Ghettoside

On a Friday evening in May, Walter Lee Bridges and Bryant Tennelle were walking down West 80th Street. Bridges is tattooed, wiry, and fit, and appears to “have known danger”; Tennelle, on the other hand, is “more relaxed, oblivious” (13). As they walk, a black Chevrolet Suburban pulls up around the corner; a young man jumps out of the car, fires three shots, and leaves. Bridges reacts instantly. Tennelle is slower and is shot in the head; although he is still alive at the time of the shooting, he will later die at the hospital.

Tennelle’s murder occurred “in the midst of an unexceptional period of violence,” beginning with the murder of Fabian Cooper approximately one month prior (18). Officer Greg De La Rosa was the first to arrive at the scene; as he worked it, he heard a rumor, which turned out to be true, that the victim was the son of an LAPD detective, Wally Tennelle.

John Skaggs, born in 1964, was raised in Long Beach, California; his father had also been a homicide detective, but Skaggs was raised mostly by his mother, Janice. He was a highly competitive athlete as a youth, though his mother “made it clear that the Skaggs children were always to appear mild, sportsmanlike, and well behaved” (22), traits Skaggs carried with him into his career. He attended college briefly, but “found sitting in a classroom unbearable,” so he dropped out and followed his father and became a cop (22).

Even as Skaggs aged, he “never called in sick,” “never went to the doctor,” and stayed in “perfect physical condition,” to the frustration of his coworkers (23). Though he was a meticulous, tireless worker, to some, he was perceived as a “laggard” for remaining in South LA as a detective: “It was understood that to advance, officers had to move beyond divisions to elite centralized units or administrative functions” downtown (23).

Officers who worked “south of the Ten” were marginalized, and detectives weren’t seen as part of the larger culture of the LAPD, with its emphasis on “patrol innovations, not investigative prowess” (24). Detectives who wanted status and prestige worked in the Robbery-Homicide Division (RHD) downtown, which handled big-publicity cases; Skaggs, however, considered “so-called ordinary street murders” his specialty (25). For their part, “[c]ops who worked south of the Ten often seemed to revel in their underdog status” and “looked down on cops from other bureaus” (25). To work south of the Ten “was to feel a sense of futility, forgo promotions, and deal with all those stressful, dreary, depressing problems poor black people had”; for Skaggs, however, “ghettoside was the place to be, the place where there was real work to be done” (27). 

Wallace “Wally” Tennelle was born in Alabama in 1954. His parents “aspired to better things” and moved their children out west in 1963, “part of the second great black migration from the South” (28). Wally as a child “was decisive and organized, a stickler for neatness” (28). Following high school, rather than college, he joined the Marines, hoping for combat in Vietnam; however, he missed the window because his mother—purposefully—delayed sending in his baptism certificate. As a result, he took a Marine post in Costa Rica, where he met his eventual wife, Yadira.

Following the Marines, he worked briefly in security, then with his father at United Airlines before joining the police in 1980. After rotating through several units, Tennelle ended up working as a gang officer “in the midst of the great American homicide wave of the early eighties,” which suited him well (32). He initially relished in being one of the “die-hard street cops” (32), but eventually gravitated toward detective work. Tennelle, Leovy writes, had a combination of traits that made him a good police officer and detective; “[p]olice work can be a haven for brainy, action-oriented people who do not, for some reason, gravitate toward formal education,” but Tennelle additionally had “preternatural neatness, the ability to control himself and the space around him, and the quiet certainty of his whole mien” (32-33).

At the time Tennelle became a detective, “[t]he city was entering what veteran detectives would thereafter refer to as ‘the Big Years’” (33). In 1993, for example, black men in LA were killed at a rate “similar to the per capita rate of death for U.S. soldiers deployed to Iraq” in 2003 (33). Leovy writes of there being, essentially, two cities: South LA, in which the heavy toll of wave of homicides was keenly felt day after day; and the rest of LA and the country, where no one seemed to care. Further, even when the media did pick up on the homicide epidemic, it was typically written off or fetishized as just gang violence. The cyclical syndrome was dubbed “the Monster”: “not just [for] the pileup of homicides […] and the unseen savagery of these crimes, but also the indifference with which the world seemed to view them” (36).

During this period, detectives were heavily overworked, and “the job came to resemble battlefield surgery,” with caseloads twice what experts recommended (38). Detective work was seen as reactive rather than proactive, which meant that even police administration seemed not to care about the problem. Nevertheless, the Big Years “created a few unrivaled experts,” as “[o]nly a select number of detectives in the country could claim the familiarity with homicide that the LAPD’s South Bureau and Central Bureau” could (39).

“High-homicide environments are alike,” writes Leovy: “The setting is usually a minority enclave or disputed territory where people distrust legal authority […] where law had broken down” (39). Arguments cause much of the killing, which “can be described in two words: Men fighting” (38). Leovy notes that the violence found in South LA is not unlike the violence found in pseudo-lawless societies throughout history: violence is “a result of lawlessness, not a cause […] history shows us that lawlessness is its own kind of order” (40). This arises “any place […] where formal authority is patchy or distrusted” (41). As a result, in order to be effective, homicide detectives must be able to understand not only homicide but also the culture of an area, not just “secret slang and symbolic affronts” but also “people’s fear of being labeled ‘snitches,’” how to maneuver bureaucratic indifference, and how to understand the profound grief associated with homicide victims’ families (41).

Tennelle worked with Kelle Baitx. The two worked tirelessly, working an immense caseload, but Baitx was most impressed by the fact that Tennelle would always go home to his family, “puttering around the house” when he wasn’t working (42).