Connie Gordon, center, joined the LAPD when black officers were a rare thing. Now, as a civilian, he finds that some things haven't changed enough. (Michael Robinson Chavez / Los Angeles Times / October 20, 2010)

Connie Gordon got off the beat and out of the LAPD years ago.

He lives well in retirement, with lots of time to play golf, and is blessed with the incalculable bounty of healthy children and grandchildren.

But twice a week he returns to a corner of South L.A. he knew well during his patrol days. He sits at a concrete picnic table in a park he'd prefer I didn't name, though I can tell you it's in the most dangerous neighborhood in L.A., according to a Times survey of crime data.

"Don't worry, Hector," Gordon told me over the phone before I headed out there. "I'll make sure nothing happens to you."

Gordon, 64, goes to that park with his brothers, Calvin and Ralph, both former LAPD mechanics, and Sterling, a retired LAPD sergeant. They see old friends, including several who are homeless. They reminisce as other seniors nearby slap down dominoes. Some rather well-dressed young men float in and out of the park too, doing business on their cellphones.

Very often, an LAPD patrol car cruises past. Gordon watches the officers closely. "There's a lot of good, enforcement-minded guys out here," he said. "A few of the guys get out of their cars and they'll have a conversation. But some don't even try to relate."

Gordon knows the Los Angeles Police Department as both an insider and an outsider. I went to South L.A. to talk to him because he has a surplus of something often lacking in the debate over police reform: perspective.

He grew up in South L.A. when it seethed and burned in the 1960s and many of his neighbors saw police as the enemy. Then he spent his LAPD career arresting bad guys in a wide variety of assignments, including downtown, the Westside, narcotics and vice.

Now he's a civilian again. Not long ago, he was standing at the tailgate of his SUV talking to some homeless guys - which apparently qualified as a suspicious act to an LAPD officer cruising past. The officer demanded that Gordon and his friends place their hands on their heads. Gordon felt the officer's attitude was "caustic" and refused.

"I've got 30 years in the department," Gordon told the officer after a heated exchange. "I know how this is supposed to go.... All I want is respect. And that's all these guys want too."

Gordon would be the first to tell you that the LAPD of today is light-years removed from the department he joined in 1969 - in part because black officers like him endured years of hassles to make it a better force.

But it still has a way to go.

"That kind of stuff goes on all the time," Gordon said of his brief standoff with the young policeman. "Guys do it routinely."

Creating a police department capable of keeping a big city safe, despite poverty and the legacy of racism, is one of the hardest challenges in a democracy. Every new officer-involved shooting reminds us of this, as critics line up to argue that the LAPD is the same old, same old.

But those of us with memories of the old L.A. know how far the department has come.

Gordon is the son of migrants who left segregated Pine Bluff, Ark., for L.A. in 1955.

"There was this little 5-foot-2 woman who taught me how to live my life," Gordon said of his mother, Eva, a seamstress. "The idea of public service was instilled in us. You needed to give something back to the good that was given you."

When Gordon first applied to the LAPD in 1969, he was a former military policeman. But the department turned him down, saying he had a heart defect.

"We knew the system was set up to weed us out," Gordon recalled. But he persisted. With a letter from the head of a hospital cardiology department, he got in.

Gordon was a rookie working in South L.A. when he and two white partners responded to a burglary near his alma mater, Manual Arts High. At that moment, Gordon saw why the LAPD needed people like him.

As the suspect emerged from the back door of an apartment, Gordon drew his .38-caliber revolver and simultaneously uttered a few choice swear words. The suspect surrendered.

"Why didn't you cap him, Connie?" one of his partners asked afterward. "That was a felony in progress. It would have been a good shooting."

"That guy didn't get shot because I grew up there, and I didn't perceive him as a threat," Gordon told me.

Being a black man in the LAPD in those early days required the stoic patience of a Jackie Robinson, he said. "I wasn't arrogant, I didn't speak out, but I carried myself with pride."

He was often in a personal no man's land as he patrolled South L.A. Some residents called him a pig. When he talked to neighborhood friends, it made his white partners uncomfortable. "It was an us-versus-them mentality," he said.

In the late 1970s, at the West L.A. station, Gordon challenged one white officer who consistently brought in black suspects battered and bloodied.

Gordon warned the officer that he had relatives who lived in the division. "And if they ever tell me that you did anything to them, you're going to have hell you can't handle."

The head of the station, Capt. Ken Hickman, heard about this confrontation. "I had him as an ally," Gordon said. "So I didn't take any heat for it."

More good people joined the force, both black and white. Some reformers were forced out, Gordon said, but others thrived. By the time he left the force in 2000, it was more racially diverse than at any time in its history.

Building the LAPD we want is a constant struggle, Gordon said. "The department has done a remarkable turnaround. But we never got changes until there was a law, or a court decision forced it."

Being a cop was an honor, Gordon told me. And he always believed that you could love the force and want better from it at the same time.

Connie Gordon still thinks that, from the perch of the concrete bench, watching men and women in patrol cars cruise past. They're doing a job that was the great adventure of his life, and which he survived with his principles intact.