Ghettoside (23 page)

For blacks, this system meant being killable. Blacks were “
shot down for nothing” by whites. But that was not all. They murdered each other, too—in fields, labor camps, and at Saturday night gatherings where there was “
so much cutting and killing going on.” Their rates of death by homicide were similar to—and at times higher than—what they would be decades later in northern inner cities.
In Atlanta in 1920, the rate hit 107 deaths per 100,000 people. In Memphis in 1915, it was 170.
Black people even lynched each other, sometimes exacting mob justice against murder suspects whom white authorities had failed to prosecute.

White people “had the law,” to quote a curious phrase that crops up in historic sources. Black people didn’t. Formal law impinged on them only for purposes of control, not protection. Small crimes were crushed, big ones indulged—so long as the victims were black. John Dollard, a Mississippi researcher of the thirties, speculated that black infighting was the product of white design—or at least some intuitive consensus. “One cannot help wondering if it does not
serve the ends of the white caste to have a high level of violence in the Negro group,” he wrote.

It might not seem self-evident that impunity for white violence against blacks would engender black-on-black murder. But when people are stripped of legal protection and placed in desperate straits, they are more, not less, likely to turn on each other. Lawless settings are terrifying; if people can do whatever they want to each other, there are always enough bullies to make it ugly. Americans are nostalgic for the village
setting and hold dear the notion of community, so the idea that the oppressed do not band together in solidarity is counter to our myths. But community spawns communal justice; the village gives rise to the feud. The condition of being thrown
together just because they were the same color should be considered one of the injustices black people suffered in segregation.

Beyond this, white people saw to it that solidarity among black people was kept to a minimum.
They enlisted blacks as spies,
favored “their Negroes” over other black people,
and used them as pawns in their battles with each other. For people of all colors, the South was a stew of factors that produce homicide—a place where law remained
a contested prize in a low-level, unfinished revolution. But black people experienced law, both its action and inaction,
as a systematic extension of the campaign of terrorist violence that had brought an end to Reconstruction and stripped them of their rights under the Constitution. For years after the Civil War, a taint of sectarian rivalry tinged black–police interactions. Nashville blacks declared they would not “
submit to … arrest by any damned rebel police!” Black people fought police in street battles, and—just as in the Seventy-seventh a century later—
they wrested friends from police hands. Later, as segregated enclaves formed in Southern cities—
Nashville’s “Black Bottom,” Atlanta’s “Darktown”—police avoided them. Officers “did not go through the areas where most Negro homicides occur,
but rather stayed on the main thoroughfares.” Black communities became, “
at least to some extent, self-policing,” a historian summed up.

This set up the great clash of the late twentieth century. A flood of black migrants, schooled by the lawless South, swept into cities such as Los Angeles.
They brought with them their high homicide rates and their tendency for legal self-help. The police they met were not unlike those back home. LAPD officers shot and killed many people and were free with their fists. “I worked with one who took his gun belt off and said, ‘You wanna fight?’ ” said Bernard Parks, the former chief, recalling his patrol days in the 1960s. But L.A. cops were different in important ways: there were more of them and they were a lot more intrusive. New
professional standards meant deploying officers by mathematical formula based on frequency of crime. Since there was more crime in black neighborhoods, they got proportionally more police. In 1961, for example,
the LAPD spent four times as much per capita in Newton Division as it did in West L.A. Southern black migrants had been used to police who ignored them. But these cops were ever-present, hounding them with aggravating “preventive” tactics.

The results were explosive. Watts burned, and so did Newark, Detroit, and other cities in the 1960s. From this turbulent brew the nation imbibed a deep skepticism toward bureaucratic justice that echoes to the present day. Black protest against overzealous police and prosecutors
remains a cherished template for left-leaning critics of criminal justice. But another, profound grievance of the period went mostly ignored—the inadequacy of official response to black-on-black violence.

Instead of confronting the mounting death toll in the cities, the justice system took a permissive turn.
It practiced victim-discounting on a mass scale just as black homicides surged. Prison terms per unit of crime in the U.S. hit rock bottom in the 1960s and 1970s,
making this country one of the world’s most lenient. Courts acquitted. Parole terms were generous. In the midseventies,
only a third of California’s convicted homicide perpetrators remained in prison after seven years, and the rough streets of South Bureau teemed with murderers newly released. Reformers focused on the rights of defendants,
seemingly blind to the ravages of underenforcement.

The pendulum swung. Change in the 1980s was quick and ruthless. Get-tough policies became political winners. Prison populations soared. Change included longer prison terms for violence. But their impact was blurred by unreasonably harsh sentences for lots of lesser crimes. Cops began filing charges for “every Mickey Mouse thing,” recalled defense attorney Seymour Applebaum. “And it’s always a felony. Everything’s a felony now.” By 2007, parole violators returned to custody on technical violations made up
the largest single category of new prison arrivals. But through it all, the basic weakness didn’t change.
In fact, homicide solve rates dropped.

Since it’s
not the harshness of punishment but its swiftness and certainty that deters crime, black people still had good reason to feel unprotected. Murderers still went free, while the new crime-suppression tactics bore more than a passing resemblance to the old Southern wink. Even after legal discrimination was abolished, the situation didn’t change much from what black migrants had known in the South. Homicide wasn’t just a bad habit black people couldn’t break. Segregation, economic isolation, and the flawed workings of American criminal justice created the same conditions anew.

For white people, justice was almost as
ineffective; homicide solve rates for all Americans still lag behind those of the safest European nations. But what might appear a tolerable level of incompetence to a relatively safe, dispersed, white majority felt different to black migrants from the embattled South. White people were more likely to have jobs, money, mobility—assets that compensate for criminal-justice failures by giving people other means to achieve independence and autonomy from each other. Not so the black people who fled to industrial centers in the twentieth century. For generations, black Southerners had experienced the weakness of criminal justice as a central feature of a system that kept them down. To them, the state’s tendency to allow people to kill and face no consequences was an aspect of its enmity toward them. Blacks were like an occupied people. Especially in poor urban centers, they lived in minority enclaves and settled their scores outside the law.

By the late twentieth century, the criminal justice system was no longer very corrupt. Many police and prosecutors were sincere and professional, and legal outcomes were relatively color-blind. But because the reach of the system was so limited, the results were similar to those produced by masquerade justice. Even when criminal justice procedures were clean and fair, violent-crime investigations remained too ineffective and threadbare to counter the scale of black-on-black murder. Black people still had reason to doubt that the law would have their backs, and they reacted accordingly. This is the world that Skaggs lived in, although he didn’t put it into this historic context. What Skaggs saw was simply this: the system looked busy, but didn’t do its job.

It took just a few weeks for things to come to a head between Skaggs and Bernal. Bernal went out of town briefly and Skaggs got what he considered “a bullshit clue”—some report of a black SUV matching the description of the killers’. He did not touch base with Bernal about it. Instead, he simply marched up to the owner’s house, knocked on the door, and immediately ascertained that the SUV belonged to Hispanics, not blacks, thus eliminating the clue. Upon his return, Bernal was annoyed. In Bernal’s memory, Skaggs had duplicated something that had already been done and communicated poorly about it. In Skaggs’s account, Bernal didn’t want him pursuing leads alone and objected to his methods.

In any case, they had words.

Skaggs did not waste time arguing with Bernal. He made no effort to try to work things out with him. He was, as ever, blunt and unequivocal. He told Bernal he was walking into Prideaux’s office to say the partnership could not work and to demand a change. Bernal tried to defuse the situation and hold him back, but Skaggs was not to be dissuaded. In this, as in everything, Skaggs sought to propel events to their conclusion as quickly as possible.

And so Lyle Prideaux found himself faced with the decision he had tried at first to avoid. There were Skaggs and Bernal, sitting before him in his office, obviously at a crisis point. Skaggs demanded that he be given the case to work free and clear or be taken off it.

Inwardly, Prideaux sighed. He was disappointed in the two of them for putting their personality problems before the case like that. But then again, he reflected, he had not brought Skaggs into this case because he was “some quiet little guy who was going to keep things under wraps.” He had sought out Skaggs to burn down forests, and he could only blame himself that now here he was, squarely in the midst of a full-on Santa Ana blaze.

He told Bernal and Skaggs both to leave his office, then pondered his next move.

Prideaux didn’t have to think long. In his mind, the Tennelle case was the number one priority of his new command. It was important for the future of the reconstituted homicide bureau, for the department’s reputation in South L.A., and for the principle of the thing.

And it was important because of how Prideaux felt about it, deep down. Prideaux was like everyone else in the department who knew Tennelle: he could barely talk about the case without his eyes filling with tears. This was, Prideaux realized, a moment to earn his rank and pay.

So, in the next minute, he changed the course of the Tennelle case. He walked out of his office and told Skaggs he could have it.

Bernal was stunned. The decision was highly unusual, and a completely crushing condemnation of his work. Most of all, he was stung by the implicit suggestion that he had not given the Tennelle case his all.

Bernal was not the indifferent worker that Skaggs took him to be. After all, he had also worked the Big Years in South Central Los Angeles. He had also devoted his career to ghettoside work and felt a strong sense of duty about the neglected crimes there. He knew Tennelle a little, and he felt as they all did about Bryant’s murder—namely, that it was unbearable, and that the case was a must-solve.

And on top of all this, Bernal had a personal stake in the case that went beyond his loyalty to Tennelle as a coworker. Unbeknownst to most of his colleagues, Bernal’s nephew had been murdered in East L.A. over in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s territory a year and a half before Bryant’s killing, and the case was never solved.

Christian Bernal was nineteen. He had been planning a career in law enforcement and had applied to join the Sheriff’s Department. Like a lot of young would-be cops, he had a shaved head. Bernal’s son was in the parked car with him when attackers came up on foot. It was like the Tennelle case. The cousins were not gang members. They were just young Hispanic men who the assailants assumed were gang rivals because of how they looked. The revolver blasts showered them both in broken glass.

Bernal was at home when his phone rang, and he picked it up to hear his son screaming hysterically
—“They shot him, they shot him, they shot
him.”
Bernal’s sister, Christian’s mother, was devastated. At the time of Bryant’s death, the whole Bernal family was still reeling: Armando Bernal, like Wally Tennelle, had only experienced homicide as a police officer up until then. Now he knew how different it felt to have one’s own family ravaged by the Monster.

Rick Gordon thought highly of both Skaggs and Bernal and believed both men had contributed to the case in unique ways. Gordon would point out later that various investigative styles were needed to meet the demands of the South L.A. homicide environment. Cases differed, and not every investigator’s style fitted every case. Bernal’s approach might not have been the best fit for the Tennelle case, Gordon said, but there had been many other cases in which his combination of patience and meticulousness paid off.