by Jill Leovy
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 hig
h as 15 percent—were “knuckleheads.” This term referred to unemployed, criminally involved men, and gang members, especially black ones.
Blacks “could better their lives, but they don’t,” said one officer of Hispanic ethnicity. “They love it. They love selling drugs. They love forcing old people out of their homes so they can sell drugs there.” Said a white officer: “The true victims are Hispanic. Black suspects prey on Hispanic victims.” There was plenty of Hispanic crime and “gang activity,” too. But the hard-core underclass in Watts was black, and it was impossible for patrol cops not to see that. All day long, their radios buzzed with familiar suspect descriptions. “Male black, five-six to six-two, eighteen to thirty-five, white shirt, black pants,” a gang officer intoned drily, reading aloud from a report in the Watts station one day. All the cops present laughed, for they all sought the same suspect. But even as officers laughed, some cops also searched their souls, trying to figure out how to accommodate their experiences at work with the antiracism they shared with most of their countrymen.
They sometimes wrestled with race in disarming ways. No one in the wider world seemed to want to talk about it, but black residents, to many officers, appeared more violent than Hispanics. Their own eyes told them so. Statistics backed them up. Few officers wanted to believe that black people were somehow intrinsically wired for violence.
“Maybe the stereotype is true,” said Francis Coughlin, a white gang detective who would play an important role in Skaggs’s story. “I don’t know! I like to think it is a choice. Even in this environment, you have a choice!” His voice betrayed a touch of anguish—the whole issue so delicate and painful.
“Choices” rhetoric helped officers ascribe the violence of Watts to individuals, and thus avoid explanations that felt like group generalizations of black people. But talk of “choices” also inevitably raised questions of blame. And since blame also served as a satisfying distancing mechanism, officers ended by blaming not just suspects but victims for the “choices” they’d made.
Some version of “good riddance” summed up much of the cops’ private response to the violence there. “There are no victims here” was a tired cliché seemingly echoed by half the officers in Southeast. “You take your values and put them in the backseat while you are here,” said gang sergeant Sean Colomey, who worked in Southeast in the aughts. “Then you go back to where you are from and get your values again.”
A white Southeast officer called a successfully prosecuted gang homicide “two for the price of one,” because one gang member had been killed and a second imprisoned. Another white officer, of supervisory rank, scanned a report about a black gang member who had barely survived a bullet to the head: “Why couldn’t it have just taken care of the problem we are dealing with here?” she asked caustically.
A telling bit of cop slang that expressed this philosophy was the word righteous. Officers used “righteous” to distinguish people they considered real victims—innocent and worthy of sympathy—from victims only in a strict legal sense. A righteous victim might be the hardworking neighbor struck by a stray bullet. It went without saying that there were few righteous victims among the black men of Watts.
But officers could not be condemned wholesale for their strong emotional responses to violence. The anger of many Southeast cops was complicated—shot through with outrage and horror. Even as they spouted callous, shopworn rhetoric, some Southeast officers also displayed deep engagement with problems they encountered in Watts—problems that often seemed to be ignored by a wider world.
A gang detective in Watts named Patrick Flaherty was typical. He worked twelve serious shootings a month—far too many to solve. Flaherty, to his credit, hated “cleared other,” and he worked hard. But few victims would testify. Once, a wounded gang member said “Fuck you” to Flaherty’s request for information—his dying words.
Another time, he investigated the case of a fourteen-year-old boy paralyzed by gunfire. The boy’s mother, against all evidence, insisted the perpetrator couldn’t have been a black man. Flaherty offered this story as an example of perverse denial among blacks. His views appeared harsh and condemnatory: “The whole culture of the black community is crime!” he said. Yet in the same interview, Flaherty kept returning to this fourteen-year-old, whose story never made the news. Flaherty worked the case diligently, driven by a sincere, sympathetic response to the boy’s ordeal, and he persuaded him to testify. He got to know the family, stayed in touch. And every time they went to court, he carried the boy down the steps of the family’s apartment himself.
When Skaggs came to work in Southeast Homicide, the countywide homicide death rate for black men in their twenties was about forty-eight times the average for all Americans. Southeast had always been among the five most violent LAPD precincts, and sixty-five people were killed there the first year after Skaggs arrived, three quarters of them black. The next year, 2003, Southeast led the city in killings with seventy-seven people dead, two thirds of them black.
Skaggs occupied a corner in the back of the detective squad room, alongside his colleagues at what was called the homicide “table,” for that is what it was—a handful of desks pushed together, the inauspiciousness of their function reinforced by the arrangement of office furniture, for the homicide table looked no different than the burglary table or the auto table.
After initially bouncing him around between partners, La Barbera eventually assigned Skaggs to work with Chris Barling, another Southern California native who had migrated from South Bureau Homicide. Barling was two years older than Skaggs, also white, and just as tall: the two men wore the same size suit. Barling looked fit, but astonished his health-obsessed colleagues with his diet of packaged burritos and Mountain Dew. Both men were of superior talent. At the point when they became partners, they had identical clearance rates: 75 percent.
The partnership clicked right away. Barling was analytical and talkative, with a flair for circumstantial cases. Skaggs saw that he was good at making sense of complex webs of evidence. For Barling, a denial was as good as a confession.
For his part, Barling admired Skaggs’s style—how he attacked everything in sight, plunging after every scrap of information, going right at its source, refusing to take no for an answer. La Barbera sometimes assigned them extra cases just to juice the unit’s end-of-year clearance rate.
Typically, La Barbera’s little Watts squad had no more than four or five pairs of homicide detectives. These detectives carried the highest homicide caseloads in the city, double or triple those of colleagues in the wealthier San Fernando Valley and West bureaus. Twelve to fifteen cases per pair were typical in those years.
Homicide rates were on the wane, but homicide staffing had dropped, too, and clearing cases still wasn’t seen as central to the department’s crime-fighting strategy. So La Barbera faced the same old frustrations. It was a reprise of the Big Years: insufficient resources and upside-down priorities. Barling liked to say that they were “Don Quixotes, tilting at windmills.” The unit was perennially short of cars and computers. La Barbera “took a complaint” once for stealing an extra, unused computer from the patrol officers because one of his investigators didn’t have one, and he weathered the inevitable internal-affairs investigation. His detectives were not allowed to bring their police sedans home, unlike detectives in other units, such as “major crimes” at headquarters. They had no office in which to meet, unlike the station’s community policing and data analysis units.
The homicide detectives also lacked sufficient space to interrogate people, since they shared the only available interview room with all the other officers in the station. The room had no recording equipment and no window, and it was always short of chairs and uncomfortably cold.
The detectives were not issued tape recorders, although prosecutors had begun to require recordings to file charges by that time. So they bought their own and, absent an interrogation room, devised ingenious ways to conceal them. One detective carried a heavy
binder filled with paper. He cut out the center of the stack to make a secret hollow and hid his recorder in it. This qualified as high technology in ghettoside homicide.
La Barbera spent much of his time trying to secure adequate supplies and equipment. His detectives were not issued departmental cell phones; they bought their own. They did not have the capability to enhance or take stills from surveillance videos, or to videotape interrogations, so they persuaded a local appliance merchant to help them. They struggled for access to moving vans and surveillance cars. They waited for weeks to hear back from labs for reports on physical evidence. La Barbera purchased his own fax machine and printer for the office, and several pieces of furniture, including his own chair. The detectives made regular trips to Office Depot to buy pads, pencils, staplers, keyboards, calendars, and even the blue binders for the murder books.
La Barbera was forever setting goals and drafting plans, trying to improve things. His requests seemed pretty reasonable for a department that ran its own helicopter fleet: he wanted tinted windows in a sedan to ferry witnesses incognito, a locking cabinet for murder books, maybe a few digital cameras. Again and again, he was turned down.
The brass juggled other concerns—response times and suppression of lesser crimes, such as burglaries. These were more numerous and created more noticeable blips in crime statistics. Reporters, meanwhile, virtually never covered Southeast homicides. So there was little political pressure to address them.
Even within their own station house, Southeast Homicide detectives sometimes felt like lepers. They had to cajole their colleagues to help them with stakeouts and sweeps. La Barbera tried to improve this, too. He spoke to roll calls, quietly urging the uniforms to stop shooing people rudely from crime scenes and to treat bereaved families with compassion. The officers would roll their eyes, then bark at weeping relatives again, or smirk at witnesses—that smirk that some LAPD officers seemed to have learned at the academy. They still turned in field-interview cards that read like haiku. No one in charge seemed interested in impressing on the uniforms that it was appropriate for them to serve as a supporting cast for detectives. It was as if they policed on a completely different plane. Sometimes, patrol officers roared by fresh shrines on the street without a glance, unaware of the murders that had just happened there.
