by Jill Leovy
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.
South Bureau officers heard some version of the lament several times a day: “It ain’t like I’m out here doin’ something. I’m just cruisin’!” a young woman named Tamala Brown sputtered, facing down a pair of Seventy-seventh officers who caught her driving without a seatbelt in 2005. “What about all these other people out actually doin’ something?” No one seemed to hear that last part—no matter how urgently black people said it. Legal scholar Randall Kennedy was a lonely voice among his peers when he asserted that “the principal injury suffered by African-Americans in relation to criminal matters is not overenforcement but underenforcement of the laws.” Glory Massey did not need to be told.
Years later, describing the experience of having Skaggs investigate her husband’s death, she said that when Skaggs took over the case, “it was like how your own brothers would go and look for the guy, you know?” In her mind, Skaggs had substituted the state’s intervention for communal justice, and Massey was deeply grateful. She believed Skaggs’s aggressive work on her husband’s case had probably averted another homicide.
Seven years later, Glory Massey’s eldest son, Damon, was also murdered.
In the depths of her grief, Glory Massey thought about John Skaggs. Skaggs had been assigned elsewhere by then. No suspect was arrested in Damon’s case. Years went by; no one contacted Glory. Her son’s murder remains unsolved as of this writing. In response to inquiries, a man on her street said simply: “Someone took care of it.”
THE CIRCUMSTANTIAL CASE
As young John Skaggs was trying out as a South Bureau trainee, Wally Tennelle remained working on the north side of the invisible administrative boundary of Florence Avenue. He was well on his way to becoming one of the Central Bureau’s master craftsmen. Tennelle had by then worked scores of cases.
Tennelle and Baitx worked as partners for five years in the Newton Division. Up at RHD—the prestige division downtown—supervisors in search of talent homed in on Tennelle. They tried to recruit him. But Tennelle refused an RHD assignment on principle. He was still at heart a hard-driving south end copper who loved to be busy. On some level, he knew he was born to chase the lowly, frustrating gang cases they disdained up at headquarters.
And there was something else: a question of fairness. Wally Tennelle was no leftist, but the phrase “some daddy’s baby” translated to an issue of social justice that he couldn’t help taking to heart. The well-heeled had superior policing, he believed. “The poor people down here never get anything, and they need good detectives,” he said.
The LAPD, however, did not have the same priorities. The institution was not geared to channeling its best talent to detective tables down in the Newton Division. Talented municipal employees are expected to advance. Plus, Tennelle was due for a pay raise and had three kids in private school. Without really understanding all its implications, he allowed himself to go through the process of oral and written exams and was boosted to the rank of D-3, detective III, or supervisor.
Promotion requires transfer in the LAPD. Tennelle was shifted out of homicide and into a supervisory position in a different unit in Newton, overseeing a “table” of detectives investigating domestic violence and rape cases. Ostensibly, such detective tables are supposed to conduct interviews and track down suspects. But in the ghettoside divisions of the LAPD, investigation of relatively low-level crime was afforded so little manpower that, in essence, these jobs become paper pushing. Detectives have no time to interview people, and in the arena of domestic violence and rape—the latter, like the former, overwhelmingly committed within families or among acquaintances—huge numbers of victims refused to testify in court. The detectives under Tennelle’s command were mostly reduced to filling out forms and meeting administrative deadlines. Tennelle had inadvertently trapped himself in the most dreaded assignment imaginable, a desk job. His whole nature rebelled.
“You could just tell he was miserable,” Baitx recalled. He had never before heard his old partner complain. Tennelle told his old boss he was thinking of quitting. The boss urged him to hang in there—he would get used to it. But Tennelle knew his own mind.
He endured six months for appearance’s sake. Then he learned of one homicide D-2 spot open. It meant a demotion—he would lose his D-3 rank—and it was in RHD, where he had never wanted to be. But at least it was a real investigative job, not one that just went through the motions.
To the annoyance of his captain, Tennelle took the demotion, and in 1999—in horrified flight from the stacks of paper that piled up on the sex crimes table—he ended up at RHD.
He had accepted a 7 percent pay cut to make the switch. It took him seven years to work his way back. But it was worth it: he was back in an action-focused investigative job chasing killers, and he was happy again.
Baitx was amazed. He had never known anyone in the money-obsessed ranks to willingly take a demotion and pay cut.
Except for the voluntary demotion, Tennelle’s ascent through the department in those years paralleled the experience of many south end cops. In one respect, however, Wally Tennelle was idiosyncratic, even a little radical. He lived in the Seventy-seventh Division.
Among LAPD officers, the proscription against living in the city of Los Angeles went without saying. It was something that had long annoyed various liberal critics of the department. For years, most officers in the department had refused to live in the city they policed and instead commuted into the city from distant suburbs. They formed little red-state bastions sprinkled around the five-county area of Southern California—Santa Clarita and Simi Valley to the north, Chino and as far as Temecula to the east, and Orange County to the south. But with a few exceptions, such as San Pedro, a historic enclave of ethnic whites, Los Angeles was considered off-limits, the length and breadth of this beautiful city disdained by its police.
Of course, for many stripes of public employees, including teachers and firefighters, living in Los Angeles was difficult because the city had developed a stark rich-poor split, and moderately priced homes in low-crime neighborhoods were hard to come by. LAPD cops worked odd hours, so the long freeway drives that would have been prohibitive for rush-hour commuters were feasible for them.
How much racial prejudice weighed into this choice depended on what was meant by the term, since a majority of officers were themselves minorities. Anyway, their attitudes were too paradoxical for such a coarse summation: LAPD cops had a tendency to voice disgust about the neighborhoods of central Los Angeles, then defend them in the next breath.
Mostly, though, officers un
derstood what outsiders did not: that nearly every part of their jobs involved conflict, very personal conflict. To police the ’hood was to encounter a daily barrage of wrath. The idea of being followed home or confronted in one’s own neighborhood was terrifying. So for years the department’s critics complained that cops didn’t live in the city, and for years the cops declined to do so.
But not Wally Tennelle. He lived not just in the city, but in the Seventy-seventh Division. While it was true that the Seventy-seventh—unlike Southeast—had many pockets of nice middle-class homes, it remained either the first or second most violent division in the city, year in and year out, and its eleven square miles included the territories of several of the city’s most violent black street gangs. The fact that Wally Tennelle chose to live there was a source of wonderment to his colleagues, and fueled sotto voce commentary behind his back: “It was common knowledge” that Tennelle lived in the Seventy-seventh, said his RHD lieutenant, Lyle Prideaux, “and a lot of people didn’t think it was real wise.” Kelle Baitx, however, resented it whenever he heard that kind of talk. He had visited Tennelle’s home, knew how well kept and comfortable it was, and saw that the neighborhood was also “nice.” He himself had bought a house in El Sereno—another “nice” but distinctly urban, and mostly Hispanic, neighborhood near the city’s core—and sent his children to private school, just as Tennelle did. Baitx had traveled once with Tennelle to Alabama in pursuit of a suspect, and Tennelle had used the occasion to visit his family’s old home, a six-hundred-square-foot box with wood siding used, at the time of their visit, as a crack house. Baitx knew how poor Tennelle’s parents had been, how humble his roots, and how far the family had come. Tennelle should be able to live wherever he wanted, Baitx thought.
For Tennelle, the choice was easy. The neighborhood was home; it was near where he grew up, where his mother still lived. He had bought a home he could afford when he was a young cop, and had what he called “a wild-ass dream: that my children only know one home.”
Not that there weren’t difficulties. When the Tennelles first moved in, an apartment building down the street was a hub for drug deals. A dealer once stood in Tennelle’s driveway and conducted a transaction as Tennelle, who had served briefly as a narcotics cop, was mowing the grass a few feet away. Perhaps the dealer had a faulty antenna for cop detection; more likely he was caught slippin’ because it had never occurred to him that a cop would live on his street. Tennelle called 911 and had him arrested.
Later, Tennelle wrote a 3.18 narcotics report on the building and offered his home as an “OP,” or observation post, and the problem swiftly abated. After that, the Tennelles enjoyed the area. They were fond of their neighbors. Tennelle’s commute was a neighborhood hop—few Angelenos have it so good. Tennelle could respond to homicide callouts in Newton division within minutes, unlike most detectives who lost most of the first critical hour because it took them so long to get there. His neighborhood had sidewalks, mature trees, well-tended yards, and adorable 1930s-vintage homes—some of them gingerbread style. Fresh sea breezes waft through this part of L.A., palm trees sway, and although the section lies in the flight path of LAX, it’s far enough from the runway that the sound of descending planes is not too bothersome. You didn’t have to be from the Frisco side of Jasper, Alabama, to appreciate this neighborhood; it was objectively and inarguably, as Baitx put it, “nice.”
Tennelle’s neighbors knew he worked for the LAPD. He did not apologize for being a cop; he had always treated people with deliberate respect, on the job and off, and he defied the world to make him ashamed. “I’ve run into my share of people I’ve arrested,” he said, “and I can look them in the eye.” Shirking off to live in the suburbs felt somehow dishonorable to Wally Tennelle. “I’m home here. I’m not gonna let anybody run me out,” he said.
And more people wanted him there than not—this was made quickly clear. When word got around that there was a cop on the block, neighbors came to his doorstep with all kinds of troubles. Cops didn’t live in the neighborhoods they policed because they feared all those suspects. But perhaps what they should really have feared was all the victims. Wally Tennelle soon discovered that his neighborhood embraced him—perhaps more than he bargained for—but he accepted the role with good grace and did his best to help his neighbors with their problems.
About the same time that Wally Tennelle went to RHD, John Skaggs was finally earning a promotion to the lowest rank of detective, D-1.
Skaggs was subject to the same promotional rules as Tennelle. Thus, earning the rank to do what he was already doing meant he would no longer be allowed to do it. Just as Tennelle’s reward for advancement was a sentence on the Newton sex crime table, Skaggs was transferred out of homicide and sentenced to a narcotics table in the LAPD’s Pacific Division in Venice, a low-crime area along the beach.
It was unendurable.
At last, a post opened for a “gang” detective on a South Bureau task force in the Seventy-seventh Street Division. It was not quite what Skaggs wanted. But at least it was south of the Ten, investigating crimes involving human victims, and unlike Tennelle, he didn’t have to demote himself to make the switch.
A reprieve came with a new boss: Detective Sal La Barbera, a homicide supervisor who had first noticed Skaggs when the latter was still a young red-haired gang officer. La Barbera was just seven years older than Skaggs, but he had been a detective a lot longer. He had remained in ghettoside units longer than almost anyone he knew, passing on promotions and watching his peers advance. Dark-haired, with rawboned Italian good looks and a spray of acne scars over each cheek, La Barbera cut a romantic figure, an image he deliberately cultivated. He was not the devil-may-care loner he pretended to be. He did not do well alone, nor was he indifferent to the opinions of others. La Barbera was moody, easily hurt, forever trusting someone only to feel betrayed later. Various relationships had foundered in bad blood.
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. Of
ficers 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.
