On York Boulevard in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles sits the Los Angeles Police Museum with three stories of exhibits on the history of policing in the City of Angels (and Bad-Asses).

Originally, we intended to visit the Heritage Square Museum with its Victorian mansions that were moved to a lot alongside the 110 (Pasadena) Freeway. Unfortunately, they were closed for a fund raising event, so we had to find an alternate. We had visited the LAPD Museum a couple years ago, so we decided to drive north and check to see if it was open. Fortunately, we were in luck.

The second floor has three interesting exhibits that are the heart of the museum:

• The 1963 kidnapping of LAPD officers Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger by two hoods. Hettinger managed to escape, but Campbell was executed in a Kern County onion field. Joseph Wambaugh wrote a novel about the incident in his novel The Onion Field.
• The Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) in May 1974, in which six members of the organization were killed when the LAPD attacked the house they were in.
• Most interesting to me was the 1997 North Hollywood shootout between two heavily armed bank robbers and several hundred police officers. One of the exhibits was a video of the actual event.

Still from the February 1997 Bank Robbery

Afterwards, Martine and I had lunch and went to one of our favorite stores, the Galco Soda Pop Stop on York Boulevard. They sell an incredible selection of soda pop, beer, and wine from all over the world, in addition to nostalgic candies and toys from the 1950s and 1960s.