Free Ghettoside by Jill Leovy Page B

a post opened for a “gang” detective on a South Bureau task force in the Seventy-seventh Street Division. It was not quite what Skaggs wanted. But at least it was south of the Ten, investigating crimes involving human victims, and unlike Tennelle, he didn’t have to demote himself to make the switch.
    A reprieve came with a new boss: Detective Sal La Barbera, a homicide supervisor who had first noticed Skaggs when the latter was still a young red-haired gang officer. La Barbera was just seven years older than Skaggs, but he had been a detective a lot longer. He had remained in ghettoside units longer than almost anyone he knew, passing on promotions and watching his peers advance. Dark-haired, with rawboned Italian good looks and a spray of acne scars over each cheek, La Barbera cut a romantic figure, an image he deliberately cultivated. He was not the devil-may-care loner he pretended to be. He did not do well alone, nor was he indifferent to the opinions of others. La Barbera was moody, easily hurt, forever trusting someone only to feel betrayed later. Various relationships had foundered in bad blood.
    Over the years, the job had burdened La Barbera with a hounded, slightly paranoid demeanor. He’d gone on so many late-night homicide callouts that he had lost the ability to sleep through the night. His family relations were stressed, perhaps fatally so. He suffered from depression. Some colleagues disliked him, calling him two-faced. His manner didn’thelp. He appeared most easygoing when he was put out, and he pretended to be joking when he wasn’t. But he wasn’t a liar. La Barbera said what he meant most of the time—just in a very quiet voice. If you paid close attention, you weren’t deceived.
    La Barbera’s fractured personal life and internal contradictions came oddly packaged with inimitable professional consistency. He had a vision. He believed in his craft—believed unreservedly in the idea of homicide investigation as a cause. He believed that the state articulated its response to violence by apprehending those who committed it, and that failing to do so sent an unmistakable message the other way—that violence was tolerated, especially when the victims were poor black men.
    His theory was, he admitted, “a circumstantial case.” But La Barbera’s observations over the years in South Los Angeles had convinced him that catching killers built law —that successful homicide investigations were the most direct means at the cops’ disposal of countering the informal self-policing and street justice that was the scourge of urban black populations. La Barbera had character flaws. But his views on homicide belonged to an elevated plane of ethical reasoning.
    This made him an oddity. In truth, a lot of police had only the fuzziest idea what they were there for, aside from the most basic, traditional function of answering calls, dealing with them, and going “Code Four” on the radio—“situation under control.” There was amazingly little discussion of the craft of policing, and no consensus on what constituted good police work versus bad.
    Cops were told they were supposed to “be proactive,” focus on “suppression,” or practice “crime control.” Showered in such nonsensical orders and jargon, they couldn’t really be blamed for struggling to find purpose in their work. Officers drove around, conducted consent searches, ran license plates, drove some more. It could feel quite pointless. It didn’t help that even as they were supposedly held to high standards and expected to display the skill and initiative of trained professionals, many so-called innovative policing strategies tended to reduce them to cogs.
    There was a lot of emphasis on police being “visible” and on strategically deploying them to targeted neighborhoods based on crime trends. But exactly what officers were supposed to do once they got to a so-called target neighborhood was left a little vague. The omission