Tim and Bob dealt with Sylvester Scott several times during their years in the Compton P.D., having been introduced to him by a higher-up in the department, Reggie Wright, Sr. Scott was an OG by the time the detectives met him in the eighties. According to Scott, the Pirus were created to directly combat the Crips. (Scott died on May 12, 2006 after being shot by his girlfriend.)
Pirus show off their artillery.
To distinguish themselves, they wore red - the school color of Centennial High, which most attended - and called each other “Blood.” From the time of the group’s formation, all Blood-affiliated gangs in Compton would refer to themselves as “Pirus.” Blood-affiliated gangs formed in Los Angeles and surrounding areas mostly referred to themselves as “Bloods,” although there were a few Piru sets outside of Compton, as far away as San Diego. Over time they would even change the C in Compton (C’s stood for Crips) to a B for Blood and refer to the city as “Bompton.”
***
By the late seventies, the violent crime rate had soared. The murder rate climbed higher each year. Compton’s demographics had changed drastically and continued to do so as more Blacks and Latinos moved in and more whites moved out. The sprawling Sears Department Store on North Long Beach Boulevard - once a bustling and thriving retail business - had closed down and was boarded up. After that anchor was gone, other businesses packed up and left due as the city’s crime rates escalated in the face of factors such as high unemployment, gang activity, prostitution, and drug addiction. Those vacating businesses were replaced with liquor stores, bars, and fast food joints. Alcoholics, drug addicts, prostitutes, and gang members began to dominate North Long Beach Boulevard and much of the city.
By 1982, Compton was almost eighty percent Black and fifteen percent Latino, including a number of undocumented immigrants. The few whites who remained, along with small segments of other nationalities, made up just five percent of the population, which had now swelled to nearly 85,000 people[16]. Almost every neighborhood had a Black gang and a Latino one. Because of high unemployment rates that affected the whole country, particularly urban communities where there was poor education and an imbalance of opportunities, many residents, almost twenty-five percent, lived below the poverty level and received welfare from the county. Shifting demographics would continue over the next two decades. (By the year 2000, the city would be approximately sixty percent Latino.)
Compton, in the early eighties, was no longer just the hub of Los Angeles County. It was now the hub of crime.
Irish and Italian gangs in 1920’s Chicago had made drive-by shootings famous. These types of shootings were becoming par for the daily course in The CPT. Director John Singleton’s 1991 film Boyz n the Hood was how many in America became aware of the prevalence of drive-by shootings in South Central, but anyone who lived in Compton during the eighties already knew of them.
Many residents feared possibly finding themselves in the middle of a drive-by. Some lost innocent family members - adults, children, babies - who collaterally caught stray bullets during these violent outbursts. They never knew when one was going to erupt because, when it came to gang rivalries, vendettas and payback were constants, with little regard to the consequences.
A stranger driving through Compton during this time would have been met by the city limits sign “COMPTON,” all tagged-up with gang graffiti. The graffiti on the wall just north of the city limits sign read: “Welcome to Santana Blocc - ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK.” If said stranger chose to continue into Compton, he or she would see gang members everywhere, cruising the streets, sporting their colors, and repping their sets. Every neighborhood had been claimed. The whole place was tagged.
As that stranger neared the south city limits, there was a boarded-up “rock house” - a place where crack cocaine had been sold and used - that was riddled with bullets. Headstones with the names of dead gang members and “WELCOME TO THE WARZONE” were painted on the wall.
This was a version of Dante’s Hell, except there was no Virgil to act as a guide. A stranger entered at his or her peril. Many of the residents lived in daily dread. It was hard to escape violence, and the police force had its proverbial hands full trying to stem a tide that was rising higher every day.
***
By the time Tim and Bob joined the Compton Police Department - one in 1982, the other in 1983 - Crips and Pirus were in full effect throughout the city. The South Side Crips and eastside-based MOB Piru had both recently formed. (“MOB” was short for “Member of Bloods.”) Overall, there were approximately fifty-five gangs in Compton at the time.
“WELCOME TO THE WARZONE” graffiti in Compton.
It was an epic number of gangs for a city that was just ten square miles.
Neither of them could be prepared for what they were stepping into when they first hit the streets as police officers, nor for the level of violence that would escalate over the years.
They had no choice but to learn quickly and adapt.
2
THE GREATEST CITY ON EARTH
Timothy M. Brennan was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1959 and grew up in the suburb of Park Ridge, near O’Hare International Airport. In the late fifties, the city of Chicago and the Federal Aviation Administration had already begun shifting O’Hare to become the area’s primary airport, directing the majority of commercial air traffic away from Midway Airport, which had become overcrowded.
He saw lots of planes come and go. Not long into adulthood, he would be ready to leave Chicago as well.
Tim’s paternal great uncle Chicago P.D. Officer William J. Brennan
His family had a long history of working in construction and law enforcement. His father, Richard Brennan, and his brothers Mike and Pat were all carpenters. His mother Madeleine had been a longtime secretary and matron for the Park Ridge Police Department. Both of his grandfathers and his great uncle were cops for the Chicago Police Department from the 1920’s through the 1950’s. They worked through the Prohibition-era gang wars that erupted between Johnny Torrio and Al Capone’s Italian crime mob The Chicago Outfit and their main rival, George “Bugs” Moran and his Irish crew the North Side Gang.
It was practically in Tim’s blood to have an understanding of how to deal with gangs.
***
He joined the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve when he was seventeen-years-old and still in high school. He was stationed in number of places: New Jersey. Virginia. Louisiana. Illinois. He worked construction and earned his high school diploma by going to night school.
The winters in Chicago took their toll and Tim began to long for someplace warmer. In February of 1981 - when he was twenty-one, soon to turn twenty-two - he packed up his clothes and motorcycle in the back of his mini pickup truck and headed west. He had twelve hundred dollars in his pocket. He wanted two things: a new life and to be a cop. Tim wanted to be a real cop, in an area with a high crime rate where he could do genuine police work.
Tim’s maternal great-grandfather Chicago P.D. Officer Robert J. Creasey
Tim’s paternal grandfather Chicago P.D. Officer Matthew J. Brennan
Tim’s maternal grandfather Chicago P.D. Officer Henry Ramsey
He first tried looking for work in Arizona, then Nevada. When he got down to five hundred dollars, he decided to try his luck in Long Beach, California.
His money was running out, which limited him finding a place to stay. He stored his bike and lived in his pickup truck for four months until he saved enough through construction work to get an apartment in downtown Long Beach.
One day while reading the paper, he saw an ad by the Compton Police Department for police officers. Even though Compton wasn’t ranked because its population was under a hundred thousand, the city consistently had murder rates that topped those of the nation’s largest cities.
He was excited. This would be a chance for him to be a real cop. To do some real police work.
He applied.
In January 1982, Tim joined the force. It was almost a year after
he’d left Chicago.
He was one of six Compton Police Department recruits who graduated from Rio Hondo College’s Police Academy, located in the hills just above Whittier, in April of 1982. Of the recruits who graduated along with him - Henry “Bud” Johnson, Rick Petty, Marcos Palafox, Ted Brown, and Joseph Rene Fontenot - only Rick Petty and Tim would still be on the Compton police force when it was shut down in 2000.
After the academy, the recruits went right into training. They met the Compton police chief, James Carrington. A man of few words, he was near the end of his career and didn’t seem to think much of them.
It was a time when the department was ruled by peer pressure. Many of the veteran officers had been hired in the fifties and sixties, a period when no one dared to question their authority. Political correctness wasn’t a consideration back then. No one bothered to measure their actions and words. The stress the recruits experienced in the academy carried over to the streets. As a trainee, it was made clear they were all expendable. Some never even made it through training. Others left for less demanding police departments. The pace in the streets was intense and relentless. Many cops were burned out after just a few years, with good reason: Compton was out of control.
At the time, the drug PCP - phencyclidine, aka “angel dust” - was just becoming popular in South Central and Compton. It was classified as a dissociative drug, a hallucinogen, which meant that the user, a “duster,” didn’t have a reality-based perception, from a multi-sensory standpoint, of what was going on. That made the drug bad news in the worst way. When someone did PCP, he or she was often extraordinarily strong because they couldn’t feel any pain, so trying to subdue or calm that person was a nightmare. The person would typically be sweating profusely, breathing heavily, and have rigid muscles, along with horizontal and vertical nystagmus (involuntary eye movement). Being in a struggle with someone hopped up on PCP meant literally fighting for your life. It sometimes took five or six cops to subdue one violent duster.
Someone in the department came up with a clever way to deal with them. Years later, younger officers were told about this proposed solution and they’d lose it laughing, unable to believe that it was a real consideration by the department.
During orientation, Sergeant Joe Flores had taken the recruits out back behind the station to the Heritage House grass lawn and grabbed a blue plastic duffel bag from the trunk of his car. Only supervisors had these duffel bags. Inside were ten-by-ten-foot nets with ropes at the bottom that acted as drawstrings.
“This will keep you from getting hurt fighting these guys,” Flores had said.
The recruits practiced, trying to figure out the proper way to use them. One of them would throw a net over another recruit, then pull on the rope, which would tighten around the recruit and sweep him to the ground. During practice it worked perfectly, effortlessly. Flores was convinced this was going to make life better for cops.
Out on the streets, however, the recruits heard differently.
“Those nets are a joke,” officers told them. No one ever called requesting to use them. Whoever had come up with the idea for the net hadn’t considered how violent dusters were. They were just as wild and strong inside of the net, only now, they needed to be untangled from it, which complicated things. Officers wound up tangled in the net themselves as they tried to free a duster from it. It was a mess all around.
Aside from the training in the back lot behind the station, those nets never made it out of the trunk of Flores’ car. They did, however, make for a really good story years later.
***
There were several people within the Compton P.D. who schooled Tim (and Bob, when he was hired), on what was what in the streets when it came to gang wars. Sergeant Rick Baker, who had grown up in Compton, was an expert on Latino gangs. He and Reggie Wright, Sr., an expert on Black gangs, taught rookies the history of gangs in the city.
Reggie knew Black gangs better than almost anyone. He had grown up in the Imperial Courts housing project in Watts, just north of Compton. Imperial Courts, along with Nickerson Gardens and Jordan Downs housing projects, were considered the worst in the Los Angeles area, with high crime rates driven by gang activity.
Reggie came from a large family. One of eighteen kids, he seemed to know everyone in South Central and Compton. He had an outgoing personality and could talk to anybody, a skill perhaps honed during his years as a meter reader for Southern California Edison. He and his brother, Giles joined the Compton police force in 1977. They were hired by their cousin, Tom Cocheé, Compton’s (and California’s) first Black chief of police. Being related to the chief didn’t exactly endear Reggie and Giles to other Compton cops.
Reggie was as an expert in dealing with Black gangs. He was an exceptional negotiator and could diffuse tense standoffs between cops and gangs. Gang members knew him as “The Reg,” and would ask for him specifically. Because of this, he’d end up solving murders and crimes for everyone in the department. Other cops saw Reggie’s way of doing things as him coddling the gangs, but he got results.
As a rookie, Tim learned quickly that most of the crimes in Compton could be tracked back to gangs and that their survival depended on creating an environment of fear and intimidation. He learned who the leaders, which gangs had rivalries, and which ones had alliances. Gangs had a hand in everything that was happening in the streets. Thefts, burglaries, robberies, stolen cars, shootings, murders. Their main thing, however, was drugs. This was the backbone that supported everything else. Pills (uppers/downers) and marijuana had been mainstays throughout most of the seventies, but PCP had taken over during the late seventies and early eighties. Money from PCP sales allowed the gangs to buy guns and to run their operations.
Tim’s early days at the Compton P.D.
By the time he’d been on the job for a year, rock cocaine would begin its rise in Compton and South Central, growing to large scale use within two years. It would ultimately become an epidemic across the country and be the life blood of the gangs in the city, escalating crime and addiction rates to staggering levels.
***
As a rookie, Tim was assigned to Training Officer Preston Harris. Harris had grown up on the west side of Compton in the area claimed by the Lantana Blocc Crips (not to be confused with the Santana Blocc Crips on the east side of the city). Harris was a tall, athletically-built Black man who wore glasses and had a Jheri curl. They would fall out years later, but when he was Tim’s training officer, Tim had a great deal of respect for him. Harris taught him how to be a cop in one of the toughest cities in America.
Tim was schooled on Day One, first at the briefing, where he was unceremoniously yelled at and barely acknowledged by veteran officers, a tactic he soon learned was typical treatment of rookies. Then he was schooled by Harris when he took Tim out to their patrol car.
He walked the rookie through how to use the lights, the siren, and the radio. Then he looked Tim in the eye and said: “There are several things you’d better never forget.”
Tim listened closely, an apt pupil.
“If we get in a fight,” Harris said, “you better fight to the end. We win fights.” Harris continued, “Memorize the map and know where you are at all times.”
Tim understood. A good cop, a smart and effective one, had to know the area he was navigating.
“Don’t be a snitch.”
This was old-school policing. Much of that mindset could still be found in police departments around the country. There was no social media and ubiquitous cellphones recording everything, holding cops to accountability. Compton, back then, was literally the wild, wild west, and these were the unwritten rules. Rookies were taught to follow them at the risk of being frozen out, or worse, if they didn’t.
Harris dropped one more gem.
“If we do a car stop and your partner calls you by his own name, get ready to start shooting. You understand?”
“Okay,” replied Tim.
Harris started the car and off into the nigh
t they went. More lessons would come over the next days and weeks. Some of them were taught through instruction and observation, but a good deal were learned hands-on in the streets.
***
That first night on patrol with Harris, Tim had no clue what was happening. He didn’t know what was being said on the radio. He didn’t know where they were in the city. He didn’t even know what the hell they were doing. One of their first calls came in for a duster.
They headed to Tichenor Street and Willowbrook Avenue. People were standing around pointing at a large Black man with no shirt on. The man was sweating heavily, his arms and legs rigid and extended. He stared straight ahead with a crazed look in his eyes.
“Get his attention,” Harris said to Tim as he headed toward the man.
“How?” Tim asked, basically on his own to figure out what to do. Harris was focused on his strategy for subduing the duster.
Unsure of himself, Tim walked up to the man and started asking him stupid questions. The duster couldn’t understand any of it. Harris quietly came up behind the duster, put his arm around the guy’s neck, and wrestled him to the ground. Tim just stood there.
“Handcuff him!” Harris yelled as he tussled with the duster, who was very strong and clearly out of it.
Tim tried to handcuff the guy, but the duster was wild. The rookie flopped around on the ground with both the duster and Harris, trying to put on the cuffs. He finally managed to get them on. In the process, his uniform had become dirty and torn, and this was only his first night. They took the man to jail, booked him, cleared the paperwork, and headed back out.
Another call came in. Another duster. This time at 700 West Raymond.
“Must be a live batch out there tonight,” Harris said.
A “live batch” meant some really strong PCP. Harris looked at Tim.
Once Upon A Time in Compton Page 3
