Ghettoside

by Jill Leovy

  Without pausing to consider what might happen, Skaggs shot off a blunt memo to his commander criticizing the existing organization and arguing that, given the scant number of cases, the West Bureau homicide investigation function should be centralized. He spelled out how such a centralized unit would work. Among other benefits, he argued, a change would ensure that young detectives would get consistent caseloads. They would learn better, he wrote. Getting enough cases had never been a problem in South Bureau, but in West Bureau, detectives went months between callouts.

  The commander liked the memo. Before Skaggs knew what had happened, he was being asked to head up a new centralized West Bureau homicide squad along the lines he’d suggested. Skaggs realized belatedly that he couldn’t back out. He remains in West Bureau. He is in the spotlight a little more. But he says the pace is slow. He misses the south end. He is nearing retirement, however, and he is unlikely to return.

  As Barbara Pritchett’s little brother neared his high school graduation, she looked forward, for the first time since she was very young, to freedom from child care. Then one of her sisters died of complications of childbirth. The baby survived. Pritchett took the new infant home, fed him and cared for him. She is raising him now—starting over with one more baby in her late forties. She still weeps about Dovon every time this writer calls on her. She remains in Watts. One of her nephews was recently murdered.

  Sam Marullo decided he could no longer stand being a gang officer. He shed his blue uniform for a tie and returned to working homicide. He is assigned again to South Bureau homicide squad, and has resumed being one of its most effective practitioners. He has finally been granted the lowest detective rank, D-1.

  Nathan Kouri works in the same unit. Pritchett offered a description of him that perhaps best describes his present status. “Nate,” she said, “is always Nate.” His boss is Rick Gordon, who calls Kouri one of the strongest investigators in the group. Sal La Barbera shifted jobs in the homicide group, working under the lieutenant and planning retirement. The “retal” cycle pitting Main Street Crips against Hoovers that began with events the week of Da’Quawn Allen’s killing continues as of this writing. A subsequent victim was Harold Germany, twenty-one, one of the young men hemmed up at Da’Quawn’s shrine in this narrative. That murder has not been solved. Another recent victim was Jarret Crump, twenty-one, a janitor on his way to dinner, mistaken for a Main Streeter because of the car he drove.

  Wally Tennelle continues to work at RHD and still solves cases with regularity. The Tennelles now have several grandchildren and are very involved in their lives. They remain in the same house where Bryant grew up.

  The motive for Bryant’s murder remains unclear. Skaggs believes that Starks and Davis may have been targeting Bryant’s friends down the block, and that Davis shot Bryant by mistake or as a proxy. Skaggs said that the details of the case suggest a personal grudge, not mere gang rivalry. It’s significant, he said, that in both Davis’s and Midkiff’s accounts, Starks’s recital of directions seems to indicate that he sought a remembered spot—a specific street. If Skaggs is right about this, it means that, like so many “gang” murders, this one was actually related to an argument, maybe a previous fight. And it means that Skaggs is probably also right about another point: Bryant’s hat didn’t matter much. Davis shot him because of where he was.

  It is difficult to gain more insight from Starks’s and Davis’s divergent accounts. However, Starks offered a version that, though unverifiable—and offered chiefly to underscore what he said was his minor role—has the sound of authenticity.

  He said that Bobby Ray Johnson, though well loved by some, was at times an obnoxious drunk. Before the murder, Johnson had punched an older, respected fellow member of the Bloccs while drinking. Powerful members of the gang plotted to kill him in revenge. Johnson needed to prove his loyalty, Starks said. This, he claimed, was the backdrop to the hit. Asked if these events led to Johnson’s murder months later, Starks shook his head. That was separate, he said—that fight involved a woman. As for who committed the still unsolved in-house killing of Bobby Ray Johnson, Starks grimaced: “Everybody knows, everybody knows!” he said.

  At this writing, homicides in Los Angeles County have fallen to levels that would have been unimaginable to Skaggs at the turn of the century, when he came to Southeast. By 2010, the year Starks and Davis were tried, homicide death rates for black men ages twenty to twenty-four had fallen to about 158 per 100,000, or less than half their peak in the Big Years, though of course this figure is still twenty or thirty times higher than the national mean. Killings have gone down further since. In the city of Los Angeles, the drop has been especially dramatic. There were 297 homicides in the city in 2011. By 2013, there were 251, a breathtaking decline. But the figures had a similar tilt as in years past: Three high-crime station areas—Southeast, Southwest, and Seventy-seventh—accounted for 109 homicides, or 43 percent of the city’s total. Nearly all the victims in the three divisions were men, more than three quarters of them were black (double the proportion of black people in the area’s population)—and 84 percent of the killings with known suspects were intrarace. Still, the slack has allowed LAPD investigative units to breathe a little—to better archive and investigate cold cases and to clear more new ones. Caseloads are falling. Detectives have more time and clearance rates are rising. There is no longer a need for the trailer behind the Southeast station: the LAPD at long last has been entering those cases into computer databases. The firearms laboratory recently adopted new technology to allow better, faster matches of bullets to revolvers.

  Some neutral factors, a few positive ones, and at least one negative one have helped drive the decline in murders. For the city of L.A., it is clear that demographic change is an important driver. The city’s black population is fast disappearing: black Angelenos were once nearly a fifth of the city’s population, but they made up a scant 9 percent in the 2010 census. Their numbers have been dropping steadily each year as the city’s black residents scatter to the exurbs. To some extent, their high homicide rates travel with them. But the change has also coincided with—at long last—a dramatic easing of the residential hyper-segregation that set the conditions for sky-high inner-city murder rates. As black people finally begin to integrate into more mobile and mixed communities, the Monster is in retreat.

  That change perhaps has been aided in part by a related development—an increase in public benefits paid to poor black people, particularly men, primarily in the form of SSI (Supplemental Security Income, a payment available to people with disabilities). One reason for this is prison reforms. The federal Second Chance Act in 2005 inspired new efforts to provide SSI to prisoners upon reentry; many prisoners qualify, since a third of the state’s inmates have been diagnosed with mental illness. As we have seen, autonomy counters homicide. Cold cash paid out to individuals is a powerful thing: this author has watched SSI transform many aspects of life in South Central Los Angeles over about a decade, but the change for indigent black men has been especially dramatic. Statistics reinforce these observations: enrollment of working-age African Americans in SSI in 2009 was nearly twice their representation in the population, and African American children made up nearly one-third of SSI recipients age fifteen to seventeen. African American recipients of SSI are more likely to be poor and less likely to be college educated than SSI recipients generally, suggesting this money is indeed finding its way into the hands of the urban poor—including adult men who historically have been cut out of social welfare programs.

  Money translates to autonomy. Economic autonomy is like legal autonomy. It helps break apart homicidal enclaves by reducing interdependence and lowering the stakes of conflicts. The many indigent black men who now report themselves to be “on disability”—many of them with mental disabilities, such as ADD and bipolar disorder—signal an unprecedented income stream for a population that once suffered near-absolute economic marginalization. An eight-hundred-dollar-a-month check for an unemp
loyed black ex-felon makes a big difference in his life. The risks and benefits of various hustles surely appear different to him. He can move, ditch his homeys, commit fewer crimes, walk away from more fights. Doubtless many people will criticize this trend and decry the expense of SSI. But this author can’t condemn a program that appears to have saved so many from being murdered or maimed.

  For those not convinced by humanitarian arguments, it’s worth noting that homicide is expensive, too. Health insurance for these same indigent black men through the new Affordable Care Act may change the picture further. Another factor reducing murder rates is a bleak one—large numbers of black men in prison. Imprisonment brings down homicide rates because it keeps black men safe, and they are far less likely to become victims in prison than outside it. California’s rate of imprisonment increased fivefold between 1972 and 2000. Homicide deaths among this largely black and Latino population of tens of thousands number just a handful per year. But this is, it need hardly be said, a rotten—and expensive—way to combat the problem. Other factors, such as the shift to cellphone sales of drugs, the abuse of legal pharmaceuticals, computer games that keep adolescents indoors, and the improved conduct of police (former chief Bernard Parks deserves much credit for the latter in L.A.), probably count, too.

  People are much safer, on the whole, in America than they used to be, and this is good. But anyone who tracks homicide in L.A. County and elsewhere still can’t escape the obvious: black men remain disproportionately victimized. Solving this problem deserves every honest effort. People may disagree about the remedies—particularly the balance between preventive and responsive measures—but they should not disagree about the problem’s urgency.

  The homicide problem lost two of its great intellectual prophets in the course of the events described in this book—William J. Stuntz and Eric Monkkonen. Both scholars believed that an understanding of violence must proceed from a study of the structure of law and the working of formal legal institutions. Both died young, of cancer. It remains for others to do the considerable work required to turn back the plague. Stuntz died in 2011. His pithy summation of the problem still applies: “Poor black neighborhoods see too little of the kinds of policing and criminal punishment that do the most good, and too much of the kinds that do the most harm.” Monkkonen, a professor at UCLA, died in 2005. He did not live to see the recent, stunning homicide declines here in L.A. But he left these lines for the future: “The challenge for the twenty-first century,” he wrote, “is to keep pushing for lower rates even when it seems as though this is happening automatically.”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This book grew out of reporting on homicide in Los Angeles extending from late 2001, when the Los Angeles Times put me on the police beat, to 2012, when I wrapped up the field research for this book.

  A year or two into the beat, I sought the LAPD’s permission to “embed” at its Seventy-seventh Street Division and was given a desk in the detectives’ squad room on the second floor of the station house. From then on, I focused on the streets of South Bureau and the squad cars and roll calls of the Seventy-seventh and neighboring Southeast stations, reporting on homicides and other crimes, talking to witnesses, bystanders, suspects, and families of victims. I first met Sal La Barbera during that period, and also John Skaggs and Chris Barling. Around that time, I began assembling the data used in these pages with the help of analysts within the LAPD, epidemiologists at the Injury and Violence Prevention Program at the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, and the staff of the Los Angeles County coroner’s office.

  In late 2006, I launched “The Homicide Report” on the Los Angeles Times website. This was an attempt to provide a comprehensive, day-by-day accounting of every homicide in the county. I reported about a thousand homicides for The Homicide Report over the course of the next two years, working mostly out of my car—a 2001 Ford Escort. I carried a police radio, went to crime scenes, talked up people I met on the street, and got to know police officers. By the time I started compiling the blog, I had already covered many homicides and was familiar with homicide statistics. Still, I found the project to be profoundly revealing. Suddenly, I was watching the statistics unfold in real time—living the data, not just reading it on a page. Every corpse, every weeping relative, and every sleep-deprived detective was linked to a data point in my hard drive, as if—in traversing the county’s four thousand square miles—I was guiding my Escort across a vast Excel file. I saw patterns I hadn’t seen before and found myself inventing new categories to keep my charts organized. “Group home.” “Party.” “Hangfire” (sheriff’s shorthand for cases in which victims linger in hospitals or in nursing homes). I will never look at statistics quite the same way again. I wrote briefly about Bryant Tennelle in 2007, and also about Dovon Harris, whose mother, Barbara Pritchett, I met when I knocked on her door a few days after his death.

  In mid-2008, the Times suspended The Homicide Report, and I began working on this book, researching and writing it in intervals over the next five years, between hiatuses to meet other work or personal obligations. Beginning in June 2008, I embedded myself once again in the Seventy-seventh, shadowing homicide detectives as I had in the early 2000s. Sam Marullo and Nathan Kouri had joined La Barbera’s squad by then, now working under the same roof with the Seventy-seventh and Southwest’s squads. For more than a year, I accompanied Southeast detectives to crime scenes, court hearings, and interviews, peeling off in the evenings and on weekends to visit victims’ families, attend funerals, or walk the streets. I spent subsequent months in follow-up interviews and library research.

  The events, scenes, and details described in this book were, in all cases, either directly observed by me or reconstructed after the fact using interviews with participants. Wherever possible, court documents, police reports, and other official records were used to verify particulars. All names are real names; some names were withheld due to safety considerations, with particular care extended to witnesses possibly facing reprisal.

  I have consistently had problems reconciling reported homicide data with my own data collected through real-time reporting. Officially reported clearance rates, as this book suggests, are frequently at odds with the data reported by detectives when they are asked, point-blank, “Were charges filed?” But to a surprising extent, straight tallies of homicides vary, too. There are unappreciated complexities involved in counting homicides, and these have caused me no small share of headaches.

  For this book, I have largely relied on lists of homicides assembled by the coroner’s office, cross-checked with police data, detective-squad tallies, and my own reporting, as this is the most immediate, detailed, and directly sourced information I could come by. The tables I’ve compiled include names of victims, circumstances of deaths, and, in many cases, observations made at crime scenes and funerals and information provided by families and detectives. Over the years, in search of clarity on clearance rates, I have conducted surveys of case outcomes by calling or visiting the assigned detectives or their field supervisors and asking for updates.

  For years now, I have tried to penetrate the mystery of disproportionate black homicide. Correlation is not causation. I wanted to know exactly what was happening and why. I’ve sought answers in reported facts and observations, and tried to avoid pat speculation and received wisdom. Mostly, I’ve relied on what I have myself seen or heard directly from those who are close to homicide. I have made deliberate efforts to listen to the bereaved—to seek out the parents, siblings, spouses, and children of black homicide victims, whose viewpoints are under-represented in our national debates over criminal justice. I tried to discipline myself to find people in great pain, from a sense that the sad and disturbing nature of this subject matter is one of the reasons it is avoided and underemphasized. These interviews, in particular, led me to consult scholarly research on the history of black homicide and the attitudes and policies of legal authorities toward it. So, although statistics are important—the
high homicide rate for black men is, after all, the reason I wrote this book—I am with John Skaggs in his preference for the field and the unmediated detail of lived experience. This book is my attempt to relate what I’ve learned—a circumstantial case, to be sure, but the one I saw.

  For Christopher

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would not have happened without the faithful and keenly intelligent efforts of my brother, Steven Leovy, who read every draft, checked facts, and advised and argued with me through every stage, despite his own full-time career and duties. My brother, an engineer, was an unlikely participant in this. But he contributed on every level, from deep issues of writing and story-telling to small matters of jargon and typos, and also provided moral support and every manner of practical assistance. I cannot thank him in any manner that would equal his contribution. I can only reiterate that his commitment to this project is the reason it exists.

  Many other people helped in ways great and small. I will not name all of them here, but they include my editors and colleagues at the Los Angeles Times, who launched and supported the efforts that supplied the context for this book. They include John Spano, Sam Enriquez, Miriam Pawel, Doug Smith, Sandi Poindexter, and especially Gale Holland, one-of-a-kind editor and friend, who oversaw the Homicide Report blog and also read drafts of this book. I owe gratitude to scores of people in the LAPD, many of whose names do not appear here but who brooked my intrusions for the best of reasons—to make sure I got it right. A short list must include Matt Mahoney, Glenn Krejci, Pat Gannon, Dorayya Dasari, Gerry Pantoja, Roger Allen, Rick Gordon, David Garrido, Carlos Velasquez, Kyle Jackson, Paul Vernon, Mike Owens, Brent Josephson, and especially Kerri Potter and Mark Hahn. Very special thanks to Tom Eiman, whose brief mention in this book belies his selfless, thoughtful contributions. Thanks also to William Bratton, Charlie Beck, Earl Paysinger, Andy Smith, Rick Jacobs, Jim McDonnell, and Willie Pannell for access, multiple interviews, and general transparency, and also to the crew of South Bureau Criminal Gang Homicide. Special appreciation to Bernard C. Parks, who has generously enlightened me for years with his unmatched knowledge of the LAPD. Finally, I must recognize the late Kenneth O. Garner, who died midway through my work. Garner believed in truly open public institutions and was of great assistance.