Free Ghettoside by Jill Leovy

him to hang in there—he would get used to it. But Tennelle knew his own mind.
    He endured six months for appearance’s sake. Then he learned of one homicide D-2 spot open. It meant a demotion—he would lose his D-3 rank—and it was in RHD, where he had never wanted to be. But at least it was a real investigative job, not one that just went through the motions.
    To the annoyance of his captain, Tennelle took the demotion, and in 1999—in horrified flight from the stacks of paper that piled up on the sex crimes table—he ended up at RHD.
    He had accepted a 7 percent pay cut to make the switch. It took him seven years to work his way back. But it was worth it: he was back in an action-focused investigative job chasing killers, and he was happy again.
    Baitx was amazed. He had never known anyone in the money-obsessed ranks to willingly take a demotion and pay cut.
    Except for the voluntary demotion, Tennelle’s ascent through the department in those years paralleled the experience of many south end cops. In one respect, however, Wally Tennelle was idiosyncratic, even a little radical. He lived in the Seventy-seventh Division.
    Among LAPD officers, the proscription against living in the city of Los Angeles went without saying. It was something that had long annoyed various liberal critics of the department. For years, most officers in the department had refused to live in the city they policed and instead commuted into the city from distant suburbs. They formed little red-state bastions sprinkled around the five-county area of Southern California—Santa Clarita and Simi Valley to the north, Chino and as far as Temecula to the east, and Orange County to the south. But with a few exceptions, such as San Pedro, a historic enclave of ethnic whites, Los Angeles was considered off-limits, the length and breadth of this beautiful city disdained by its police.
    Of course, for many stripes of public employees, including teachers and firefighters, living in Los Angeles was difficult because the city had developed a stark rich-poor split, and moderately priced homes in low-crime neighborhoods were hard to come by. LAPD cops worked odd hours, so the long freeway drives that would have been prohibitive for rush-hour commuters were feasible for them.
    How much racial prejudice weighed into this choice depended on what was meant by the term, since a majority of officers were themselves minorities. Anyway, their attitudes were too paradoxical for such a coarse summation: LAPD cops had a tendency to voice disgust about the neighborhoods of central Los Angeles, then defend them in the next breath.
    Mostly, though, officers understood what outsiders did not: that nearly every part of their jobs involved conflict, very personal conflict. To police the ’hood was to encounter a daily barrage of wrath. The idea of being followed home or confronted in one’s own neighborhood wasterrifying. So for years the department’s critics complained that cops didn’t live in the city,and for years the cops declined to do so.
    But not Wally Tennelle. He lived not just in the city, but in the Seventy-seventh Division. While it was true that the Seventy-seventh—unlike Southeast—had many pockets of nice middle-class homes, it remained either the first or second most violent division in the city, year in and year out, and its eleven square miles included the territories of several of the city’s most violent black street gangs. The fact that Wally Tennelle chose to live there was a source of wonderment to his colleagues, and fueled sotto voce commentary behind his back: “It was common knowledge” that Tennelle lived in the Seventy-seventh, said his RHD lieutenant, Lyle Prideaux, “and a lot of people didn’t think it was real wise.” Kelle Baitx, however, resented it whenever he heard that kind of talk. He had visited Tennelle’s home, knew how well kept and comfortable it was, and saw that the neighborhood was also “nice.” He himself had