Ghettoside (13 page)

But it was not merely a sales job that detectives such as Skaggs perfected. Good ghettoside investigators projected something deeper to their wavering witnesses—something akin to pure conviction. It was no accident that the most successful among them were confident, reassuring. They made people feel they could handle their burdens.

In the early days of European law, the legal historian James Whitman said, state officials faced similar problems. Back when “vengeance cultures” permeated medieval society, murders often stemmed from feuds. Villages were small and, often, everyone knew who had committed the murder but no one wanted to speak in court. Whitman argues that many of our modern legal procedures, such as unanimous jury verdicts, actually began as efforts to coax cooperation—to provide safety and “
moral comfort” to people who didn’t want to testify and who feared retaliation.

Whitman’s thesis has a medieval theological slant. But in other ways Skaggs and his colleagues personified the moral comfort he describes. They succeeded because South Central Los Angeles was a version of a medieval vengeance culture—a premodern setting, legally speaking. In the twelfth-century village,
fama
—rumors, in Latin—had already named a suspect. In Watts, the GIN usually had. In both, it was left to the state to confirm what everyone already knew. This was not a job for Sherlock Holmes. It was a job for a counselor—or prince.

THE NOTIFICATION

One winter morning in 2004, John Skaggs took the wheel of his sedan and headed out into the sun-washed streets of Watts. His mission was to tell a father that his son was dead.

With him was the most recent of a seemingly endless string of Southeast detective trainees, Mark Arenas, a thirty-four-year-old former gang officer raised in Downey. Arenas was trying to learn the ropes, and he was anxious not to appear the amateur. Arenas held a dim view of social dynamics in Watts. “The lack of responsibility!” he would exclaim in disgust. “Violence is
accepted
here.”

Skaggs and Arenas had been at a homicide scene that morning, a black man killed in the driver’s seat of his SUV. Skaggs had volunteered to tell the family. He took Arenas. “Ever done a notification?” Skaggs asked as he drove. Anything could happen during a notification. Loved ones of victims screamed, collapsed, or fainted. At the county hospitals, nurses were trained to prepare for being attacked. One colleague of Skaggs’s would always remember the notification he made in the case of twenty-five-year-old Ronald Tyson, shot dead in an alley near Central Avenue in 2003. When he told Tyson’s mother he had been murdered, she vomited.

Homicide notifications also carried some psychological risk for the people who carried them out. A coroner’s investigator fumed that people she met were curious about dead bodies, as if that were the hard part. “It’s not the gore. It’s the grief,” she said. Even if a notification went smoothly, “I walk out and I’m shaking and I’m suppressing the urge to cry,” said Bryan Hubbard, a trauma surgeon at California Hospital. An image stayed with Hubbard for years: He brought a mother to view the body of her little boy, dead from gunshots. She spent several minutes shaking his small, lifeless form, trying to wake him up.

For Skaggs, notifications were one more task that required skills not taught in the academy. He considered this a serious part of a young detective’s training. Arenas was feeling unsure and sought to impress Skaggs. So he cracked a joke, pretending he would deliver the news with tough-guy bravado: “Sorry to tell you—he took one to the head!” Arenas was still a gang officer at heart. In his milieu, a phrase such as “took one to the head” might mark one as cool. Skaggs stared ahead at the wheel. Arenas shot him a look, tried to apologize, and trailed off. After an excruciating silence, Skaggs changed the subject.

Three years had passed since Skaggs had come to Southeast. Skaggs and Barling had rocketed through dozens of cases, working closely with La Barbera. By then, they were helping run the squad, functioning almost as La Barbera’s deputies. Shortages of manpower, supplies, and patrol and lab support still impeded investigations. Turnover remained high—Arenas was among the many recruits who would not remain in the unit long. But Skaggs, if anything, was more devoted to his craft than ever. He was dimly aware that the work had changed him, subtly reorienting his viewpoints on law enforcement and crime. He still spoke in the same vernacular as his cop friends. But his inward views had shifted.

It was something felt more than said—the culmination of scores of random observations that illuminated a moral dimension to homicide work that was absent from many other police functions. Skaggs now sensed his investigations addressed a deeper need in black neighborhoods than he had previously understood. This, in turn, colored other
impressions. Arenas, for example, accused the division’s black residents of inferior values. But Skaggs had concluded that many residents connected to Watts murder cases were ordinary people, trapped by conditions of lawlessness. Coercion and intimidation lay behind much of their apparent “acceptance” of violence, he thought. Sometimes, arresting a young man for murder, he would reflect that things might have turned out differently had the suspect “grown up just four blocks away.” Skaggs also saw that many victims had no role in provoking the attacks that killed them. His colleagues insisted Watts had no real victims. But years later, a trace of anguish would tinge Skaggs’s voice when he talked of the many cases he’d handled in Southeast. His choice of words was telling: “All those innocent people!” he said.

Years before, the same accrual of understanding had prompted Wally Tennelle’s reluctance to work at RHD, the phrase “some daddy’s baby” ringing in his ears. Before that, it had prompted Skaggs’s father to conclude that nothing matters after working homicide. And on this winter day, it prompted Skaggs’s chill response to Arenas. He gave up on training for a moment. When they pulled up to the house, Skaggs walked ahead, and confronted a man in dress shoes on the porch.

He asked the man’s name. He was the father they sought. Skaggs told him that his son had been killed—right there on the front porch. No buildup. No euphemisms. Just straight truth and clarity. The father sagged against the door frame:
“Oh my God.”

Skaggs followed him into the house. Spotless glass coffee table, red carpet, snow-white upholstery. The father, face wild with confusion, bent double as if punched, asked three or four more times, “He’s dead?
Dead?
” And Skaggs answered patiently each time: “Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”

The city’s murder rate was dropping fast. But Southeast’s homicides remained high. Seventy-two people would be killed in that small area in 2004. Sixty-five more would die in 2005, and sixty-nine in 2006, representing a per capita murder rate that was eight to ten times the national average. As always, the majority of the killings were black-on-black.

Skaggs and Barling remained partners, and in their first two years together, they cleared twenty-six of thirty-two cases—an 81 percent clearance rate. After that, clearing cold cases from previous years boosted their rate even higher, and it remained high for the next three years.

They had developed an odd relationship. Though best friends, they argued constantly. They argued about football, dinner plans, politics, and every detail of their homicide cases—always without rancor. It drove their colleagues up the wall. Barling was pedantic. Skaggs was impish. Barling would wave his arms and spout malapropisms. “Constringent” combined the words “contingent” and “constrained by”; “cycular cycles” meant the persistence of inner-city problems. Skaggs would shake his head, aping astonishment. Round and round they went.

Some of it was the result of a conscious policy the two had established: they agreed that only one of them would lead on each case. It freed them to debate their investigations, knowing there was no real danger of conflict. But for Skaggs, countering Barling’s endless hand-waving fulminations also may have served a subconscious need. It ensured that Barling would serve as the repository of outrage and left Skaggs free to work.

Compassionate by nature, Barling was unafraid to air his distress over the bloodshed in Watts. He was appalled by the Monster, tormented by what he perceived as the public’s indifference and political neglect, baffled by the black tilt to the stats. “It’s either society’s racism, or something is
wrong
with them—something wrong just with black people. And I don’t believe that!” Barling said, his voice rising in distress. “I believe we are all created equally, men, women, all races! That’s why I cannot buy that.”

Skaggs forced Barling to move on. His private views on homicide remained buried at the level of intuition, surfacing now and then in flickers—beats of awkward silence like the one that met Arenas’s joke. The rest of the time, he appeared carefree. It was key to his stamina.

Even the sordid misery of the streets rolled right off him. Skaggs by that time had spent years amid drug addicts, prostitutes, and killers. Yet he retained a squeaky-clean propriety. He was not morally rigid. But he
had a strong idea of what he considered a sensible life and was surprised by even minor lapses. Bad housekeeping scandalized him. Sleeping late was worse. As for the homicides, after a hundred cases, Skaggs would still shake his head, amazed someone could actually be so
dumb-ass
as to kill. In this way, he preserved what was not exactly innocence, but an unsullied spirit that allowed him to go home to his family each night psychologically intact.

Sal La Barbera never lost his high ambitions for the unit. He sought not just to perform adequately in his modest D-3 supervisory post, but to make of his job a great life project.

There was a touch of grandiosity to his attitude. But La Barbera had a rare combination of skills. As anyone who has worked in a professional environment knows, top practitioners don’t always make effective managers. La Barbera was both workaday administrator and man of ideas. He would expound on some lofty crusade one minute, put the paperwork in good order the next.

At work, he displayed no anger, reserving his emotions for his various personal dramas. He emphasized team spirit. He taught his detectives to take pride in speaking for homicide victims, no matter who they had been in life. It was his version of Tennelle’s “some daddy’s baby.” In Watts, the idea had particular relevance. “Innocent victims,” in the conventional sense, were a minority. More often, victims in Watts murder cases were combatants, and everyday language in Watts reflected residents’ sense that they lived in an unseen war zone. The LAPD was an “occupying army.” Gang members called themselves “soldiers” and “warriors.” And over on Broadway and Manchester, a protest banner announced the area’s nickname: Little Baghdad—a pointed comparison to occupied Iraq.

As a result, victims in Watts cases were often suspects, too: fighters in a continuous flow of street skirmishes. Today’s executioner might be tomorrow’s victim. A detective might have a pretty good idea that a victim had been a “soldier,” and even an exceptionally vicious one.

“
Murderers are mean,” as the historian Monkkonen said, and in Southeast, they seemed especially so. The meanest among them urinated on their victims, or blasted away as they lay dying and shielding their faces with their hands; punctured palms were a common homicide injury. But the creed dictated that the murder of a killer be treated as that of a child felled by a stray bullet. “They are all innocent angels when they get to me,” La Barbera would say.

Most of all, La Barbera drummed into his detectives his conviction that virtually all the cases were solvable. The way he saw it, the perennially low ghettoside clearance rates were malfeasance. It was a theme he hammered away at in almost every staff meeting, and in a dozen quiet asides per day. He was not above goading his detectives: “These guys are sitting around smoking dope with no high school education!” went a typical refrain. “You guys are smart people. I think you can fucking figure out what happened!”

There was defiance in La Barbera’s stance. It inspired loyalty. Skaggs and Barling absorbed his philosophy. They considered a respectable clearance rate to be 80 percent or higher. Ever the perfectionist, Skaggs took the notion even further. He coined a derisive term for detectives he considered mediocre. “Forty percenters,” he called them.

Typically, the mix of South Bureau cases included a number of “self-solvers”—murder-suicides, simple domestic homicides, killings witnessed by police officers, cases in which suspects were caught running from the scene, and so forth. The prevalence of self-solvers meant police agencies had to solve a few additional challenging cases to produce a natural 30 to 40 percent clearance rate in official tallies. Given that reported rates were often not much higher than this across many of L.A. County’s highest-crime areas, it could be inferred that Skaggs thought dimly of the whole system. Too often, he said, it seemed to him that detectives were “just going through the motions.” Nothing annoyed him like low professional standards.

Skaggs and Barling became La Barbera’s co-conspirators. They helped him hatch and execute little plots. One involved Southeast’s old murder books—the blue binders detailing investigations.