Ghettoside (9 page)

Over the years, the job had burdened La Barbera with a hounded, slightly paranoid demeanor. He’d gone on so many late-night homicide callouts that he had lost the ability to sleep through the night. His family relations were stressed, perhaps fatally so. He suffered from depression. Some colleagues disliked him, calling him two-faced. His manner didn’t
help. He appeared most easygoing when he was put out, and he pretended to be joking when he wasn’t. But he wasn’t a liar. La Barbera said what he meant most of the time—just in a very quiet voice. If you paid close attention, you weren’t deceived.

La Barbera’s fractured personal life and internal contradictions came oddly packaged with inimitable professional consistency. He had a vision. He believed in his craft—believed unreservedly in the idea of homicide investigation as a cause. He believed that the state articulated its response to violence by apprehending those who committed it, and that failing to do so sent an unmistakable message the other way—that violence was tolerated, especially when the victims were poor black men.

His theory was, he admitted, “a circumstantial case.” But La Barbera’s observations over the years in South Los Angeles had convinced him 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. La Barbera had character flaws. But his views on homicide belonged to an elevated plane of ethical reasoning.

This made him an oddity. In truth, a lot of police had only the fuzziest idea what they were there for, aside from the most basic, traditional function of answering calls, dealing with them, and going “Code Four” on the radio—“situation under control.” There was amazingly little discussion of the craft of policing, and no consensus on what constituted good police work versus bad.

Cops were told they were supposed to “be proactive,” focus on “suppression,” or practice “crime control.” Showered in such nonsensical orders and jargon, they couldn’t really be blamed for struggling to find purpose in their work. Officers drove around, conducted consent searches, ran license plates, drove some more. It could feel quite pointless. It didn’t help that even as they were supposedly held to high standards and expected to display the skill and initiative of trained professionals, many so-called innovative policing strategies tended to reduce them to cogs.

There was a lot of emphasis on police being “visible” and on strategically deploying them to targeted neighborhoods based on crime trends. But exactly what officers were supposed to do once they got to a so-called target neighborhood was left a little vague. The omission contained a disturbing implication: that a bunch of blue uniforms stuffed with straw might be able to perform the same function rather well, and for a lot less money.

New LAPD directives in the 2000s drove this home. One involved planting “decoy” patrol cars on high-crime streets. The empty, parked black-and-whites were supposed to scare would-be criminals into thinking actual officers might be nearby. Even worse for self-respecting police officers, the brass instituted a practice of assigning a pair of officers to drive around aimlessly in a patrol car with red lights flashing. Higher-ups viewed this as clever and progressive. The idea was to give criminals a sense that cops were on high alert. But when officers learned in roll call that their shift duties would involve no real work—that instead, they were to toodle around ridiculously under a flashing red light—their faces registered unmistakable insult.

If you asked most LAPD patrol officers why they chose to be cops, they would shrug and answer vaguely: “To help people.” It was a little poignant. Cops enjoyed good pay and lavish pensions. But many seemed to really want to be do-gooders without really knowing how.

Sal La Barbera did not have this problem. He had a clarity of purpose that guided all his actions. Because of what he believed, he knew precisely what his mission was and why it was important every single day of his working life. He managed an array of priorities, all of which were harmonized in his mind with clear, long-term goals and a deep understanding of the problem he sought to conquer. All in all, he represented a consistency and integrity that was missing from the criminal justice system he worked within. And if he didn’t seem to be the sort of man to carry that standard, well, that only confirmed Rick Gordon’s doctrine that sometimes the people who appear least truthful are the ones telling the starkest truths.

The decade of the 1990s was over. Crime was dropping. South Bureau
Homicide was disbanded and replaced by divisional homicide squads in each of three South Bureau station houses. La Barbera was put in charge of one of them: the Southeast Homicide squad in Watts.

Over the years, he had watched Skaggs develop as an investigator.

The two men did not work together directly at South Bureau Homicide, but La Barbera was familiar with Skaggs’s style. He knew Skaggs did not procrastinate or putter around the office, spending too much time on computers. He was nearly always outside, moving, talking, making face-to-face connections with people, confronting them over and over, returning to places where he had been roughly turned away. Shortly after settling into his new unit, La Barbera recruited Skaggs.

Skaggs, for his part, sensed in La Barbera someone who believed in the work and its higher purpose. He leaped at the opportunity. So began the next phase of his career, at last a full-fledged homicide detective.

GOOD PEOPLE AND KNUCKLEHEADS

In 2000,
the nine square miles of Watts were home to about 130,000 people, 39 percent of them black. Nearly everyone else in the Southeast Division was Hispanic, including many brand-new Mexican, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan immigrants.

Black people had inhabited the swampy bottoms of Watts since its earliest days. In the late 1920s, when Watts was an independent town, blacks became the town’s majority, and might have elected its first black mayor. But outnumbered whites—claiming water-supply issues—staved this off:
they got the City of Los Angeles to annex it instead. In the second of the great black migrations, after World War II, black people poured into Watts from the South and soon made it notorious among the country’s “inner-city” black neighborhoods. “
An infected pocket of misery, unemployment and despair where new arrivals from the South congregate,” the political writer Theodore H. White called it in 1965, after the riots.

Every factor that predicted violence was concentrated in Southeast. The division was the poorest one in South Bureau. It was home to a cluster of public housing projects, including Jordan Downs and Imperial Courts, places made notorious by rap musicians. Older men dawdled
in front of liquor stores or jaywalked with gaits of languid contempt. Police cataloged a score of black gangs there, some with imaginative and poetic names: Fudgetown Mafia, Hard Time Hustlers, Bounty Hunters. Bone-thin addicts with bad teeth rattled shopping carts down its boulevards.

Yet for all its notoriety, the landscape of Watts was not as formidable as its reputation. This was not a no-man’s-land of high-rise slums. Trees and lawns adorned tiny detached one-story houses set off by waist-high chain-link fences. Sidewalks were crowded with kids walking home in their school uniforms and mothers pushing strollers. Teenagers practiced dance steps at bus stops. The housing projects boasted gracious touches. Nickerson Gardens, where curved streets wound around black-and-white row houses, had been designed by the famous black architect Paul Williams and reflected his deepest values—California living and “a passion for small homes for everyday people”—according to his Memphis archivist, Deborah Brackstone. Sunlight streamed through the windows of Nickerson’s cozy, private units. Ground-level doors opened on geraniums and sloping green lawns.

And, of course, Watts claimed an equal share of the city’s best attributes. It was Mediterranean and golden, with air that was soft in summer and crisp in winter. Gardens there burst with bird-of-paradise flowers and purple-blooming jacarandas. Palm trees lined streets, their glossy fronds flashing in the sun. There were still paddocks in Compton and a stable in Athens, and people rode horses up the grassy median of Broadway. They sat on couches on front porches, barbecued in their driveways on summer evenings as their children played.

The setting made much of the literature about the urban “underclass” based on observations in places such as Philadelphia, Baltimore, and the Bronx seem like some dark fantasy. A foreign visitor in 2008 said she was surprised by the pleasant surroundings; referencing
George Kelling and James Q. Wilson’s famous essay, she noted that there were no broken windows at all.

Most blacks in Los Angeles had Southern origins. But folklore held that Watts had drawn the poorest and last of the black migrants—refugees from rural Louisiana and East Texas, many from sharecropping and subsistence farming backgrounds. A bit of Watts mythology even held that its blacks were “darker complected” than blacks elsewhere in L.A. This notion was doubtful, and impossible to prove in any case, but it was of a piece with Watts’s reputation for extreme black disadvantage.

That history was still in evidence when Skaggs came to work in Watts in 2001. Newcomers from the South still came, and transplants went back and forth to ancestral towns. In the roll call room of the station hung a large painted sign. It bore the logo of the Louisiana Hotel, a local establishment once considered a notorious nest of vice. The police had somehow pilfered the sign when the motel was demolished, and it was clear why they coveted it: “Louisiana Hotel” was shorthand for the neighborhood. Many of these sons and daughters of Louisiana still interacted as if living in a rural Southern village. Weekends brought big family cookfests and jovial church breakfasts. Everyone seemed to know everyone.

The uniformed gang enforcement officers in Skaggs’s station house had a running joke about Slidell, Louisiana, a town that could appear to have been uprooted and replanted on the streets of Watts. Sometimes it seemed half the black gangsters in the division hailed from there. But Shreveport, Lake Charles, Natchitoches, and New Orleans were also well represented.

Only people who weren’t familiar with this kind of “inner-city” environment would attribute its problems to alienation or lack of community solidarity. The truth was that “community spirit” in the sense of both local pride and connections among neighbors was far more in evidence in Watts than elsewhere. It was one of the defining aspects of the ghettoside setting: a substantial portion of the area’s residents were related to each other through extended family ties, marriage, or other intimate connections. Relatives who were only nominally related by blood often saw each other daily, ate together, celebrated together, quarreled and comforted each other. They shared food, money, and living quarters.

They raised each other’s children. They traded off transportation and housework.

Even people who were not related were networked into this complex mosaic. Common-law romantic relationships—the myriad “baby daddy” and “baby mama” connections—not only constituted their own distinct category of familial bonds, they roped in a lot of other blood relations, too. And if people had no claim to family ties at all, they invented them. Terms such as “play sister” and “play cousin” were ubiquitous all over South Central and had an important role in organizing social life. Even friendships in Watts often appeared more intimate than elsewhere. In contrast to wealthier neighborhoods, where most people worked at day jobs and neighbors knew each other in passing or not at all, the unemployed people of these places were home all day, hanging out together, confined to a few blocks. It lent the constant calls for “the community to come together” a touch of absurdity. Watts already had more togetherness than most Americans could tolerate.

Among officers in the division, the company line was that most of South Bureau’s population were “good people.” But a minority—some cops put it at 1 percent, some as high as 15 percent—were “knuckleheads.” This term referred to unemployed, criminally involved men, and gang members, especially black ones.