by Jill Leovy
Just like Baitx and Tennelle a few years before, Skaggs and Barling worked the ghettoside way. Scores of cases, and not a moment to lose.
Skaggs rose at 3:30 A.M. Unlike the many LAPD officers who exhausted themselves working odd hours, Skaggs was disciplined enough to force himself to go to bed at eight o’clock every night, no matter what.
Each day began with a list of tasks, every moment booked, with delays for traffic and slow courthouse elevators carefully accounted for. 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, brown bags spread out on the trunk of the sedan. Most days they worked twelve hours or more, with tasks stretching late into the night. Skaggs was a serious coffee addict; he drank it very black and by the pot, the last cup after dark; it did not affect his sleep at all. Overtime was his life. One of the office secretaries had dubbed the homicide squad “the green mile” because of all the green overtime forms they turned in. It was the one area in which divisional homicide squads were amply provided for: they usually didn’t have enough detectives, but the ones they had could exploit contract provisions that treated them like factory labor and rewarded unceasing work. Skaggs earned $190,000 one year—his peak. Asked his base salary at the time, Skaggs could not pinpoint it. He had never bothered to learn his actual wage.
The squad was usually short on experience, with too many apprentices and too few veterans to train them. Ghettoside work was so draining that it required incompatible attributes, youthful energy and master craftsmanship. All the South L.A. homicide units suffered from high turnover, with young recruits often moving to easier and more rewarding positions as soon as they were able; this was also true of prosecutors down at Compton Courthouse. Short-handed South Bureau homicide units frequently accepted mediocre candidates to compensate. Two of La Barbera’s detectives over the years were drummed out on misconduct allegations. Others solved no cases. La Barbera did his best to combat churn. He was a tireless talent scout and recruiter. But the best officers scoffed at his advances. “Hey, you want to work homicide?” La Barbera said brightly to one who passed his desk one morning. The officer guffawed and walked off, shaking his head.
La Barbera obsessed over every last detail of his management job, kept his own elaborate records, and studied his data in his spare time in search of best practices. He discovered that constantly training young recruits who didn’t work out wasted time and hampered the progress of his best detectives. La Barbera looked at years of clearances and found it was better to keep strong detectives together than to partner them with apprentices. Strong pairs would solve more cases than the weak ones sacrificed. So he kept Barling and Skaggs together.
For Skaggs and Barling, this was a formative, golden period.
La Barbera demanded pride of appearance, and Skaggs always looked crisp in his business suits. He allowed himself the one indulgence of taking off his suit jacket as he worked Southeast’s baking asphalt streets. But he kept the ties knotted and never rolled up the sleeves of the white dress shirts he always wore. He and Barling cleaned their sedan frequently so people would know at a glance they weren’t just any plainclothes cops—they were homicide detectives. Skaggs loved it when Southeast residents, who studied their cops very carefully, recognized him as a homicide man.
In the office, Skaggs and his colleagues were obsessively neat. They kept bottles of Formula 409 spray at their desks. One day a trainee spilled coffee on Skaggs’s desk. Appalled silence—then La Barbera quietly threatened to fire him. It wasn’t clear that he was joking.
The cleanliness served a purpose. A stack of paper left on a desk meant a detective was falling behind, and with so many cases, that spelled disaster. Organization was survival. Detectives were always in danger of getting buried. Skaggs had pictures of his children under glass on his desk, but nothing else. He used scissors to cut out bits of text on printouts to keep track of his cases, Scotch-taped on 8-by-10 notebook sheets. When he solved a case, he highlighted it in yellow.
Nothing came easily in Southeast. But for Skaggs, the impediments—lack of sufficient manpower and equipment, no media coverage, little clout within the department—became motivators. Long before, he had begun to develop a subversive posture toward the status quo. Now, underdog pride suffused his work. Southeast detectives saw themselves as the equivalent of a military MASH unit—better and smarter craftsmen because they were forced to get things done fast.
Among the LAPD’s legions of high-school-educated, second-generation cops in those years, Skaggs was not immediately recognizable as an outlier. He was smart, but not book-smart. Needing only language enough to convey favor and disfavor, he spoke simply in the vernacular of the avid California surfer he was. Skaggs began sentences with “See” or “All’s I’m sayin’.” When he praised things, he said “Sweet!” When he condemned them, he used bowdlerized profanity: “Shoot!” or “Flippin’!”
He had a favorite term of disparagement: dumb-ass. Skaggs found this term useful for dispensing with a long and varied list of annoyances in his life. Paperwork. Bad tattoos. Excessive drinking. They were all dumb-ass. Skaggs sometimes even referred to the high crime of murder as dumb-ass. It worked as a noun, too. Inconvenient bureaucrats could be dumb-asses. Killers could be dumb-asses.
Among cops, he fit right in—just another jock in the locker room—talking football and RVs and fitness regimens and the Baker to Vegas police relay race like all of them. His seeming ordinariness also served him working on the streets of Watts, where he mixed surfer slang and ghetto idioms so the latter seemed part of a natural vocabulary of found clichés. Skaggs could make reference to “snitch jackets” or “front street” without sounding affected. He was not like some South Bureau officers, who made a show of knowing gangster lingo. Skaggs believed he could speak to people he met in Watts just as he spoke to anyone else.
The ability to talk to anyone, anywhere, always using the same words and grammar, never talking down to people, never trying to impress some third party, was a curious matter of principle to him. It was part of a secret catalog of personal standards he had assembled around his work—a list of codes, seldom voiced, except in occasional flares of annoyance when he saw them transgressed.
His deceptively unsophisticated speaking style served another purpose as his career progressed: it was helpful in interrogations. Skaggs often played the goofy amateur. Suspects didn’t comprehend the razor-sharp strategic intellect until it was too late. But it was not entirely an act. Skaggs was not someone who lost himself in deep analysis. He rarely felt the need to be any more precise or evocative than words like “sweet!” or “dumb-ass” permitted. He was not that interested in explanation. His reasoning style was strictly intuitive. His brain was full of data. The power of his mind lay in his ability to access it all instantaneously with great precision and to parlay it into swift, effortless decisions. “It’s Skaggs’s way,” Chris Barling would say, “or it’s dumb-ass.”
His utilitarian outlook seemed to militate against soulfulness. But Skaggs must have had a little. He loved Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. He loved the unappreciated landscapes of California, its creosote deserts and ponderosa plains. Of course, most Californians also loved the place. But Skaggs’s passion was of a higher order. He’d been raised on Southern California’s Elysian sunlight and rainbow mists. He couldn’t imagine leaving. When Skaggs heard of cops retiring to other places—Idaho, or Gig Harbor, Washington—he shook his head in sympathy as if they’d been struck by illness. Poor souls. Living in that weather. They would never be able to get a foothold in the housing market again.
WITNESSES AND THE SHADOW SYSTEM
What one prosecutor called the “colossal” problem of ghettoside homicide cases was the difficulty in getting witnesses to talk. They were terrified they would be killed.
In Watts, if witnesses cooperated with police at all, they nearly always pleaded to have their statements kept anonymous. M
any had to be chased down. After initial interviews, they would have to be subpoenaed to testify, then impeached on the stand because they lied about matters about which they had earlier displayed knowledge.
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. And that was when things went well. In many other cases, they denied what they had seen, or mysteriously vanished in the interval it took to schedule trial hearings.
The reluctance of witnesses to testify was the primary reason so many murder cases went unsolved. In 2008, lack of witness cooperation was the number one impediment to finding suspects in 108 homicide cases in the city of Los Angeles—or 40 percent of all cases in which witnesses played any role. In many other murders, reluctant witnesses may not have been the primary impediment but were still high among the reasons why cases were not solved. Barling liked to say that all the unsolved cases in Southeast were “just one witness away.”
Street homicides offered few physical clues. Most were “scoop-and-carry” cases in which the wounded victim had been transported by ambulance to a hospital before being pronounced dead. Evidence consisted of a few shell casings, shoes, and ribbons of clothing left by paramedics’ scissors.
Labs played little role in most street murder cases. It doesn’t take a fancy scientific laboratory to determine that a man died because a bullet hit him.
Instead, cases were made on witnesses—and sometimes only witnesses. Since the sixties, the State of California had provided funds to help relocate witnesses to new apartments as a way of protecting them. The money was minimal—usually a few thousand dollars. The state program typically paid only for a move and a couple months’ rent. There was no long-term assistance to help people start new lives in new places.
Moreover, the funds were approved for people only after they agreed to cooperate with prosecutions; detectives couldn’t use them to get reluctant witnesses into a safe place before interviewing them. And moving relatives of witnesses was difficult. Witnesses often worried for the safety of elderly grandparents, who typically owned their homes and did not qualify for relocation.
Finally, the program did not fully comprehend the circumstances of the underworld denizens who were likely to be homicide witnesses. These included homeless people, addicts, prostitutes, gang members, and hustlers, who depended on a geographically specific black market—a corner to sell drugs, an alley to turn tricks. They weren’t often noted for their responsible decision making.
For such tormented souls, witness relocation programs were not especially helpful. “Where do you relocate a homeless person? The next block?” said one former Southeast detective, Dan Myers. One of Myers’s witnesses on a homicide case was a homeless crack addict. For years, he tried to keep track of her, hoping to keep her safe. Once, after a search, he caught up with her in an alley. She was half dressed, her hair disheveled, with nickel-sized blue bruises on her arm. She told Myers that gang members that week had grabbed her, shaken her, and threatened her about her testimony.
The extent of retaliation against witnesses was hard to measure. Detectives insisted retaliation was rare, especially after trials ended. But an average of about seven known murders of witnesses occurred countywide each year during Skaggs’s first five years in Southeast, and the real figure was probably at least a dozen. This was a tiny fraction of total murders countywide. But a little murder goes a long way. Most rational people hesitate to do something that a dozen people a year get killed for doing in their county. There was so much fear that the twenty-five thousand dollar rewards offered for help on cases were virtually never collected.
Witnesses were also targets of intimidation that fell short of murder. Firebombs flew through their windows; drive-by shootings were conducted as they tried to relocate, bullets ricocheting near moving vans parked in the street. Some witnesses described being marked and harassed after testifying. Wearing a “snitch jacket”—a reputation for cooperating—meant being targeted for abuse. Police tended to have little sympathy for people tarred with this label, black gang members in particular. They appeared less inclined to offer relocation to young black men with criminal records. Some would even argue that witness safety was a nonissue because the only people who really needed to worry about retaliation were gang members—as if this made it less problematic. Threats and assaults against gang members were, of course, the very statistical heart of the problem, and so, in this respect, as in so many others, it was all upside down: the system’s weakest point was exactly its statistical apex.
Police could be astonishingly parsimonious and presumptuous even with upstanding and fully cooperative witnesses. It was assumed that poor people could move at a moment’s notice, that their ties to whatever place they called home were not equal to those of wealthier suburbanites. And some cops, steeped in right-wing rhetoric about the “nanny state,” harbored deep philosophical objections to aiding witnesses with cash. One detective supervisor in Southeast during Skaggs’s term said that she saw it as her duty to make sure they got as little state money as possible. She considered the division’s poor to be welfare malingerers and did not want to abet their sponging ways.
Experienced homicide detectives did not share this view. They saw deeper into residents’ lives, forged ties with them, and, most important, experienced their pain as more than a glancing inconvenience. Suffering was a teacher. There was a palpable difference between the exasperated posture of certain first responders—paramedics, patrol officers, some nurses, who dealt with people briefly and deflected their agony to stay sane—and the mute outrage of homicide detectives, doctors, and other workers who witnessed the long aftermath. The latter, such as Roosevelt Joseph, a Seventy-seventh Street Division homicide supervisor, often came to resent what they saw as callous judgments by the former. “They say these people should come forward—just because they work eight hours a day here and have a gun and a badge and go home to Orange County at night!” Work ghettoside long enough and one learned the hard way what could happen to witnesses. Brent Josephson, the Seventy-seventh Street detective, once relocated an eighteen-year-old witness named Yvette Rene Blue and remained friends with her. She would send him little notes and cards. But the young black woman visited her old neighborhood after testifying and was murdered. Josephson was never the same. He kept Blue’s wallet-sized photograph taped to his computer terminal for years after.
Detectives made moral appeals to try to persuade people to cooperate despite their fear. But for many witnesses, testifying presented a quandary—they had to consider their own safety and that of friends and relatives against their duty to the state. Police and prosecutors, if they were perceptive, also felt this dilemma. One RHD detective described his uneasiness about using an older woman as a witness in a gang case: she had brushed his concerns for her safety aside, explaining that her son had been murdered years earlier, and she no longer cared if she died. In one Watts case, the main witness, a homeless prostitute, was cooperative because she loved the victim. But she refused relocation, probably in part because her desperate existence required her to remain where she was—living in her car, offering blow jobs to men in the projects. “She’s not scared, but she should be,” the detective said. “I’m scared for her.”
Fear made collaborators even of people who committed no crimes. Many homicide witnesses shed tears when confronted by police. They would apologize as they yanked closed the curtains, or requested, in sheepish undertones, that police not come to their houses in daylight. Very often, police knew nothing of what witnesses were going through.
In one 2009 case in Watts, an important witness, who lived across the street from the driveway where a man was murdered, spent the next three nights sleeping on the kitchen floor with his family as men parked their cars outside and displayed guns or threw rocks at the house. He never reported the attacks: he was on felony probation for welfare fraud and had lied to his employ
er about it. He was afraid to deal with police for fear of exposure or being sent to prison.
Sometimes, the most down-and-out people showed epic courage. On another Watts case, a crack cocaine addict told police she had seen only enough to place the suspect at the scene. But when the day came for her to testify, she surprised the whole courtroom by looking the defendant in the eye and exclaiming, “You killed him!… I’m sorry, but you did!”
Another witness, Debra Johnson, testified against her attackers in a Nickerson Gardens massacre-style assault that left two people dead. Johnson—asthmatic, on parole, and addicted to drugs—was maimed by gunshots to the mouth and chest and could barely talk. But on the stand, she brimmed with spirit. “That’s just how it was,” she declared, and pointed an accusing finger at the shooters.
Both of these women were from the same neighborhoods as the kilers; they were both poor people indoctrinated in street codes. And both were very brave.
Yet although witness fear and safety was addressed periodically by the press and by policy makers, its centrality to the syndrome of black murders was massively underrated. In fact, journalistic and academic work related to witnesses tended to focus on their unreliability. The public could not be blamed for believing that these constituted primary problems in the justice system, since so many experts specialized in this issue, and so many grants were awarded for research about them. In Skaggs’s time, there were regular calls to further restrict the use of eyewitness evidence in court—far fewer calls to better protect the mostly poor, frightened, and highly vulnerable people upon whose shoulders the state laid the burden of testifying.
