I have never run across a news story about Los Angeles police in which the police union clammed up and had nothing whatsoever to say about it. Until this one.

Most of those men you see working security at location shoots for movies or TV shows are retired motorcycle cops. Give them just a glance and you'd think they were official. But they're a hybridized species -- looking the part but without full cop powers and not answerable to the LAPD. And they make a very pretty penny, sometimes six figures a year.

Chief Bill Bratton doesn't want these jobs done that way. He wants only active-duty, fully empowered officers coordinated by the department to be the ones moonlighting on sets within the city limits. The productions would pay the LAPD, which would pay the officers, schedule the work, assume liability and take a cut for its trouble. It's not money, Bratton says, it's professionalism, and he will work "aggressively" to make it happen.

See why the police union had no comment? If this were a film, I would be so ready for the pitch meeting: "It's cop versus cop -- a turf war across the Thin Blue Line in the City of Angels. What's at stake? Millions of dollars in movie income and all the craft services food you can eat."

Cops and movies have been tight since Mack Sennett made Keystone Cops comedies in what is now Echo Park and the police helped him do it. Decades later, Dan Cooke, the LAPD's Hollywood advisor, was such good pals with Jack Webb, the creator and star of "Dragnet," that Webb used Cooke's badge number, 714, as the show's emblem.

By the 1960s, the security relationship was firmly entrenched. Studios could summon retired or off-duty cops from independent "wranglers" on short notice, and -- as The Times pointed out in 1986 -- the wranglers "took a cut from the studio pay of each officer whose off-duty work they arranged." One man's finder's fee looked like another man's kickback.

When Daryl Gates was police chief, he didn't like the arrangement any more than Bratton does now, but nothing much changed. Some cops abused the system. Active-duty cops would call in sick on their regular shifts and then show up guarding a movie shoot, making more money there than for an official day's work.