Free Ghettoside by Jill Leovy Page A

bought a house in El Sereno—another “nice” but distinctly urban, and mostly Hispanic, neighborhood near the city’s core—and sent his children to private school, just as Tennelle did. Baitx had traveled once with Tennelle to Alabama in pursuit of a suspect, and Tennelle had used the occasion to visit his family’s old home, a six-hundred-square-foot box with wood siding used, at the time of their visit, as a crack house. Baitx knew how poor Tennelle’s parents had been, how humble his roots, and how far the family had come. Tennelle should be able to live wherever he wanted, Baitx thought.
    For Tennelle, the choice was easy. The neighborhood was home; it was near where he grew up, where his mother still lived. He had bought a home he could afford when he was a young cop, and had what he called “a wild-ass dream: that my children only know one home.”
    Not that there weren’t difficulties. When the Tennelles first moved in, an apartment building down the street was a hub for drug deals. A dealer once stood in Tennelle’s driveway and conducted a transaction as Tennelle, who had served briefly as a narcotics cop, was mowing the grass a few feet away. Perhaps the dealer had a faulty antenna for copdetection; more likely he was caught slippin’ because it had never occurred to him that a cop would live on his street. Tennelle called 911 and had him arrested.
    Later, Tennelle wrote a 3.18 narcotics report on the building and offered his home as an “OP,” or observation post, and the problem swiftly abated. After that, the Tennelles enjoyed the area. They were fond of their neighbors. Tennelle’s commute was a neighborhood hop—few Angelenos have it so good. Tennelle could respond to homicide callouts in Newton division within minutes, unlike most detectives who lost most of the first critical hour because it took them so long to get there. His neighborhood had sidewalks, mature trees, well-tended yards, and adorable 1930s-vintage homes—some of them gingerbread style. Fresh sea breezes waft through this part of L.A., palm trees sway, and although the section lies in the flight path of LAX, it’s far enough from the runway that the sound of descending planes is not too bothersome. You didn’t have to be from the Frisco side of Jasper, Alabama, to appreciate this neighborhood; it was objectively and inarguably, as Baitx put it, “nice.”
    Tennelle’s neighbors knew he worked for the LAPD. He did not apologize for being a cop; he had always treated people with deliberate respect, on the job and off, and he defied the world to make him ashamed. “I’ve run into my share of people I’ve arrested,” he said, “and I can look them in the eye.” Shirking off to live in the suburbs felt somehow dishonorable to Wally Tennelle. “I’m home here. I’m not gonna let anybody run me out,” he said.
    And more people wanted him there than not—this was made quickly clear. When word got around that there was a cop on the block, neighbors came to his doorstep with all kinds of troubles. Cops didn’t live in the neighborhoods they policed because they feared all those suspects. But perhaps what they should really have feared was all the victims . Wally Tennelle soon discovered that his neighborhood embraced him—perhaps more than he bargained for—but he accepted the role with good grace and did his best to help his neighbors with their problems.

    About the same time that Wally Tennelle went to RHD, John Skaggs was finally earning a promotion to the lowest rank of detective, D-1.
    Skaggs was subject to the same promotional rules as Tennelle. Thus, earning the rank to do what he was already doing meant he would no longer be allowed to do it. Just as Tennelle’s reward for advancement was a sentence on the Newton sex crime table, Skaggs was transferred out of homicide and sentenced to a narcotics table in the LAPD’s Pacific Division in Venice, a low-crime area along the beach.
    It was unendurable.
    At last,