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Further Writing L.A.:
Life that art can’t
imitate So Reggie the alligator already has escaped once from his cell at the Los Angeles Zoo. Mark my words: No prison will hold him. He will escape again and steal a Ferrari Enzo. This is what makes writing wild fiction about Los Angeles so hard. L.A. just won't be outdone. This city feeds on phantasmagoria. It mocks magic-realism and one-ups even the most florid fabulation. This city conjures car chases, for instance, that send Jerry Bruckheimer quivering to his stunt coordinator in despair. It's as though L.A. is a hoary old vaudevillian who refuses to be upstaged. MORE
The LAPD 15 Years Later I WAS IN MY DORM ROOM at San Diego State, listening
to the Led Zeppelin cover of "When the Levee Breaks," when
I first saw George Holliday's amateur video of the Rodney King incident
on CNN. It looked like those grainy films of Selma, Ala., in 1965,
and the brutality turned my stomach. They didn't really talk about
Rodney King when I went through the Los Angeles Police Academy a
few years later. The department just tore its clothes and sat shiva
for those officers, and we didn't speak of them or the deadly riots
that followed their acquittals 15 years ago. I went on thinking that
those cops were racist brutes. MORE Street Gang Realpolitik I TALK TO a lot of gangsters in my line of work. A lot of them are like child soldiers, both dangerous and pathetic, at once sharpened and blunted by years of constant predation and grief. Still, I liked this guy last week. He was watchful and laconic, like a lot of cops I know. He got jumped into a gang around the time I became a cop, said he'd done it for the health plan — figuring it was healthier to get jumped in than to keep getting jumped on. I asked him about violence between black gangs like his and Latino gangs in L.A. He waved the notion away like hanging smoke. "The thing about it is the Eses outnumber us," the guy told me. "And we're in business with them." MORE
AN ANCESTOR of mine, for whom I am named, was the sheriff in Neshoba County, Miss., before the civil rights movement. It's haunting to see my name stamped into his old tin star. I know almost nothing about the man, but I'm fairly certain William Joshua Beall conceived of law enforcement very differently than I do. I have spent most of my career with the LAPD in 77th Division — the heart of South Central — serving and protecting people whose parents and grandparents migrated here to escape places like Neshoba County. 77th Division occupies less than 12 square miles, roughly from Vernon Avenue south to Manchester Avenue and from Central Avenue west to Crenshaw Boulevard. About 175,000 people live in 77th, mostly Latinos and blacks. So far this year, we've had 69 murders. Most of our murders are gang-flavored, but many are plain Cain — raw homicidal impulses unchecked by middle-class propriety, the unfocused rage of the desperate and downtrodden. A man murdered over a chicken coop. Another killed over a cold beer on a hot afternoon. MORE
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L.A. REX IS PUBLISHED BY RIVERHEAD BOOKS, A DIVISION OF PENGUIN GROUP (USA)