by Jill Leovy
The witness intimidation problem was just one aspect of the larger ghettoside problem: a shadow legal system that competed with formal law.
Each time he delved into a Southeast case, Skaggs had the sense that he was entering an underworld. For all the chaos, this world was organized, rule-bound. Black people in Watts were generally governed by a complex system of etiquette, backed by the threat of violence. This was the shadow that filled the vacuum of legitimate authority. One reason it existed was the neighborhood’s vast underground economy. When your business dealings are illegal, you have no legal recourse. Many poor, “underclass” men of Watts had little to live on except a couple hundred dollars a month in county General Relief. They “cliqued up” for all sorts of illegal enterprises, not just selling drugs and pimping but also fraudulent check schemes, tax cons, unlicensed car repair businesses, or hair braiding. Some bounced from hustle to hustle. They bartered goods, struck deals, and shared proceeds, all off the books. Violence substituted for contract litigation. Young men in Watts frequently compared their participation in so-called gang culture to the way white-collar businesspeople sue customers, competitors, or suppliers in civil courts. They spoke of policing themselves, adjudicating their own disputes. Other people call police when they need help, explained an East Coast Crip gang member. “We pick up the phone and call our homeboys.”
Gangs issued informal “passes”—essentially granting waivers that exempted people from the rules that governed everyone else. A star athlete in a gang neighborhood, for example, might be issued a “pass” that exempted him from participation in gang life. Or passes might be extended to people allowed to conduct illegal businesses in rival territories. “Selling without a pass” was an occasional homicide motive.
Gangs could seem pointlessly self-destructive, but the reason they existed was no mystery. Boys and men always tend to group together for protection. They seek advantage in numbers. Unchecked by a state monopoly on violence, such groupings fight, commit crimes, and ascend to factional dominance as conditions permit. Fundamentally gangs are a consequence of lawlessness, not a cause.
Some version of gangs has characterized lawless settings throughout history. In the nineteenth century, gangs ran the gamut: bandit groups among Russian peasants bearing catchy names like the “Steppe Devils”; Philadelphia volunteer firefighters who warred with each other and committed arson; New York City “voting gangs” who angrily confronted each other, fighting over what Monkkonen called the “nineteenth-century equivalent of cocaine—access to the jobs and graft political powers offered.” In Georgia and Virginia in the early twentieth century, the “gang” mantle belonged to groups of black and white moonshiners who intimidated people and killed snitches.
The tendency for people to band together when state power is weak is so inevitable it can even seem innate. “The latent causes of faction,” wrote founding father James Madison, are “sown in the nature of man.” Without law, people use violence collectively to settle scores and right wrongs, and commonly refer to violence as their own law. Wherever law is absent or undeveloped—wherever it is shabby, ineffective, or disputed—some form of self-policing or communal justice usually emerges.
Police, prosecutors, and politicians in L.A. blamed gangs for the homicide problem. They portrayed gangs as formidable nations of organized crime or as an exotic new social disease. But among street officers in South Bureau, doubts sometimes surfaced, a sense that much of what was breathlessly termed “gang culture” was pretty ordinary group behavior. Officers couldn’t help noticing certain inconsistencies, like the way so much gang crime seemed to involve just four or five guys “cliquing up,” in the spirit of a high school locker room, or the way so few gang homicides stemmed from drug deals—and so many from infighting. Some gang members showed signs of being unwilling draftees, and many monikers sounded less like noms de guerre than like playground taunts—“Cheeseburger,” “Wheezy,” “Klayhead,” “Beer Can.” Petty arguments, insults, and women seemed to drive a lot of gang violence. One gang war in Southeast stemmed from the sale of a used car. Gang members in Watts bragged of making large sums. But in the morgue, the rolled wads of dollar bills found inside shoes contradicted them: these were poor people. The black market is a desperate place.
The size of the stakes did not limit the reach of the shadow system, however. Seemingly minor transgressions could bring severe reprisals. Skaggs marveled that one of the highest offenses in the underground was the simple act of “lying on” people, in the sense of spreading malicious gossip about them. But the prohibition that affected him most was the one banning snitching—that is, cooperating with police. This was not simply a criminal ethos. Snitching was sometimes seen as borderline racial betrayal, a concession to a law enforcement system that had not served blacks especially well. People in Watts would argue that street justice was ethically superior. They would pressure homicide witnesses to keep quiet so the victim’s family would have a chance to strike back.
The snitching taboo was surprisingly nuanced. It was more like a standard of selective cooperation. Gang members sometimes turned in their own for the killing of children, for example. This followed from the correct assumption that such “innocent victim” cases would bring out the heat—that is, provoke an aggressive police response. But moral repugnance also played a role. Gang members who snitched in such cases sometimes did so because they considered the mistake “out of bounds,” or beyond the pale. “They have their own idea of what’s justifiable,” Skaggs said.
Other killers were protected by a broad consensus, extending beyond gang members. Murders of gang assailants inside enemy territory were notoriously difficult to solve for this reason; the invader was seen to have had it coming. Detectives were also less likely to win cooperation in cases in which the victims were obnoxious or strangers. Skaggs described one case involving a victim who had been an annoyance to his neighbors: “Everyone in Nickerson says, ‘That’s no problem if he got killed! Why are you guys even bothering?’ ” he said.
Nearly every official who dealt closely with crime in Watts felt the same way. “They have their own businesses … their own law!” prosecutor Joe Porras said of the participants in the gang cases he tried in Compton Courthouse. “It’s a parallel world, and you are trying to bring your law into it.” Cops and prosecutors felt like door-to-door salesmen, trying to peddle a legal system no one wanted anything to do with. Prosecutor Grace Rai marveled at how much work it was just to get people to participate in proceedings at Compton Courthouse. To witnesses, jurors, and victims, “you can’t just say, ‘This is a violation of the law,’ ” Rai said. First, “you have to get them behind the law.”
Testifying in Compton Courthouse in late 2009, one young black man explained why he had not reported a killing he had been present at. “The place I live at—there’s rules and regulations behind living there,” he said. He lived in the territory of the Bounty Hunter gang. Pressed for details, he did not say whose rules they were, or how he had come to learn them—simply that they existed for him unquestionably, enforced by an implied threat that surrounded him, as ever-present as the roar of traffic from the elevated freeways. An attorney asked what would happen if he violated these mysterious “rules and regulations.” The young man answered with an impatient shrug: “Killed, shot—anything,” he said.
Back in the 1930s, the anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker wrote of the proscriptions of Jim Crow in exactly such terms. Powdermaker noted a conversation with a black woman about her fear of socializing with a white man: “When asked what she is afraid of, she laughs and says: ‘Don’t you know it is against the law?’ Further questions make it clear that she knows of no specific law … but the law to her is a vague and sinister force, transcending any body of definite rules.”
The alternate ghettoside “law” in Watts was exactly like this—a vague and sinister force transcending any body of definite rules. The shadow system had long ago evolved to the point that a mere hard look or
the sucking of a tooth conveyed its lethal force without further elaboration. People knew the “rules and regulations” and obeyed them.
At the same time, some Watts residents appeared to long for freedom from the oppressive menace of informal law. Many older gang members appeared miserable and talked constantly of “getting out.” In the privacy of the interrogation room, many proved willing to turn on fellow gang members, telling detectives that they secretly disliked them. Residents would still holler “One time!” at the cops. The term derived from the memory of police touring black neighborhoods once a day, making no real effort to address crime. “One time” was a stock anticop insult, just like “po-po” and “blue-eyed devil.” Yet it contained a plaintive note—a paradoxical suggestion that more times might be better.
And once in a while, street hustlers would make it clear that they would rather have formal justice if given the choice: they’d call 911. When the puzzled officers arrived, the hustlers would ask them to referee disputes: “My dope got ripped off! I want you to book him for robbery!”
Skaggs learned to think of his job as persuasion: selling formal law to people who distrusted it and who were answering to another authority—shadow law. The pitch had to be convincing and relentless. Ghettoside detective work was “ninety percent talking to people. Maybe a hundred percent,” Skaggs said.
The challenge left no room for self-doubt, no room to equivocate. Skaggs was made for it. He went back again and again to the same streets, the same houses, knocking over and over, rousting witnesses at dawn or late at night. He learned certain patterns of life in Watts—where junkies loiter, which couch a drug dealer might call home.
Skaggs’s manner of knocking was loud, persistent, and seemed to brook no opposition. He banged on windows using his department-issue flashlight, since most homes in Southeast had those steel security doors and it was hard to knock on their metal screens. If no one came, he banged some more. He moved to the next window and the next, banging and banging, as if he had all the time in the world. He might return several times that day. Sometimes people talked to him just to get him to go away.
“In the room” (which, in Southeast, literally meant a room, since there was no interrogation booth), Skaggs enveloped people with his conviction. Everything would be better once the truth came out—this was his axiom. His approach was neither coarse nor hostile. He simply bore down, relentless and businesslike. He talked of putting things right, of releasing burdens. He presented justice as psychological relief, even to suspects. He believed it was.
These were the skills that mattered because there were few mysteries among Southeast cases. The homicides were essentially public events—showy demonstrations of power meant to control and intimidate people. They took place on public streets, in daylight, often in front of lots of people.
Killers often bragged. Some were so brazen they posted public signs taking credit. Gloating graffiti was a common homicide clue. DLB fallen star hahaha!!! read one such public announcement in Watts. It had been spray-painted in an alley hours after a youth nicknamed Star was shot to death. (DLB stood for Denver Lane Bloods, who in this case were allied with the suspects from a neighboring gang.)
Families of the dead often heard rumors of who did it. Once in a while, a family member would report to police that the killers had attended the funeral, or paid them a menacing visit. An uncle in Southeast Division reported hearing the name of his nephew’s killer from friends. But he was hoping police would discover the killer’s identity without involving him. One mother in the Southwest Division reported that the killers of her son knocked on her door. They taunted her about her loss. If she told police, they would kill her too, they said.
“Everybody knows” was a phrase that cropped up a lot. Names buzzed on what Southeast detectives called the Ghetto Information Network—the GIN. But even when murders took place amid crowds of people, detectives were left with no witnesses. A score of people would see a murder; not one of them would testify.
To counter this, La Barbera taught his detectives to think of themselves as Madison Avenue impresarios. Their job wasn’t deducing—it was sales. They had to “sell ice cubes to an Eskimo!” he would say. The elegant business attire was part of this ethos. “People say, oh, you think you’re perfect,” La Barbera said. “Well, yeah! We’d better be.” He kept a whiteboard near his desk to track cases and leave messages. The salesman’s credo, “ABC—Always Be Closing,” was written at the top.
But it was not merely a sales job that detectives such as Skaggs perfected. Good ghettoside investigators projected something deeper to their wavering witnesses—something akin to pure conviction. It was no accident that the most successful among them were confident, reassuring. They made people feel they could handle their burdens.
In the early days of European law, the legal historian James Whitman said, state officials faced similar problems. Back when “vengeance cultures” permeated medieval society, murders often stemmed from feuds. Villages were small and, often, everyone knew who had committed the murder but no one wanted to speak in court. Whitman argues that many of our modern legal procedures, such as unanimous jury verdicts, actually began as efforts to coax cooperation—to provide safety and “moral comfort” to people who didn’t want to testify and who feared retaliation.
Whitman’s thesis has a medieval theological slant. But in other ways Skaggs and his colleagues personified the moral comfort he describes. They succeeded because South Central Los Angeles was a version of a medieval vengeance culture—a premodern setting, legally speaking. In the twelfth-century village, fama—rumors, in Latin—had already named a suspect. In Watts, the GIN usually had. In both, it was left to the state to confirm what everyone already knew. This was not a job for Sherlock Holmes. It was a job for a counselor—or prince.
THE NOTIFICATION
One winter morning in 2004, John Skaggs took the wheel of his sedan and headed out into the sun-washed streets of Watts. His mission was to tell a father that his son was dead.
With him was the most recent of a seemingly endless string of Southeast detective trainees, Mark Arenas, a thirty-four-year-old former gang officer raised in Downey. Arenas was trying to learn the ropes, and he was anxious not to appear the amateur. Arenas held a dim view of social dynamics in Watts. “The lack of responsibility!” he would exclaim in disgust. “Violence is accepted here.”
Skaggs and Arenas had been at a homicide scene that morning, a black man killed in the driver’s seat of his SUV. Skaggs had volunteered to tell the family. He took Arenas. “Ever done a notification?” Skaggs asked as he drove. Anything could happen during a notification. Loved ones of victims screamed, collapsed, or fainted. At the county hospitals, nurses were trained to prepare for being attacked. One colleague of Skaggs’s would always remember the notification he made in the case of twenty-five-year-old Ronald Tyson, shot dead in an alley near Central Avenue in 2003. When he told Tyson’s mother he had been murdered, she vomited.
Homicide notifications also carried some psychological risk for the people who carried them out. A coroner’s investigator fumed that people she met were curious about dead bodies, as if that were the hard part. “It’s not the gore. It’s the grief,” she said. Even if a notification went smoothly, “I walk out and I’m shaking and I’m suppressing the urge to cry,” said Bryan Hubbard, a trauma surgeon at California Hospital. An image stayed with Hubbard for years: He brought a mother to view the body of her little boy, dead from gunshots. She spent several minutes shaking his small, lifeless form, trying to wake him up.
For Skaggs, notifications were one more task that required skills not taught in the academy. He considered this a serious part of a young detective’s training. Arenas was feeling unsure and sought to impress Skaggs. So he cracked a joke, pretending he would deliver the news with tough-guy bravado: “Sorry to tell you—he took one to the head!” Arenas was still a gang officer at heart. In his milieu, a phrase such as “took one to the head” might mark one
as cool. Skaggs stared ahead at the wheel. Arenas shot him a look, tried to apologize, and trailed off. After an excruciating silence, Skaggs changed the subject.
Three years had passed since Skaggs had come to Southeast. Skaggs and Barling had rocketed through dozens of cases, working closely with La Barbera. By then, they were helping run the squad, functioning almost as La Barbera’s deputies. Shortages of manpower, supplies, and patrol and lab support still impeded investigations. Turnover remained high—Arenas was among the many recruits who would not remain in the unit long. But Skaggs, if anything, was more devoted to his craft than ever. He was dimly aware that the work had changed him, subtly reorienting his viewpoints on law enforcement and crime. He still spoke in the same vernacular as his cop friends. But his inward views had shifted.
It was something felt more than said—the culmination of scores of random observations that illuminated a moral dimension to homicide work that was absent from many other police functions. Skaggs now sensed his investigations addressed a deeper need in black neighborhoods than he had previously understood. This, in turn, colored other impressions. Arenas, for example, accused the division’s black residents of inferior values. But Skaggs had concluded that many residents connected to Watts murder cases were ordinary people, trapped by conditions of lawlessness. Coercion and intimidation lay behind much of their apparent “acceptance” of violence, he thought. Sometimes, arresting a young man for murder, he would reflect that things might have turned out differently had the suspect “grown up just four blocks away.” Skaggs also saw that many victims had no role in provoking the attacks that killed them. His colleagues insisted Watts had no real victims. But years later, a trace of anguish would tinge Skaggs’s voice when he talked of the many cases he’d handled in Southeast. His choice of words was telling: “All those innocent people!” he said.
