Willowbrook—the flashpoint of all this nigger voodoo.
He went into it in broad daylight. The heat was somewhere up in the 90s. The fires added some heat. His riot gear added some more. South L.A. was all heat and frenzy.
Looters were gutting liquor stores. Looters were guzzling brand-name stuff right there. Looters were pushing shopping carts down the street. The carts were chock-full of booze and TV sets.
Gunshots popped continuously. You couldn’t tell who was shooting who. The National Guard was out in force. They looked young and dumb and scared and plain trigger-happy.
You couldn’t patrol logically. Too much came at you too fast. You had to snag looters at random. You had to work by whim and the stimulus of the moment. You couldn’t gauge the direction of gunshots. You couldn’t trust the guardsmen not to spray rounds and kill you with ricochets.
It was uncontainable disorder. It grew in direct proportion to their attempts to control it. A deputy was pushing a crowd back. A looter grabbed his shotgun. It discharged and blew his partner’s brains out.
It went on and on. The action dispersed and reconstellated unexpectedly. He worked three whole days of it. He shagged dozens of looters and lost weight from heat exposure and adrenaline overload.
The action tapped out from some kind of mass exhaustion. Maybe the heat wore the rioters down. They made their statement. They brightened up their shitty lives. They gorged themselves with cheap booty and convinced themselves they’d gained more than they lost.
The cops lost their collective cherry.
Some denied it. They attributed the riot to a specific series of criminally spawned events. Their logic of cause- and-effect went no deeper.
A lot of cops went into default mode. Unruly niggers were unruly niggers. Their inbred criminal tendencies should now be suppressed even more rigorously.
He knew better. The riot taught him that suppression was futile. You don’t burn down your own world for no good reason. You couldn’t shut people down or keep people out. The more you tried, the more chaos would supersede order. The revelation thrilled him and scared him.
The twins were born a month after the riot. His marriage ran smooth for a while. He studied for the sergeant’s exam and worked Norwalk Patrol. He pondered the lessons of Watts.
He lived in two worlds. His family world was uncontrollable. The lessons of Watts failed him at home. He knew how to handle criminals. He couldn’t handle the volatile woman he loved.
The novelty of kids wore off. They started fighting again. They fought in front of the boys and felt bad about it.
He made sergeant in December ’68 and transferred to Firestone Station. Firestone was high-density, high- crime, all black. The pace was frantic. He learned to work at triple his Norwalk rate.
He worked as a patrol supervisor. He ran from Code 3 call to Code 3 call every shift. Firestone was dope and armed robbery and brutal domestic calls. Firestone was a riot zone back in ’65. The folks there had their own post- riot revelations going. Firestone was sidewalk crap games and guns. Firestone was the child who climbed into the dryer and got burned and spun to death. Firestone was decelerated chaos. Firestone could blow fast.
He spent four years there. He finished his patrol tour and went on the station detective squad. He did some community relations work. Anything that bridged the cop-civilian gap was good for business. The LAPD had fucked cop-civilian relations to an all-time fare-thee-well. He didn’t want the Sheriff’s to follow their lead.
He transferred to the auto-theft detail. He developed sound detective skills and reveled in the specific nature of the work. Theft crimes were cut-and-dried. They boiled down to violated ownership. They were isolated problems that ended with the apprehension of specifically guilty parties. He didn’t have to pop harmless kids for marijuana. He didn’t have to referee domestic disputes and dispense marital advice like he knew what he was talking about.
Detective work was his calling. He had the social skills and the temperament for it. Patrol work was a breathless sprint with no fixed finish line. Detective work was sedately paced by comparison. He plugged into suspects one-on-one and co-opted their knowledge. He moved deeper into the cop-criminal matrix.
He came to Firestone as a policeman. He left as a detective. He went to Internal Affairs Division and hounded other cops.
Cops who stole money. Cops who leaned too hard on their nightsticks. Cops who used dope. Cops who jacked off at porno movies. Cops who gave blow jobs to inmates in county holding tanks. Cops who were ratted off for imagined offenses out of pure spite.
IA was brutal. The moral turf was hazily defined. He did not enjoy hassling fellow cops. He sought out the literal truth pertaining to their situations and stressed mitigating factors. He felt empathy for some very twisted men. He knew how the job undermined family contracts. A fair portion of the cops he knew were functioning alcoholics. They were no better or worse than cops accused of smoking dope.
He had a handle on his own shortcomings. He used them to illustrate the big bottom line.
It was a morally valid line. It was an ego-driven simplification.
His marriage was dead stalled. He wanted out. Ann wanted out. They kept waiting for the other one to get up some guts and end it. They bought a house and sunk their hooks in each other deeper. He fought a persistent urge to chase women.
He left IA in ’73. He went to the Lakewood Station squad and worked auto theft and auto burg for two years. He went to Metro in ’75.
Metro worked county-wide. He ran a five-man surveillance team all over the county map. LA. County expanded for him. He saw crime booming in poverty pockets where people had just enough coin for drugs and cheap pads. The landscapes there were flat and polluted. The people lived in operational squalor. They moved between smoggy towns like rats in a maze. Freeways spun them around in circles. Drugs were a closed circuit of brief ecstasy and despair. Burglary and robbery were drug-adjunct crimes. Murder was a common by-product of drug use and illegal
