Ghettoside (39 page)

As the caseworker talked, Kouri scrunched his face and kicked a toe on the pavement. Cars roared by on the boulevard beside them.

At length, Kouri cut in. Alienating the family could jeopardize the investigation, he suggested. “What’s the bigger picture here? Taking two kids? Or solving a murder?”

The caseworker, a young black man, met Kouri’s troubled gaze.

“Solving the murder,” he said. DCFS backed off. Kouri swung back to work.

In the office the next morning, Da’Quawn’s face appeared on the television behind Kouri’s desk. His murder had qualified for media coverage because of his age. “Police say the victim is a known gang member,” the newscaster said. This was consistent with the way LAPD brass had described the killing. One captain had gone so far as to call Da’Quawn “a hard-core gang-banger.”

La Barbera was disgusted. Da’Quawn had just turned thirteen and had not a single tattoo. Gang involvement for such a child was “like playing cops and robbers,” La Barbera thought. Da’Quawn’s preposterous orange bandana, so outré and out-of-date, was like a cap gun and costume cowboy hat.

Nearby, Kouri picked up his cell phone to update Marullo on the case. This was typical. Though he remained in a gang unit, Marullo called constantly, wanting details on each new case. La Barbera cast a sour glance at Kouri. He had long abandoned his notion of Marullo as Li’l Skaggs. “Tell ’im if he wants to work homicide to come back here,” he groused. “If he wants to run his numbers game, stay over there. If he wants to work fucking
homicide
, come back!”

La Barbera was especially annoyed at the uniforms that week. He was furious at the way they had handled the crime scene, not bothering to talk to the dying boy, shooing his relatives away, then failing to pick up a phone number left by a witness. He’d been promised searches that hadn’t materialized. Gang and narcotics officers were running around acting important, busily visiting what La Barbera called “proactive harassment” upon the people of Southeast. But they’d brought no leads. “I hate cops,” La Barbera grumped. “I fuckin’
hate
cops.”

Late Sunday, long after the murders of Da’Quawn and Christopher Lattier, LAPD commanders had decided to mount a targeted “saturation” response. But the designated units had scheduled days off. So it took two days for the “surge” to hit the streets.

By then, another black man had died and two more people were injured.

Early Tuesday morning, in Main Street territory near Eighty-second Place and Main, forty-nine-year-old Thaddeus Risher was sitting in a car when Hoover suspects shot and killed him. Near the same time, two blocks away, candles in glass holders were smashed at the shrine for Christopher Lattier. Risher was an ex-convict and “straight hustler,” according to his daughter, who loved him dearly. But he had nothing to do with this quarrel either. He was just out late in the Main Street ’hood. That same night, Main Street vandals struck back, smashing the candles at Da’Quawn’s street shrine.

As the retaliations played out, a meeting was convened between gang leaders from both sides who wanted to quash the feud. These men considered the killing of a thirteen-year-old boy out-of-bounds, and they knew it would bring out the heat. But it didn’t work. Younger gangsters either didn’t know about the meeting or didn’t care. They kept fighting.

By Tuesday afternoon, the LAPD surge was finally in full swing. Patrol cars passed every few minutes in the twelve-block area where the feud was playing out.

Officers bird-dogged Da’Quawn’s sidewalk shrine, at one point “hemming up” four young mourners in their early twenties. They put them against the wall next to the balloons, candles, and white teddy bears. Uncuffed at length, the young men turned around to argue with the officers. One officer was scolding and contemptuous. But the other, in a reasoning voice, told the four to “be careful … There’s been a lot of shooting.” The young men seemed to hear only the contemptuous officer.

A watching crowd was angry. Why weren’t police out catching the killers? “People are being shot, and what are they doing? Just jacking people up!” one woman said. “Their priorities are mixed-up,” said a man nearby. “You should be out looking for
them
!” a woman yelled at the departing officers. A young man rejoined that this wasn’t likely. Police wouldn’t bother to solve the murder: “They put less effort on gang members than on others,” he said. “It’s like we are second-class citizens.”

Later that night, when only a few mourners lingered, a car pulled up,
and a youth in dark clothes jumped out with an AK-47. He opened fire, swinging the weapon around. A man at the shrine was grazed, and a young woman was hit in the leg. By Tuesday night, between fifty and seventy-five additional officers had been redeployed from other areas of the city to the twelve blocks, which commanders called “the box.”

LAPD brass used a vocabulary their underlings did not. They spoke of “victimology,” and of “biasing” and “stacking” resources, of responding “surgically.” Mostly it meant deploying lots of cops to stop and search people and to conduct parole and probation searches. The surge brought in everyone from elite Metro platoons to Harbor Division traffic cops—the latter none too pleased to have been pulled from their regular duties.

South Bureau commanders were sensitive to the impact of this onslaught and genuinely concerned about the toll of the violence. But they had no other ideas, and in this as in everything else, they were compelled to adhere to civilian oversight, honor public expectations, and respond to political direction, which meant that “proactive” policing and crime “suppression” ruled the day. “I don’t want to be perceived as an invading force,” said Capt. Thomas McDonald, of Southeast patrol. “But at the end of the day, we just want it to stop.”

La Barbera, like many homicide detectives in the south end, was skeptical. In October 2003, six-year-old D’Angelo Beck was killed by a bullet intended for someone else near Avalon and Eighty-seventh Place, after a patrol car had passed the scene seconds before. Skaggs, monitoring the retaliations by phone from Olympic, agreed: “If they don’t see the black-and-white, they’ll do it,” he said.

But what really bothered La Barbera was that the saturation did not include detectives. Fresh officers in uniforms adorned every corner. But every member of his squad was exhausted, and they’d busted through overtime limits. Nathan Kouri had been living out of his sedan for days; the unit had lost the “salvage” cars they’d hoarded, so two detectives were bumming rides from colleagues to help out.

Still, if the saturation produced clues, La Barbera could get behind it. The brass had promised “task forces.” There was always the possibility
all those searches could produce a gun or a rumor. “You want to talk to people!” La Barbera said. “Use the laws to get into their cars—then talk. I tell these cops all the time: Be a salesperson. We don’t need the Gestapo stuff.”

But several days of the surge had produced not a single report to homicide detectives. Despite numerous arrests and citations, not one witness had been identified. Not one rumor. Not one gun. There was always this disconnect between so-called proactive policing and detective work.

It was late the following week when La Barbera finally got a report of the arrests made by a special narcotics buy team that was part of the surge. He scanned it, appalled.

The team was supposed to advance the investigations. Instead, it had gone to a parking lot where crack addicts camped in plain sight and picked up some sickly middle-aged addicts including several women on minor possession charges involving twenty- and thirty-dollar rocks of crack cocaine. La Barbera’s crew knew that parking lot well: they had recently recruited a homicide witness from there, a homeless man who burst into tears when they tried to interview him. It turned out his daughter had been murdered.

The addicts had no part in the youthful violence; they weren’t even in the territory of either suspect gang. “You gotta be kidding me,” La Barbera muttered as he read. “The fucking
parking lot
!”

The surge had occasioned a modified tactical alert requiring the detectives to don their ill-fitting blue uniforms. Even mild Rick Gordon rebelled. Murders were happening, and “the department’s reaction is to put detectives in uniform!” he exclaimed.

Detectives disliked looking like patrol officers, since people were then less likely to talk to them. The uniforms added to the sense that the neighborhood was under siege, but did nothing to insert justice into it. The spectacle of Rick Gordon, one of the city’s most effective investigators, compelled to play the role of blue scarecrow at the very moment when his craft mattered most was a microcosm of how police had long functioned in the United States: preoccupied with control and prevention,
obsessed with nuisance crime, and lax when it came to answering for black lives.

The following Tuesday, despite the massive deployment, two more black people were killed in a double homicide related to the retaliation. They were Drayvon James, twenty-nine—a gang member who had tried to escape the life but had returned to visit with family—and his cousin, Robert Lee Nelson, Jr., sixteen, a student with no criminal record.

To La Barbera, this meant the saturation hadn’t worked. To those above him, it could be argued that things would have been worse without it. At a “crime control” meeting after the double homicide, commanders talked of “decoy” vehicles and personal theft statistics.

South Bureau chief Kirk Albanese praised the surge: “We put a stop to some issues that had a chance to be more explosive.” When one supervisor cited his division’s success in clearing backlogged cases, allowing detectives to attack new ones more aggressively, Albanese interrupted him with an old canard: “So you have a faster response from detectives!” he said. “But that doesn’t lower crime!”

The LAPD called a press conference on the killing cycle. Nathan Kouri was ordered to speak, since his investigation was the most advanced. The other cases had stalled. Keep it short, he was told.

Kouri was miserable. Waiting for the press conference to start, stripes of sunshine cutting through the vertical blinds in the Seventy-seventh Street Division community room, he sat in a corner, ignoring the press release someone had placed in his hands.

As the cameras rolled, Kouri found a hiding place behind Albanese, a tall man. Albanese talked of “senseless violence” and remarked that when a suspect is sent to prison “nobody wins—we have to find another way.” When it was Kouri’s turn, Kyle Jackson had to push him forward with a hand on his back.

Kouri changed color twice, looked sick, then fell silent before the microphone. Sweat glistened on his upper lip. At last, prompted by a reporter, he spoke in a barely audible voice. He credited everybody else for things he had done almost entirely alone over his days of skipping
sleep and living on Nutri-Grain bars. “We used numerous resources throughout the department,” Kouri intoned, staring at the back wall. “Surveillance. ATF task force. Parole Probation. Various uniform entities.”

Afterward, La Barbera was beside himself. Kouri had recently canceled his vacation to compensate for the overtime restrictions. Seeing Kouri, of all people—possibly the hardest-working cop in South Bureau—praise a useless and mostly theoretical “task force” for his own work was almost too much for La Barbera. But Kouri was just relieved to get through it. Fifteen minutes later, the press had packed up their cameras and his complexion had returned to normal.

During the press conference, Kouri had discovered that one of the reporters, Leo Stallworth, had grown up in Nickerson Gardens. Kouri sat down with Stallworth as the rest departed, relaxed, hands clasped on his head, quizzing the reporter about growing up in the Nickersons. “I fought every day! I remember that. I lived in total fear!” Stallworth told Kouri. It was the early seventies, and the gangs were thick there—“You join or you die,” Stallworth said. Kouri was delighted—how he loved getting information from a good source. “How’d you get out?” he asked. “Football, man!” Stallworth said.

The five victims of retaliation that week in August fell across a spectrum. Their profiles exposed the falseness of the public’s conception of “innocent victims.” A thirteen-year-old boy with no tattoos. A twenty-one-year-old working man, clean-cut and decent. A forty-nine-year-old hustler with an old bank robbery rap living off girlfriends. A twenty-nine-year-old gang member trying to get out of the life. His sixteen-year-old cousin, full of promise.

“All those innocent people,” Skaggs had once said. In this case, they all were, in a sense. Da’Quawn was the most likely of the five to have been killed for more than his skin color, since he was wearing the bandanna. The others, like Bryant Tennelle, were just unlucky.

And there was no difference in the grief left behind.

Thaddeus Risher’s daughter frankly admitted her father’s flaws and
addictions—“He was a professional hobo!” she said. Even so, she sobbed talking of his murder. She had visions of his body slumped in the car. Tears streamed down her cheeks. She was astonished by the pain. “Does it ever stop?” she pleaded.

At Da’Quawn Allen’s funeral, men in double-breasted suits, sunglasses, and earrings sat up front and wept. There was talk of the gang members who had recruited Da’Quawn. One rose to speak: “For him to look up to us—it ain’t the way to be,” he said. “We gotta give these babies a chance to live.”

After the service, teenagers streamed by Da’Quawn’s open casket—kissing his corpse, shaking their heads with eyes full of rage, then jamming on caps and stalking away.

At the double funeral for Robert Nelson and Drayvon James, a relative held James’s toddler son so that his mother could view James. The mother wept over the open casket. The toddler, held high behind her, stared at his murdered father over her shoulder. His eyes were wide and confused. At last they bore him away. But the toddler twisted and looked back, eyes still fixed on his father’s face.

At Christopher Lattier’s funeral, a young black man took the podium. “This hurts me and scares me,” he rambled, speaking quickly while staring at a point in space. “I’m afraid I’m gonna die.”