Ghettoside

As Skaggs continued to develop in the South Bureau, Tennelle, working in Central Bureau, began to get the attention of RHD, which began to try to recruit him. Tennelle resisted, though; he wanted to be busy, working the streets and helping the people who needed it the most. Rather than move to RHD, he took the exams to become a supervisory detective; however, this required a transfer, which led to Tennelle inadvertently working a desk job. Bored and miserable, when a lower-rank investigative job in RHD opened up, Tennelle took it, taking a pay cut in exchange for “an action-focused investigative job chasing killers” (53).

Tennelle’s decision to take a demotion and a pay cut was unusual, as was his decision to live where he worked, as “[f]or years, most LAPD officers had refused to live in the city they policed and instead commuted from distant suburbs,” forming “little red-state bastions sprinkled around Southern California” (53). Most, at least outwardly, were concerned about retaliation and the safety of their families; however, Tennelle “discovered that his neighborhood embraced him” (55). Regardless, having spent his life moving around, Tennelle wanted his children to grow up in one home.

Around the time Tennelle moved to RHD, Skaggs took a formal promotion to detective; as with Tennelle, this meant that he needed to transfer positions, first to a narcotics division in a low-crime area, then to a gang detective position in the 77th Division under Sal La Barbera. La Barbera’s theory of crime is “that catching killers built law—that successful homicide investigations were the most direct means at the cops’ disposal of countering the informal self-policing and street justice that was the scourge of urban black populations” (57). La Barbera was “an oddity” for this reason, as “a lot of police had only the fuzziest idea what they were there for,” beyond the basics (57-58).

When crime dropped following the 1990s, La Barbera was put in charge of the Southeast Homicide squad in Watts, where he recruited Skaggs, who “leaped at the opportunity” to return to homicide and to work with “someone who believed in the work and its higher purpose” (59). 

Watts, in the year 2000, was 39% black; in the 1920s, it was majority black and nearly elected a black mayor, but the whites of Watts convinced LA to annex it. Modern Watts is notorious for gangs, poverty, and crime, but “for all its notoriety, the landscape of Watts was not as formidable as its reputation,” boasting small houses with trees and lawns as opposed to high-rise slums, and even “[t]he housing projects boasted gracious touches” (61). Many of the migrants to Watts came from Louisiana and East Texas, and “[m]any of these sons and daughters of Louisiana still interacted as if living in a rural Southern village,” with big cookouts and large church breakfasts (62). In other words, contrary to popular maxims, crime in Watts could not be attributed to a lack of community values; on the contrary, “‘community spirit’ in the sense of both local pride and connections among neighbors was far more evident in Watts than elsewhere” in LA (63).

Officers in South Bureau generally agreed that most Watts residents were “good people,” but differed on how many could be considered to be “knuckleheads” (or “assholes”), ranging from 1 to 15%. Many blamed blacks for choosing not to live their lives better (63). Many tried “to figure out how to reconcile their experiences at work with the antiracism they shared with most of their countrymen […] Few officers wanted to believe that black people were somehow intrinsically wired for violence” (64). By ascribing it to choice, officers were more readily able to avoid racist generalizations, but framing violence as a choice “also inevitably raised questions of blame” (64). Officers, in Leovy’s view, were aggrieved and frustrated by the persistent violence, and though they didn’t want to assign blame or racist explanations for higher rates of violence, their frustration nevertheless compelled them to find some explanation for it, leading to complicated and often contradictory beliefs.

Skaggs came to work with Chris Barling, another talented detective with high clearance rates. They each had their strengths, which made for a strong partnership: “La Barbera sometimes assigned them extra cases just to juice the unit’s end-of-year clearance rate” (67). Nevertheless, resources remained low; homicide rates had dropped, but so had staffing. The “homicide table” was just a group of desks pushed together, for example, and they all shared one makeshift interview room that lacked any recording equipment, forcing the detectives to devise makeshift ways of recording discussions. Despite his relatively meager requests, La Barbera was repeatedly turned down; the city wasn’t concerned about Southeast LA homicides, so upper administration was apathetic. Even within their own station, detectives had to constantly fight with their officers to simply treat civilians, and especially witnesses, with a modicum of respect.

Skaggs’s days were meticulously planned down to the minute. 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” (69). Good officers worked tirelessly, but La Barbera struggled to recruit good officers; the work was difficult, and “young recruits often [moved] to easier and more rewarding positions as soon as they were able,” as a result (69). For Skaggs, “the impediments—lack of sufficient manpower and equipment, no media coverage, little clout within the department—became motivators” (70). 

A big problem in South LA homicide cases is getting witnesses to talk: “A witness’s decision to testify was one of the most wrenching and emotional aspects of homicide prosecutions. Witnesses wept when confronted by detectives, then wept again on the stand. That was when things went well” (74). This reluctance “was the primary reason so many murder cases went unsolved” (74). Most crime scenes offered few clues, and labs weren’t typically helpful in shooting cases: “Instead, cases were made on witness—and sometimes only witnesses” (74). Witness relocation funds were available, but the funds were miniscule and didn’t take into consideration the numerous challenges in relocation, including the extensive familial ties many had in the neighborhood, or the fact that many witnesses were homeless. Retaliation was statistically rare, but happened often enough to scare witnesses all the same. However, research on witnesses concentrated on reliability, or lack thereof, rather than the larger problem of witness fear and protection.

Besides witness intimidation, there existed “a shadow legal system that competed with formal law” (78). South LA might have seemed chaotic on the surface, but “For all the chaos, [it] was organized, rule-bound” (78). One reason is that much of the economy of the area was underground, and illegal businesses do not have legal recourse; in general, though, people “spoke of policing themselves, adjudicating their own disputes” (78). Leovy writes that “[b]oys and men always tend to group together for protection […] Unchecked by a state monopoly on violence, such groupings fight, commit crimes, and ascend to factional dominance”—a result of lawlessness (80). Some version of this has existed throughout history, and can seem almost innate. Although the society had an organization, the crime itself, to those closest to it, was less so, and often seemed more like “ordinary group behavior” (80). The people involved were not criminal kingpins, but impoverished and under the sincere belief that “street justice was ethically superior” to formal criminal justice (81): “Cops and prosecutors felt like door-to-door salesmen, trying to peddle a legal system no one wanted anything to do with” (81).

In this sense, Skaggs was an evangelist. He “learned to think of his job as persuasion: selling formal law to people who distrusted it and answered to another authority” (82-83). He immersed himself in the people and learned the area in order to more effectively, and persistently, make his point, presenting “[j]ustice as psychological relief, even to suspects” (83). Most people in the Southeast knew the perpetrators of crimes; it was only the police who didn’t know, so the detectives’ job was largely convincing people to give up well-known information, rather than uncovering secrets. La Barbera thought of the job as in large part a sales job; however, “it was not merely a sales job that detectives such as Skaggs perfected”—rather, they needed “something akin to pure conviction” in order to convince the people of Watts that they could get the job done (84). 

One winter in 2004, Skaggs and a trainee, Mark Arenas, were driving to notify a parent of his son’s murder; they had been at the scene of the crime that morning. Notifications are difficult for homicide detectives: loved ones are unpredictable, and even if everything goes well, the bearer of bad news still feels the grief. Skaggs “considered this a serious part of a young detective’s training” (86). Arenas, previously a gang officer, cracked a joke; Skaggs did not reply, then decided to handle the notification himself, rather than continue training Arenas at the moment.

Arenas was one of the officers who believed that “the division’s black residents [held] inferior values,” that they simply accepted violence; as a result, he did not take seriously the deaths of the residents’ loved ones (87). Skaggs, on the other hand, saw the complexity of the situation, that, for example, “[c]oercion and intimidation lay behind much of their apparent ‘acceptance’ of violence,” and that for many, their lives had been determined by geographic chance (87).

Although Barling and Skaggs argued constantly, aside from feeding one another’s strengths, they worked as partners in part because they had adopted a policy that there would only ever be one lead on a case. For several years, they boasted a clearance rate above 80% in a job where many detectives hovered around 40%. La Barbera, too, continued his high hopes for the unit. He “drummed into his detectives his conviction that virtually all the cases were solvable” (91). Skaggs and Barling held his convictions, and the three of them found new ways to improve the unit, such as an under-the-radar effort to clear a large backlog of cold cases, some of which “took only a few days’ work to clear” (91). Further, La Barbera focused on recruitment, looking for “the next John Skaggs” (92), whom he found in Sam Marullo; he in turn, took along a friend of his, Nathan Kouri.