Ghettoside (10 page)

Blacks “could better their lives, but they don’t,” said one officer of Hispanic ethnicity. “They love it. They love selling drugs. They love forcing old people out of their homes so they can sell drugs there.” Said a white officer: “The true victims are Hispanic. Black suspects prey on Hispanic victims.” There was plenty of Hispanic crime and “gang activity,” too. But the hard-core underclass in Watts was black, and it was impossible for patrol cops not to see that. All day long, their radios buzzed with familiar suspect descriptions. “Male black, five-six to six-two, eighteen to thirty-five, white shirt, black pants,” a gang officer intoned drily, reading aloud from a report in the Watts station one day. All the cops present laughed, for they all sought the same suspect. But even
as officers laughed, some cops also searched their souls, trying to figure out how to accommodate their experiences at work with the antiracism they shared with most of their countrymen.

They sometimes wrestled with race in disarming ways. No one in the wider world seemed to want to talk about it, but black residents, to many officers, appeared more violent than Hispanics. Their own eyes told them so. Statistics backed them up. Few officers wanted to believe that black people were somehow intrinsically wired for violence.

“Maybe the stereotype is true,” said Francis Coughlin, a white gang detective who would play an important role in Skaggs’s story. “I don’t know! I like to think it is a choice. Even in this environment, you have a choice!” His voice betrayed a touch of anguish—the whole issue so delicate and painful.

“Choices” rhetoric helped officers ascribe the violence of Watts to individuals, and thus avoid explanations that felt like group generalizations of black people. But talk of “choices” also inevitably raised questions of blame. And since blame also served as a satisfying distancing mechanism, officers ended by blaming not just suspects but victims for the “choices” they’d made.

Some version of “good riddance” summed up much of the cops’ private response to the violence there. “There are no victims here” was a tired cliché seemingly echoed by half the officers in Southeast. “You take your values and put them in the backseat while you are here,” said gang sergeant Sean Colomey, who worked in Southeast in the aughts. “Then you go back to where you are from and get your values again.”

A white Southeast officer called a successfully prosecuted gang homicide “two for the price of one,” because one gang member had been killed and a second imprisoned. Another white officer, of supervisory rank, scanned a report about a black gang member who had barely survived a bullet to the head: “Why couldn’t it have just taken care of the problem we are dealing with here?” she asked caustically.

A telling bit of cop slang that expressed this philosophy was the word
righteous
. Officers used “righteous” to distinguish people they considered real victims—innocent and worthy of sympathy—from victims only in
a strict legal sense. A
righteous
victim might be the hardworking neighbor struck by a stray bullet. It went without saying that there were few
righteous
victims among the black men of Watts.

But officers could not be condemned wholesale for their strong emotional responses to violence. The anger of many Southeast cops was complicated—shot through with outrage and horror. Even as they spouted callous, shopworn rhetoric, some Southeast officers also displayed deep engagement with problems they encountered in Watts—problems that often seemed to be ignored by a wider world.

A gang detective in Watts named Patrick Flaherty was typical. He worked twelve serious shootings a month—far too many to solve. Flaherty, to his credit, hated “cleared other,” and he worked hard. But few victims would testify. Once, a wounded gang member said “Fuck you” to Flaherty’s request for information—his dying words.

Another time, he investigated the case of a fourteen-year-old boy paralyzed by gunfire. The boy’s mother, against all evidence, insisted the perpetrator couldn’t have been a black man. Flaherty offered this story as an example of perverse denial among blacks. His views appeared harsh and condemnatory: “The whole culture of the black community is crime!” he said. Yet in the same interview, Flaherty kept returning to this fourteen-year-old, whose story never made the news. Flaherty worked the case diligently, driven by a sincere, sympathetic response to the boy’s ordeal, and he persuaded him to testify. He got to know the family, stayed in touch. And every time they went to court, he carried the boy down the steps of the family’s apartment himself.

When Skaggs came to work in Southeast Homicide, the countywide homicide death rate for black men in their twenties was about forty-eight times the average for all Americans. Southeast had always been among the five most violent LAPD precincts, and sixty-five people were killed there the first year after Skaggs arrived, three quarters of them black. The next year, 2003,
Southeast led the city in killings with seventy-seven people dead, two thirds of them black.

Skaggs occupied a corner in the back of the detective squad room, alongside his colleagues at what was called the homicide “table,” for
that is what it was—a handful of desks pushed together, the inauspiciousness of their function reinforced by the arrangement of office furniture, for the homicide table looked no different than the burglary table or the auto table.

After initially bouncing him around between partners, La Barbera eventually assigned Skaggs to work with Chris Barling, another Southern California native who had migrated from South Bureau Homicide. Barling was two years older than Skaggs, also white, and just as tall: the two men wore the same size suit. Barling looked fit, but astonished his health-obsessed colleagues with his diet of packaged burritos and Mountain Dew. Both men were of superior talent. At the point when they became partners, they had identical clearance rates: 75 percent.

The partnership clicked right away. Barling was analytical and talkative, with a flair for circumstantial cases. Skaggs saw that he was good at making sense of complex webs of evidence. For Barling, a denial was as good as a confession.

For his part, Barling admired Skaggs’s style—how he attacked everything in sight, plunging after every scrap of information, going right at its source, refusing to take no for an answer. La Barbera sometimes assigned them extra cases just to juice the unit’s end-of-year clearance rate.

Typically, La Barbera’s little Watts squad had no more than four or five pairs of homicide detectives. These detectives carried the highest homicide caseloads in the city, double or triple those of colleagues in the wealthier San Fernando Valley and West bureaus. Twelve to fifteen cases per pair were typical in those years.

Homicide rates were on the wane, but homicide staffing had dropped, too, and clearing cases still wasn’t seen as central to the department’s crime-fighting strategy. So La Barbera faced the same old frustrations. It was a reprise of the Big Years: insufficient resources and upside-down priorities. Barling liked to say that they were “Don Quixotes, tilting at windmills.” The unit was perennially short of cars and computers. La Barbera “took a complaint” once for stealing an extra, unused computer from the patrol officers because one of his investigators didn’t
have one, and he weathered the inevitable internal-affairs investigation. His detectives were not allowed to bring their police sedans home, unlike detectives in other units, such as “major crimes” at headquarters. They had no office in which to meet, unlike the station’s community policing and data analysis units.

The homicide detectives also lacked sufficient space to interrogate people, since they shared the only available interview room with all the other officers in the station. The room had no recording equipment and no window, and it was always short of chairs and uncomfortably cold.

The detectives were not issued tape recorders, although prosecutors had begun to require recordings to file charges by that time. So they bought their own and, absent an interrogation room, devised ingenious ways to conceal them. One detective carried a heavy binder filled with paper. He cut out the center of the stack to make a secret hollow and hid his recorder in it. This qualified as high technology in ghettoside homicide.

La Barbera spent much of his time trying to secure adequate supplies and equipment. His detectives were not issued departmental cell phones; they bought their own. They did not have the capability to enhance or take stills from surveillance videos, or to videotape interrogations, so they persuaded a local appliance merchant to help them. They struggled for access to moving vans and surveillance cars. They waited for weeks to hear back from labs for reports on physical evidence. La Barbera purchased his own fax machine and printer for the office, and several pieces of furniture, including his own chair. The detectives made regular trips to Office Depot to buy pads, pencils, staplers, keyboards, calendars, and even the blue binders for the murder books.

La Barbera was forever setting goals and drafting plans, trying to improve things. His requests seemed pretty reasonable for a department that ran its own helicopter fleet: he wanted tinted windows in a sedan to ferry witnesses incognito, a locking cabinet for murder books, maybe a few digital cameras. Again and again, he was turned down.

The brass juggled other concerns—response times and suppression of lesser crimes, such as burglaries. These were more numerous and
created more noticeable blips in crime statistics. Reporters, meanwhile, virtually never covered Southeast homicides.
So there was little political pressure to address them.

Even within their own station house, Southeast Homicide detectives sometimes felt like lepers. They had to cajole their colleagues to help them with stakeouts and sweeps. La Barbera tried to improve this, too. He spoke to roll calls, quietly urging the uniforms to stop shooing people rudely from crime scenes and to treat bereaved families with compassion. The officers would roll their eyes, then bark at weeping relatives again, or smirk at witnesses—that smirk that some LAPD officers seemed to have learned at the academy. They still turned in field-interview cards that read like haiku. No one in charge seemed interested in impressing on the uniforms that it was appropriate for them to serve as a supporting cast for detectives. It was as if they policed on a completely different plane. Sometimes, patrol officers roared by fresh shrines on the street without a glance, unaware of the murders that had just happened there.

Just like Baitx and Tennelle a few years before, Skaggs and Barling worked the ghettoside way. Scores of cases, and not a moment to lose.

Skaggs rose at 3:30
A.M
. Unlike the many LAPD officers who exhausted themselves working odd hours, Skaggs was disciplined enough to force himself to go to bed at eight o’clock every night, no matter what.

Each day began with a list of tasks, every moment booked, with delays for traffic and slow courthouse elevators carefully accounted for. He and Barling disdained colleagues who took long “Code 7’s,” driving as far as South Bay for restaurant lunches. Skaggs and Barling ate their lunches standing, brown bags spread out on the trunk of the sedan. Most days they worked twelve hours or more, with tasks stretching late into the night. Skaggs was a serious coffee addict; he drank it very black and by the pot, the last cup after dark; it did not affect his sleep at all. Overtime was his life. One of the office secretaries had dubbed the homicide
squad “the green mile” because of all the green overtime forms they turned in. It was the one area in which divisional homicide squads were amply provided for: they usually didn’t have enough detectives, but the ones they had could exploit contract provisions that treated them like factory labor and rewarded unceasing work. Skaggs earned $190,000 one year—his peak. Asked his base salary at the time, Skaggs could not pinpoint it. He had never bothered to learn his actual wage.

The squad was usually short on experience, with too many apprentices and too few veterans to train them. Ghettoside work was so draining that it required incompatible attributes, youthful energy and master craftsmanship. All the South L.A. homicide units suffered from high turnover, with young recruits often moving to easier and more rewarding positions as soon as they were able; this was also true of prosecutors down at Compton Courthouse. Short-handed South Bureau homicide units frequently accepted mediocre candidates to compensate. Two of La Barbera’s detectives over the years were drummed out on misconduct allegations. Others solved no cases. La Barbera did his best to combat churn. He was a tireless talent scout and recruiter. But the best officers scoffed at his advances. “Hey, you want to work homicide?” La Barbera said brightly to one who passed his desk one morning. The officer guffawed and walked off, shaking his head.

La Barbera obsessed over every last detail of his management job, kept his own elaborate records, and studied his data in his spare time in search of best practices. He discovered that constantly training young recruits who didn’t work out wasted time and hampered the progress of his best detectives. La Barbera looked at years of clearances and found it was better to keep strong detectives together than to partner them with apprentices. Strong pairs would solve more cases than the weak ones sacrificed. So he kept Barling and Skaggs together.

For Skaggs and Barling, this was a formative, golden period.

La Barbera demanded pride of appearance, and Skaggs always looked crisp in his business suits. He allowed himself the one indulgence
of taking off his suit jacket as he worked Southeast’s baking asphalt streets. But he kept the ties knotted and never rolled up the sleeves of the white dress shirts he always wore. He and Barling cleaned their sedan frequently so people would know at a glance they weren’t just any plainclothes cops—they were homicide detectives. Skaggs loved it when Southeast residents, who studied their cops very carefully, recognized him as a homicide man.

In the office, Skaggs and his colleagues were obsessively neat. They kept bottles of Formula 409 spray at their desks. One day a trainee spilled coffee on Skaggs’s desk. Appalled silence—then La Barbera quietly threatened to fire him. It wasn’t clear that he was joking.