Mikey laughed. “Shit happens fast out here, rookie.”
Bob stood there, dumbstruck.
“Let’s go,” Mikey said, still laughing.
Bob was in a sort of quiet reverie, wondering who this crazy guy was he’d been sent out with on his first day. The shift was just getting started. It wasn’t even dark out. He had to spend eight more hours with Mikey. Things had gotten off to a wild start.
To Bob’s surprise, he found himself amped for more.
***
Mikey and Bob went back to the station. It took about two hours to process the guys they’d arrested and write up the reports before they could get back in the field. By that time, Bob was ready for some more action. It was a bit unnerving for him to not know the area or what could be lurking around any corner. There were times when he wasn’t even sure what direction they were traveling, but Bob was excited; it felt like a point of no return was happening inside of him. He instinctively knew that, with this job in Compton, his life was never going to be the same.
He was right.
***
As he and Mikey rode around, Bob observed everything, including what was inside their car. He noticed a baseball in the center console and, at one point, picked it up. It was hard, solid. The world “FREEZE” was written on it in big black letters.
“What’s this for?”
Mikey started laughing.
“What?” Bob asked. Why was this ball so funny?
Mikey glanced at the ball, then at him.
“I keep that in case a motherfucker tries to run.”
He could tell from the rookie’s face that he didn’t get it.
“Say I have to get out and chase someone,” Mikey explained. “Before I do, I throw this ball at him as hard as I can and I yell, ‘Freeze, motherfucker!’” He laughed. “Sometimes it works.”
Bob laughed. Mikey couldn’t be serious. He was crazy as shit.
Bob found out, however, in the months and years to come, that Mikey had a pretty mean arm. He was quite the ballplayer. There were lots of stories floating around about him really using that ball. Supposedly, he’d once knocked a fleeing suspect out cold. No one knew whether that story was real or not. It was more like an urban legend. But from Bob’s first night with Mikey and seeing how he was, it wasn’t much of a stretch for him to believe it.
Mikey Paiz
***
Bob’s first night out with Mikey was almost over.
“5-Adam,” the dispatcher called over the car radio. That was Mikey and Bob’s call sign. “Shots fired at Oleander and Peach. Possible gunshot victims at the location.”
Bob’s heart raced. Shots fired! They were about to get into some real cop stuff.
Mikey picked up the mic, disgusted.
“10-4.” He put the mic back in place, then pounded the steering wheel. “Fuck!”
“What’s up?” Bob asked, confused by Mikey’s reaction. He was learning everything this first night on the fly.
Mikey was super-pissed. “We get off pretty soon. I wanted to drink some beer tonight.” He breathed heavily. “These motherfuckers. And I got a rookie, too? Fuck!”
Bob couldn’t show it, but he was excited. He didn’t give a shit about the fact that the shift was almost over. He was about to see a gunshot victim.
Mikey floored it to Oleander and Peach. When they arrived, Bob saw two guys on the sidewalk. One was lying down. The other was sitting on the curb. Several people were standing around. He and Mikey got out of the car. When the bystanders saw them approach, half of them immediately dispersed. Bob was riveted by the two wounded guys. He couldn’t take his eyes off them.
Mikey grilled the people standing around. “Any of you see what happened?”
“I didn’t see shit, man!” someone said.
The guy on the ground was a young Black kid. His left upper thigh was bleeding. There was a small bullet hole in his black pants. He groaned, clearly in a lot of pain.
The guy on the curb had on a white wifebeater. He was bleeding from what looked to be a graze wound on his right shoulder. Both he and the kid had on red shoes, red belts, and had red bandanas. Bob might have been green, but he knew enough to know that meant they were Pirus.
More units arrived, along with the paramedics. Bob didn’t know what to do, so he hung back and watched as it all played out.
“Payback is coming!” someone screamed.
People obviously knew who’d done this.
Bob watched Mikey talking to the two victims. He took down their names and tried to get statements from them. “You know who did this?” he asked the one in the wifebeater.
“I didn’t see shit.”
“What about you?” he asked the other.
“Fuck that,” the kid groaned. “I don’t know shit. I need to go to the hospital.”
Those were the statements. No one wanted to tell him anything. Everyone, it seemed, had an attitude about even being asked.
This was Bob’s introduction to the world of gangs. Gangbanging 101. Nobody was giving up anybody. Take a lick, take a bullet, but keep your mouth shut when the cops showed up.
The paramedics treated the wound of the guy in the wifebeater, bandaged him up, and he walked off into the night. They took the kid to Martin Luther King Hospital.
Bob watched as Mikey collected .22 caliber casings in the street. He walked over to Bob.
“Fuck these motherfuckers,” he said. “They’re the ones who got shot. If they don’t wanna tell me who did it, they can go fuck themselves. I ain’t begging them.”
It took him and Bob about 35 minutes to clear the scene. Mikey was happy because he got off on time. Now he could go have his beers.
***
Bob was still excited when went home that first night. He told Kathy everything. She listened, closely watching his face.
“Your eyes are all lit up,” she said. “This is it for you, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” he replied, knowing his life was never going to be the same. “I love this shit!”
4
ON THE NIGHT SHIFT
Tim and Bob spent their careers on the swing shift, or the P.M. shift, as it was known. This was before they became partners and after. Everything went down on the P.M. shift, and that wasn’t an understatement.
Because gangbangers were often out during the night, they didn’t start to appear until around noon and later. That’s when most criminal activity happened. By nightfall, things would be popping.
Compton was a predominantly Black city. That included the mayor, the council, the police chiefs, and the police department. The latter was unusual in that regard. Police departments around the country, irrespective of demographics, tended to be predominantly white. Most of the officers who were promoted or received special assignments in Compton were Black. That didn’t bother Tim and Bob. They loved patrolling. The streets were where the action went down, so that was where they wanted to be.
***
Early in his career, Tim worked with a guy named Bobby Baker. Baker was considered the best dope cop in the department. He was sharp. Street smart. Small, thin, and only about 5’9” or so, Baker was fearless, a formidable presence.
The Black guys in the department used to say that a white guy couldn’t work dope, not in a place like Compton, but when Baker came along he proved them wrong. He brought in more dope dealers, larger amounts of cocaine, and shut down more PCP labs than anybody, often besting the work of the actual narcotics team. Baker passed his skills on to Tim, teaching him how to work dope as well. Whenever they had a break in patrolling, Tim would drop Baker off in an area near drug dealers. Baker would hide in bushes or in a tree and watch them make their transactions. Whenever someone drove up and made a purchase, Baker would radio the description to Tim, who waited around the corner to make the arrest. After they made three or four busts, Baker would radio Tim to close in and the two of them would arrest the dealers and seize their product and any guns.
Working dope me
ant working the gangs. Dope was typically their main source of income. With gangs came guns and violence. Once caught in the act, hardly anyone ever surrendered without drama. It was typical for arrests to involve long foot chases and fights. Baker and Tim’s uniforms were often torn, dirty, or bloody.
One evening, circa 1985, Baker and Tim were on their patrol sometime around dusk, driving the 500 block of West Elm. This was the turf of the Tree Top Pirus (TTP), whose main trade was PCP sales, which were heavy in that area.
Baker and Tim spotted Carlos Moore, a known drug dealer, walking away from a car after just making a sale. They could smell the PCP in the air. The scent was strong, undeniable. They sped over to Carlos and hemmed him up.
Carlos took off running. Baker, riding shotgun, jumped out and took off after him on foot, heading northbound, cutting through a rear yard. Tim sped around to Cedar Street to try to head Carlos off. Just as he turned onto Cedar, he heard shots fired from the yard Baker had cut through.
Tim thought Baker must have popped off some warning shots over Carlos’ head to get him to surrender, but suddenly there was Carlos running past the front of the car, across the street, onto the grounds of a school just ahead. Carlos scaled the fence, then turned toward Tim and fired off several shots. Tim realized it must have been Carlos who fired the shots he’d heard earlier. Shit! Where was Baker? Had he been shot?
Just that quickly, Carlos was ghost, having disappeared into the bushes around the school. Tim, panicked, radioed for help.
“Shots fired at officers! Code 9!” A request for immediate backup. Tim’s heart was pounding. What if Baker was dead?
“No backup available,” the dispatcher responded.
“What!”
It was a surprise, and yet not. This was Compton. On many occasions during the P.M. shift, the department often found itself understaffed, with only three or four two-man units. There were plenty of times when there was more crime happening than the teams were able to handle. If multiple shootings or homicides occurred at the same time, all units might be busy at crime scenes. That meant if a team needed backup, they were shit out of luck.
Cops working in Compton learned fast that sometimes a unit had to get situations handled alone. They had to be prepared for that as a very real option.
Tim’s panic was escalating. He had to go find Baker. Just as he was about to get out of the car, Baker radioed that he was okay. Less than a minute later, he ran over to their vehicle and got inside.
An L.A.S.D. helicopter had been monitoring Baker and Tim’s frequency.
“Did I hear that you guys are being shot at and there’s no units available?” an incredulous voice asked over the radio.
“Yes!”
“I’ll come and help,” said the voice.
That was the difference between the Compton P.D. and the Sheriff’s Department. In Compton, sometimes there was no backup. The sheriffs, however, were always down to help everyone from surrounding stations.
The helicopter soon appeared overhead. It spotted Carlos and put lights on so he could easily be seen. Baker and Tim went after him on foot, hopping over the fence. He was in plain sight now, but they hung back, thinking he might open fire again. Carlos spun around, gun in his hand. Before they could react, he dumped it. He had already spent six rounds; the gun was empty. That didn’t mean he was finished. He still wanted to fight. He rushed at Tim. Tim had a gun and a flashlight. He pulled out the flashlight, using it as a weapon. Baker jumped in. Carlos gave up quickly, bleeding from the blows he’d taken.
Tim thanked the L.A.S.D. Air Unit, recovered the gun that Carlos had dumped, and handled the shooting scene investigation. When the shift ended, before he left, he made a point of letting the rest of the guys know that he wasn’t happy about him and Baker being on their own with no backup, especially in a situation where the suspect was shooting at them.
It was what it was. It was what came with the territory working the P.M. shift in Compton.
Over the course of Baker and Tim working together, they arrested many suspects and took down several dope houses, including large amounts of PCP, cocaine, and guns.
It was a big part of how Tim learned about gangs, and furthered prepared him for the work he would do once he was partnered with Bob.
***
Bob also worked with other partners during his early years. Like Tim, he too found himself in plenty of situations where he and his partners were caught out in the streets without adequate support. The shortage of radios was a continuous problem. A dangerous one. Sometimes there were no radios at all, which was ridiculous.
Bob was riding with Bud Johnson on a night where they didn’t have a handset when a call came in for a family disturbance on 133rd Street. When they arrived, yelling and screaming could be heard inside the house. This kind of thing wasn’t uncommon.
As soon as they were inside, the family that had been fighting teamed up and directed their rage at Bob and Johnson. Things escalated to where the two cops needed backup. It was just them against a whole family.
This was one of those moments when having a handset was crucial, but this was classic Compton, circa the eighties. A handset was a luxury. There was only the radio outside in their car.
“Go ask for a Code 9!” Johnson shouted at Bob.
Bob didn’t want to leave Johnson by himself to possibly get fucked up by this very riled-up family where he was now seen as the enemy, but there wasn’t much of a choice. Bob dashed out to the car and grabbed the mic.
“Code 9!” he yelled, and ran back inside to help Johnson. By this time, the fighting had commenced. All the family members were in on it, including the women, who were attacking both Johnson and Bob. They jumped on the cops’ backs, throwing blows in what was now a full-on melee. Bob and Johnson kept flinging them off, fighting them back as long as they could, which seemed like forever. Backup arrived pretty quickly, but a couple of minutes was a long time when it was just two people fighting an entire pissed-off family.
It was insane. Being out in the field like that without radios put police officers in life-or-death situations or, at the very least, dangerous moments where they could potentially get clobbered. It happened enough times to the point where the cops came together and complained. The city finally broke down and purchased handsets. The fact that a basic and necessary piece of equipment had to be begged for was quite telling in terms of what it was like working Compton in the eighties.
***
Bob would have several good partners during that period. He worked with Eric Perrodin, Angie Myles, Juan Pena, and Duane Bookman.
Bookman was a 6’2 dark-skinned Black guy with a short afro. He was senior to Bob and funny as hell, but he had a reputation on the streets - where he worked dope - for kicking ass.
One night while working together, Bookman and Bob decided to stir up some action on the 1300 block of East Glencoe Street. The area was known for drug sales. There was one particular dope house run by a Samoan gang aligned with the South Side Crips.
Bookman and Bob donned jackets over their uniforms. Bob carried a twelve-gauge shotgun under his. They parked on Greenleaf Street, cut through some yards, then hid in the bushes across the street from the Samoan gang house. Two marked units were around the corner on Long Beach Boulevard, waiting to be called.
Several gang members, about six or so, stood out front doing drug transactions. The main dealer was among them, a huge Samoan guy who ran the whole operation. Bookman and Bob remained in the bushes, watching it all go down.
Bookman looked at Bob. “You ready?”
Bob was ready.
They emerged from the bushes and walked across the street. They knew the gangsters would be armed. Bookman and Bob were in plain jackets so it wouldn’t be clear right away who they were. Since Bob was white, he walked behind Bookman so they wouldn’t see him. The gangbangers would see the Black guy first and maybe not go on the offensive as quickly.
The gangbangers noticed them, startled. It was as if B
ookman and Bob materialized from nowhere. They stared as Bookman and Bob approached. Once they were within fifteen feet, Bob whipped out the shotgun from under his jacket and racked in a round.
“Police, motherfuckers!” he yelled. “Get on the ground!” Bookman called in the backup as Bob went full Dirty Harry.
Three of the gangbangers dropped to the ground. Bob noticed one of them toss away a gun. The other three - including the main dealer, the huge guy - headed for the house. They made it inside, shutting the door behind them. Bookman was on their heels as the two marked cars that had been waiting screeched up to the house.
“Watch the guys on the ground!” Bob told the arriving cops as he rushed over to help Bookman, who was busy kicking in the door of the dope house.
Bookman burst inside and caught the main dealer in the living room. He slammed the guy to the ground. Bob, still holding his shotgun, kicked one of the other gangbangers. The guy went flying over the couch. When he landed, Bob was leaning over him, the barrel of the shotgun right in his face.
“You move and I’ll blow your fucking head off!” he said.
What would eventually become the fever-pitch War on Drugs was starting to get its footing. Gangbanging dope dealers like the guys at this house, helped create addicts and brought guns and violence into the community. They were seen as death merchants, and were treated as such.
Bookman handcuffed the main dealer as more backup arrived. The house was full of people who were known back then as “cluck-heads” - users, someone hooked on cocaine. A huge cache of weapons and drugs was also discovered in the house. Bookman and Bob were both riding an adrenaline high from what they’d accomplished by taking this place down.
They high-fived each other.
This was cowboy stuff, what real crime-fighting was all about, and Bob loved it. He was making a name for himself in the department for not being afraid to chase down gangsters.
***
For a while, Tim worked with an officer named Myron Davis. The two of them had a lot of fun together doing high-octane, action-packed policing. Myron was energetic and a super-fast runner. That worked out well because dope dealers and people who carried guns loved to run when they were about to be arrested. A lot of people weren’t built for giving chase, but Myron and Tim were. They built a reputation for catching criminals.
Once Upon A Time in Compton Page 5
