you have to realize that these bodies are still human beings.”

The LAPD photo unit is housed in a creaky corner of Parker Center with peeling paint and floor-to-ceiling cracks in the walls. The section prints about 1.5 million photographs annually. About 3,000 rolls of film are processed each month.

Photographers use an in-house studio to take mug shots of police officers, crime victims and suspects alike. Parra, the night supervisor, took the infamous mug shot of O.J. Simpson when he was booked at Parker Center in June 1994.

Sensational investigations are nothing new for the LAPD photo detail.

Parra joined the unit shortly after the brutal 1969 murders of actress Sharon Tate and four others in Beverly Hills, and the stabbing deaths one night later of wealthy market owners Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in their Los Feliz home.

Among those slain were Tate, wife of director Roman Polanski; coffee heiress Abigail Folger and filmmaker Voityck Frykowski.

One of Parra’s first duties with the unit involved enlarging photos of the grim murder scenes for use during the Charles Manson trial.

Bodies were left on the front lawn in pools of blood. At the LaBianca murder scene, the word “PIG” was scrawled on walls in the victims’ blood.

Tate, who was 8 1/2 months pregnant, was stabbed and hanged. The others were stabbed or shot.

Among the unit’s newcomers is Peter Ferraro, 42. He has only spent about five months in the field, but he’s already photographed a little of everything.

“It’s really strange,” he said. “To me, it’s almost not real. You see someone laying on a rug and seeing holes in their body. It’s not real.”

Sometimes the work can be incredibly mundane. On a recent night, Ferraro was called to the scene of a homicide that happened three days before at a mom-and-pop market near the Watts Towers.

When he arrived, two detectives directed him to a bullet casing in the middle of a parking lot. No bodies, yellow police tape or gawking bystanders. Just a small piece of metal.

Ferraro quickly went to work, taking pictures of the casing from one angle, then another and another. Thirty minutes later, he was back in his car returning to Parker Center.

The routine is regimented and strictly documentary, which often helps. Photographers sometimes drown themselves in the technical aspects of the shoot so they don’t notice the violence as vividly.

But sometimes photographers run into something they haven’t seen before. John Grote, a member of the photo unit for 22 years, says it’s just part of the job.

“It doesn’t seem to bother me,” he said. “But I guess it does.”