Ghettoside (7 page)

The dizzying homicide peak of 1992 was upon them. Baitx and Tennelle worked an astonishing twenty-eight cases that year, almost three times the recommended caseload. Tennelle thrived on it, loving the adrenaline, loving the hard work. Baitx noticed something else about Tennelle: when other cops went out drinking after work, Tennelle would go home to his family. Baitx and Tennelle were close, but Baitx only rarely saw Tennelle’s wife and his three young children. Baitx understood that when Tennelle wasn’t working, he preferred his home life, wanted to be with Yadira and the kids, puttering around the house. Tennelle rarely talked about work. At home, DeeDee Tennelle was hardly aware that her father was a homicide detective until once, as a child, she made a secret discovery of autopsy photos in a drawer.

CLEARANCE

John Skaggs was twenty-two when he entered the police academy in 1987, starting out as Tennelle was entering his journeyman years.

After the academy, Skaggs was assigned to the Seventy-seventh Street Division for a mandatory probation period as a patrol officer. He would spend most of the rest of his career either in South Bureau or gaming the system to try to return to a post in South Bureau. He was in his element in those violent years, a tall, athletic, red-haired officer with easy confidence and a serene temperament who immersed himself in learning the politics of street life.

Wally Tennelle had been conscripted as a young gang officer to clean up after the first great wave a decade before. Now John Skaggs was conscripted to clean up after the second. In the first three years of the 1990s, that savage period spanning the riots, more than six thousand people died from homicides in Los Angeles County.

In 1994, Skaggs was recruited “on loan” as an officer trainee over at South Bureau Homicide. Skaggs was not a detective. He was a P-3 then, or field training officer. This is still done in the LAPD: patrol and gang
officers are recruited to fill slots as homicide detectives without the rank. The written and oral tests used to promote officers to detective emphasize general procedures and departmental policies, not the singular abilities that distinguish good homicide investigators. Those cannot be measured by formal exams, and cops who tested well often had no talent for working murders. So homicide supervisors, weary of being stuck with under performing employees, preferred to bypass the official promotion system and scout their own talent.

It was not surprising that John Skaggs would be tapped. He was the kind of energetic young officer who typically did well in homicide units. But when asked to work South Bureau Homicide, the combined squad that then covered Southwest, Southeast, and the Seventy-seventh, Skaggs resisted. He did not want to work as a homicide detective, even temporarily. He loved his hard-charging job as a gang officer. Detectives were washouts. But it would have looked bad to refuse.

Years later, asked why he had known from his first days as a homicide detective that he never wanted to do anything else, Skaggs gave a curious answer. He did not say he loved investigating homicides. He simply said that when one discovers one is good at a task at which few others excel, one has no choice.

“I could do it,” Skaggs said when pressed. “I
could do it
. Who else can?”

Skaggs’s father had always said little about his choices. Now he had just one comment for the son who set out to follow his own path to homicide work: “Be careful,” he told Skaggs. “Because nothing else matters after working murders.” Only later would Skaggs comprehend the full weight of this remark.

Skaggs was paired with a training officer. But the high workload broke down the usual conventions, and Skaggs, though often an acting detective, was often relegated to working on his own. He solved his first case. Then the next. Each taught him a little more.

Early on, he was given a six-month-old “cold case” and asked to see
if he could breathe new life into it. (In those days, “cold” could mean a case only weeks old.) The victim was Leo Massey, a workingman who had stopped by a liquor store on his way home from work. He was panhandled for beer by another black man. Massey refused the panhandler, who attacked him as he walked out. The panhandler shot Massey through the leg and Massey bled to death.

Massey was a father and husband. By the time Skaggs got the case, Massey’s wife, Glory, was furious. She had heard rumors about the killer within days. Everyone seemed to know who did it. Everyone except the police, that is. Glory Massey had no doubt in her mind that if Leo had been white instead of black, the police would have solved his murder.

Skaggs met her in the bureau’s office at the Crenshaw Mall. Massey had developed piercing back pain from grief. She was angry. She believed the authorities didn’t care, and she feared that one of her teenage sons—or some other young man from their neighborhood—would be tempted to retaliate. Now here was yet another LAPD detective claiming interest in the case. Massey was losing patience with it—these people called themselves professionals, yet they allowed teenage boys to do their work for them, to seek justice where the state had failed to secure it.

She sized up Skaggs. Great, another tall white LAPD cop—“nine foot eight or something!” Massey said later—and she was determined not to be intimidated. She brought her face as close as she could to his despite her own small stature. It meant looking almost straight up at him. Then she let him have it, all her pent-up frustration. “He’s just another fuckin’ black man now, right?” Massey screamed at Skaggs.
“Just another fuckin’ black man down!”

Skaggs didn’t protest. He just listened.

When she ran out of breath, he began asking questions. Later, he came to see her again. He called, and came again, checking up on her, asking about her children.

Glory was not the only one who sensed that many people knew the killer. “Everybody knows” was one of the most common phrases voiced
about homicides in South Central. Lots of people had heard about the shooting, and some recognized the suspect, who was a regular around the neighborhood. But even when Skaggs pressed, they offered conflicting names. “Jamal,” some said. “Jabar,” said others. No one seemed to know who the violent panhandler really was or where he lived.

Skaggs walked and knocked, asked and asked. He ended up searching a garage where a man who fit the panhandler’s description was “staying.” He noticed a fingerprint on a mirror and got lucky. His longtime partner Chris Barling would later observe how often it seemed that Skaggs made his own luck. Skaggs yanked at the mirror, and a driver’s license with the man’s picture, birth date, and full name—Jabbar Stroud—dropped from behind it. It remained only to have the witnesses confirm it.

Skaggs drove Glory Massey to the trial himself and warned her to leave the chambers before gruesome photos were displayed. She had grown to like him, and he her. He was so unperturbed by her initial rage that he didn’t remember it afterward. By then he was long used to being admonished as a callous white racist cop. He had already heard many versions of “another black man down.” It was part of the job—an enduring theme of ghettoside work—and he shrugged it off. They always thought he didn’t care.

The sense that the police—and the larger city—didn’t care was not just a cliché. It was the lived experience of South L.A.’s black residents, quantified by data. Society had changed a great deal during the civil rights movement and the decades that followed it. Criminal justice had changed, too. But the speed and certainty of adequate punishment for the murderers of black men remained a weak point.

Historically, the nation had never been very good at punishing murderers, no matter the victim. In nineteenth-century New York
only about a tenth of all murders resulted in a conviction.
Less than half did in Philadelphia and Chicago at the end of that century. These patterns probably continued well into the twentieth century. In Los Angeles, for example,
a suspiciously large percentage of homicides—more than a
quarter of them—were not even counted for purposes of criminal investigation in the 1920s and 1930s. Some were probably killings by police. Other cases seem to have been shelved due to dead or absolved suspects. Standards were clearly different: a 1925
Los Angeles Times
article applauded two killers who had hunted down a mugger after the fact, noting approvingly that police did not think the act merited arrest. The killers “
had merely taken the law into their own hands,” the paper opined.

In subsequent decades, officials claimed to solve homicide cases at very high rates.
But California prison rolls tell a different story. During the 1960s, the number of people sent to prison for criminal homicide was less than half the number of homicides. The disparity grew more pronounced during the 1970s, when there were three times more people killed than killers convicted and imprisoned. There seems to be no other conclusion but that thousands of murders went unpunished.

Federally reported clearance rates—the rate of cases solved per crimes committed—are inflated, partly because they combine arrests with cases LAPD cops called “cleared other,” investigations declared closed although no one has been prosecuted. Cases could be “cleared” because the suspects were dead, sometimes killed in revenge murders. Even with this inflation, by the 1990s, the reported rate for urban areas had fallen to about 50 percent. Not surprisingly, a
Los Angeles Times
investigation found that the real rate was even lower. The study, based on case-by-case analysis of 9,400 Los Angeles County cases in the early nineties, concluded suspects were convicted of manslaughter or murder in only about one in three killings. Clearance rates varied by race, with cases involving black and Hispanic victims somewhat less likely to be solved than those involving white victims.
Killers of whites received the harshest penalties. These findings echoed those of other research into “victim discounting.” Death penalty studies, for example, have found that the race of defendants matters less than the race of victims. People who kill whites are more likely to be sentenced to death;
people who kill blacks get lighter penalties.

The pattern persisted after the crime drop. From 1994 to 2006, a
suspect was arrested in 38 percent of the 2,677 killings involving black male victims in the city of Los Angeles, according to the police department’s own data. Even with “cleared others” included in the count, solve rates remain less than half.
In L.A. County, a much larger area, similar patterns prevailed. The result was that unsolved homicides in South L.A. numbered in the thousands—
an average of more than 40 per square mile piled up during the decade and a half between the late 1980s and early 2000s.

Maiming people offered even better odds. There were about
four or five injury shootings for every fatal one in South Los Angeles.
A waggish colleague of Skaggs called these shootings—which injured but did not kill their victims—
almocides
, for “almost homicides.” High-crime precincts were racked by them.
Some thirty almocides occurred each month in the nine square miles of the Southeast Division in the early 2000s, for instance. People—disproportionately black men—were left paralyzed, comatose, brain injured, or forced to spend the rest of their lives using colostomy bags. Officially, some 40 percent of these aggravated assaults were “cleared.” But half of those were not arrests. They were “cleared others,” usually because victims refused to testify. Among “category one” assaults in Watts in 2004, for example—serious injury cases—
only about 17 percent ended with an assailant convicted.

The atmosphere this created was in the air Glory Massey breathed. Beneath the most serious unsolved and unprosecuted assaults thrummed an ocean of lesser crimes, often unreported ones. People were punched and kicked. Cars were shot up. Apartments were ransacked. Molotov cocktails were thrown into houses—a legal act for all practical purposes: overburdened fire department investigators recorded
hundreds of arsons a year in Los Angeles in the late 2000s.

Verbal threats were rampant. Symbolic affronts and sexually tinged humiliations reinforced them. Petty burglaries, “pocket checks,” the breaking of gold chains, the pulling down of pants—such acts carried a tacit threat of mortal violence to those who didn’t heed their messages. Being “jumped” and “beat down” were part of the everyday vocabulary of the streets. “Caught slippin’ ” meant letting your guard down—a momentary
slip could kill you. “Catch a fade” meant a fight. The gang term “DP” was an acronym for “discipline.” It meant roughing someone up to punish him for something.

These crimes set the stage for later murders. “It’s on Grape! I’ll be back!” a girl yelled upon fleeing an unreported beat-down. Three weeks later, one of the men who had punched her was murdered, and the Grape Street Crips were the suspects. An out-of-bounds ball on a basketball court sparked a fight; afterward the loser’s friends pressured him: “You need to drop that fool,” they said. “Take care of business!” He obeyed, and days later killed the victor.

Black residents in the area had long complained not just of mistreatment by police, but also that the cops did little to catch the killers and violent assailants in their midst. It was a historic grievance.
When the Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal studied the black South in the 1940s, he found that, despite rampant complaints about law enforcement, black Southerners everywhere also said they wanted
more
policing—to protect them from other black people.