East Side Story
Pinkerton, James P.
THE NATION'S PULSE EAST SIDE STORY by James P. Pinkerton T here are half a million people 1 jammed into the eleven square miles of the Los Angeles Police Department's East Side Division. The...
...More cops come and probe the darkness with their flashlights, finding more bangers in the alley...
...Small world...
...It feels like first grade, puzzling over My Weekly Reader, trying to count the giraffes hidden in the picture...
...They don't say: "Sgt...
...Why don't you bust them...
...For the most part, the police just process misery, like actuaries or epidemiologists...
...The CRASH Unit knows most of them, but they carry packs of "field identification cards" to record new information, including "moniker/alias...
...They say: "The officer counseled and released the detainee...
...How could the arresting officer have seen the alleged transaction from a moving car at night?' Maybe the perp[etrator] plea bargains, or we can get him on a pro[bation] violation...
...How old are you...
...Soon a dozen teens line the sidewalk...
...Asked if she's been arrested before, she answers with some pride that she was busted for GTA (Grand Theft Auto...
...Many are on public assistance, but the ambition that brought them to El Norte inspires them to work, starting with the gritty jobs citizens spurn...
...I squint, straining to identify a familiar visual cue...
...When...
...The knowledge that locals are shot and killed around the corner only adds to the fun of cruising down to the wild side of town, so long as valet parking is provided...
...The carpet man gets his implement back, along with a lecture on street deportment...
...Maybe he's in shock, or too wasted to remember...
...Serena says 18...
...wants to get to Hyacinth Boulevard...
...The ancient Greeks did it, too...
...A prostitute is a "Bee," for Section 647-B...
...Right...
...The dragnet of the law may catch the big fish—the green card counterfeiters, the wanted killers—but a wide legal mesh lets the rest slip through...
...The new Street Terrorism Enforcement and Protection Act (STEP) is what L.A...
...Their progress would be eased if they were physically safer, if a jaded avant-garde had to look elsewhere for violence to romanticize...
...He finally persuades the officers that it's a carpet-puller...
...One morestory in the naked city, which Knight would never think to log...
...What they do fear is deportation: a perverse tribute to the standard of living Amer'The names have been changed to protect the innocent, the guilty, and the everyday heroic...
...He takes a fatherly approach: Why is she hanging with these losers...
...Murder is Section 187 of the Code: when bangers want to intimidate someone they spraypaint his name and "187" in conspicuous places...
...The city is starting to turn the wheels of justice a little faster...
...and-white just a few blocks from the station before he points into a sidewalk crowd...
...The emergency medical technician examines the victim, who refuses a gurney...
...These dudes aren't afraid of jail: it's an extension of their lifestyle, not much worse than the way they live now...
...Pushing fifty, he is still lean and taut, but also graying and wrinkling...
...My guide for the evening, 1 Sgt...
...But not Little Suzie...
...Code 2. That means hurry, but don't use your "reds" or your siren...
...the cops ask...
...It looks painful...
...STEP will make a real difference if it survives a court challenge...
...Not tonight...
...I'm not in the Loco Ponies," she says, although she likes to kick back with them...
...He knows better than to challenge a man who barely notices a bullet wound...
...Crack dealers," he says, with the precision of an ornithologist...
...but unconscious courage empowers him to walk up to strangers in pitch-black alleys with only a flashlight in his hand...
...Three children were kidnapped...
...The lawyers would say, 'No probable cause...
...It looks harsh, but they've learned that a tiny derringer can kill you just as dead as an AK-47...
...As in the East, the hippest, hottest places arein dangerous neighborhoods...
...On the next corner a teenager signals...
...Of course," comes the answer...
...attorneys call "a baby RICO": if cops can "establish a pattern of gang activity," prosecutors can serve them with an injunction, which effectively relaxes search-andseizure rules for the police...
...Suspect described as Hispanic male, black pants, white T-shirt...
...Arrests for "CCW" (carrying a concealed weapon) and "ADW" (assault with a deadly weapon) are common...
...Knight, ' has driven the blackJames...
...A bulletin blusters over the radio: "Three-CRASH-one...
...All I see is a tableau of neon, white shirts, and shadows...
...A .22 slug has made a clean entrance and a slightly less clean exit...
...If that person should happen to die, the gangs superimpose a cross on the original graffito...
...Our black-and-white and an unmarked police car converge from opposite ends of the street...
...Another boy played Russian roulette—and lost...
...Code 1 means "Pick up your laundry on your way over," while at the words "officer down," all available radio cars scramble, and even the most fearless urban bicycle messenger is wise to stay on the sidewalk...
...If they can survive that, these "made" home-boys can laugh at a post-Miranda police interrogation...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1990 25...
...The mini-cam guys take off, too...
...But then I've never used fortified wine or crack as an anaesthetic...
...The gangs are on to the police patois...
...So he does six months...
...However, these guys aren't out to hurt anyone...
...Dun-no, he says...
...P Pinkerton works in Washington, D.C...
...Whites from the West Side, dressed in night-crawler black, queue up to boogie down...
...As for the shots fired, no witness means no arrest...
...Driving past a herd of stretch limos corraled in front of an old warehouse, Knight identifies "Delirium," a trendy club for Hollywood slummers...
...Hispanic gangs are generally territorial, organized into "sets" to defend turf...
...I thought of the ace of spades, death's calling card in the Old West...
...A nother shooting: the turf of the Loco Ponies, a wild bunch implicated in a recent drive-by shooting...
...They're Hispanic Ralph Kramdens, working-class stiffs who were drinking cerveza on the street when the cops responded...
...East Side is violent, but so were Dodge City and Al Capone's Chicago,and the gumption and pluck that has brought people to the East Side, to the threshold of the American Dream, will someday soon carry them over...
...As we roll, Knight spots a derelict shambling across the asphalt...
...By contrast, the mostly black Bloods and Crips focus on money, sharing the city's drug traffic with Asian and white biker gangs...
...Sergeant Knight escorts another girl, Serena, away from the group...
...He brakes the car, deliberately blocking the intersection to prevent another vehicle from mowing the man down...
...What can you say to a kid who commutes to be part of . . . this...
...In a city of 3.3 million, the 8,253 cops can move crime around with sweeps and barricades, but they can't clean it up...
...Our Code 2 is a bug-eyed man silently clutching his bloody forearm...
...See the man, Ninth and Remington...
...Same thing...
...The "bangers" are the sharks of the East Side sea: predatory, yet part of the urban ecology...
...The demographics are Third World: few old people, lots of children...
...She's scared now—not of Knight, but of her peers, who must wonder what she's saying to the cops...
...The newest immigrants are from south of south of the border, mostly El Salvador...
...Two teenage couples lounging on the stoop proclaim their innocence before the cops say a word...
...The kid doesn't know, either...
...Knight asks...
...Armed robbery is a "Two-eleven," after its citation in the California Penal Code...
...Last year the cops recorded 324,486 crimes, a quarter of them violent, including 873 homicides...
...She was shot in the back last year...
...The night was young, but the spring was out of my step...
...I look around and understand why the neighbor who anonymously called 911 does not want to come forward...
...Often fellow gang-bangers know each other only as "Cuchito," or "Droopy," or "Juke...
...As a "ride-along" with the East Side CRASH Unit on a recent Saturday night, I watched twelve cops deal with about 5,000 "gangbangers...
...Knight presses: "We think the Loco Ponies did it...
...Serena covers her mouth, winces, and looks away...
...Barking at them in Spanish to keep their legs apart, their hands behind their heads, and their fingers locked, the cops frisk them roughly and thoroughly...
...A cop finds a loaded .38 in the bushes...
...Knight has been a part of these stories for his two decades on the force...
...Knight opines that the crime will probably not be solved...
...It is poor but upwardly mobile, a hub of light manufacturing, and home to the service workers who clean the offices, houses, and pools of the Anglophone affluent...
...What does he want...
...Cop talk here is a stilted jargon of Latinate words, acronyms, and numbers...
...police never illuminate each other in unknown situations...
...Maybe he doesn't want to fink on a buddy who plunked him...
...Knight shakes his head and returns her to the lineup...
...Sometimes the girls are more responsive...
...It wasn't the Ponies...
...Not enough blood...
...They say they don't know who fired the shots...
...if it were my arm, I'd share my feelings with the world...
...A chill goes down my unprotected spine...
...Secret Agent Man," the old Johnny Rivers song, reverberates in my naive head ("There's a man who leads a life of danger...
...Domestic disputes are "Two-seven-threes...
...Adrenalin thrills through me as we race over...
...Knight talked to the girl and then let her go...
...She'll be of age by the '96 Olympics, if she lives that long...
...24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1990 Serena shrugs...
...It wasn't us—I mean them...
...Amazing: just like "Adam 12...
...Then I think to ask whether the cops wear bulletproof vests...
...A good analogy is Hell's Kitchen, the brawling, boozing Manhattan underworld that steeled the Irish for their climb up the ladder...
...Wouldn't stick," says Knight...
...Another shooting...
...It's no crime to carry a gun look-alike, but it's not too bright in an area where so many carry the real thing...
...The boys are ordered to remove their shirts, revealing serpentine tattoos on their left shoulder blades...
...If the East Side Division has no relation to West Side Story, neither is it like Fort Apache, The Bronx, the 1980 Paul Newman movie that defined urban decay for the popular imagination...
...LAPD'S motto is "To Protect and to Serve": nothing about "to transport...
...On the screen they sing and dance in finger-snapping formation, fighting chivalrously for love and honor...
...ica affords its prison population...
...Naked prey that I was, I quickly adapted to crouching and terrain-hugging...
...As Knight stops the car, he has no way of knowing whether the kid wants to give him a tip or shoot him...
...The newest hyphenated Americans deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...
...The ambulance comes, followed by a mobile TV news unit (they monitor the police frequencies...
...They've all been "jumped in" to the gang, an initiation that includes a brutal beating...
...Knight tells Serena that a girl her age was shot in a drive-by the previous Tuesday...
...They'll reassemble tomorrow, maybe even later tonight...
...Cops never arrest someone if they can "apprehend the individual...
...He's stoned...
...Since nobody claims ownership, the piece will be taken to the lab for an evidence check and destroyed...
...T en p.m...
...Spend one Saturday night with the CRASH (Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums) Unit of the LAPD and you'll wonder how people could ever romanticize street gangs...
...His mellow attitude toward ballistic trauma argues for the proposition that life is cheap...
...Who shot you...
...Since loitering isn't a violation anymore, all the CRASH cops can do is disperse the bangers...
...Shots fired...
...When the cops arrived, one of the men was cradling a shiny metal contraption with knobs and hooks, easily mistaken for a sawed-off shotgun...
...Serena is from Glendale, an old-line suburb ten miles away...
...Having made a full recovery, she's an equal opportunity gang member...
...Knight has no desire to be another black-bordered photograph on the wall at the station house...
...Knight and the other driver kill their headlights...
...Okay, stallion, have it your way," the EMT sighs...
...T hat night, the number of drive-by 1 shootings for the year surpassed 100 when three Lynwood kids were killed as they sat in their Oldsmobile...
...We arrive to back up two cops who have five suspects hugging a wall...
...Age 12...
...Enforcing the law in this part of town is like picking mercury off a floor...
...In today's Los Angeles they idle amid alcohol and urine on stoops and porches, pawing at their women and toying with their guns, waiting for the next petty rip-off or drive-by shooting...
...They may be gangbangers, but that loose term covers everyone from trigger-happy adolescents to the mellow middle-aged...
Vol. 23 • August 1990 • No. 8
