Just the Facts: An LAPD Ride-along Through Skid Row
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I've been writing about Skid Row for way too long now without having spent much time there. A handful of city-desk briefs for the Times 11 years ago, a coupla recent lunchtime walks and some fast drivethroughs do not an expert make.
Time to see close-up the day-in, day-out meat-grinder street culture of Skid Row that has defied eradication for decades now.
After a couple hours at Senior Lead Officer Deon Joseph's side, I'm still no expert. But I know far more than I did before, thanks to his generosity, experience and non-stop narration.
So, no punditry today, just facts and observations about Skid Row through the eyes of a cop who has to police it ....
Joseph has been an LAPD officer 11 years, eight of them here.
He starts with a quick tour of Central Station - which covers 4 1/2 square miles including the downtown communities of Chinatown, Little Tokyo, South Park, Central City East, Historic Core, Financial District, Artists Lofts, Olvera Street, Jewelry District, the Convention Center, and the Fashion District - rattling as he goes:
"There are a lot of rapes that go unreported," he says: prostitutes who are assaulted, homeless women victimized. With rape, as with many violent crimes on Skid Row, victims seldom complain to the cops, and witnesses even less often, for fear of retaliation.
He stops at the Juvenile desk.
A binder there is 2 inches thick with mugshots of 12- and 13-year-old kids arrested for peddling drugs on behalf of the 19 identified gangs dealing on Skid Row. Kids, caught with rock cocaine hidden in their butts, sent by older gang members from South L.A., Nickerson Gardens, east L.A., Altadena to scoop up money from the junkies and crackheads. "They're coming from all over the place," he says.
A lot of them are runaways. They terrorize old homeless guys into holding the dope for them, and beat them if it goes missing. Central cops can't always catch them making hand-to-hand sales, so they've been corralling them on truancy and curfew charges.
"The whole trade is based on violence," Joseph says, pointing out the busy Homicide office, the Robbery pen, the booking room. Beatings, stabbings, strangulations, shootings. It's non-stop, Joseph says.
On one overflow bench in the hallway, a blonde woman slumps, hands cuffed behind her, face against the wall, sobbing quietly. She could be 29, she could be 50, but she looks wrecked. Just another suspect, on her way through the system.
The station looks busy today, maybe even cheerful. With 50 new cops on the Skid Row beat - many on foot patrol - the drug, assault and robbery cases are flowing in thick and fast. Add roughly 16 cops per shift to a 10-officer shift, and you get some pretty dramatic results.
Every cop I talk to says it's made a huge difference having extra badges on the street - and when we get out there, the difference is palpable. How long will it take to make a substantial, lasting difference? Hard to say.
The beefed-up detail is to last only three months officially, but Joseph says Chief Bratton has promised, "We're not leaving until the job is done." They're even shifting desks around upstairs to make room for some of the 10 new prosecutors added to the detail.
We hop into a cruiser and roll out. Soul ballads flow from the speakers, mingling with the dispatch squawks.
Haggard, fucked-up women, shambling men and unidentifiable spectres in ragged clothes lounge on the curb, the benches and the sidewalks. Among them walk young, rangy-looking guys, a handful of younger women, a sprinkling of little children. One visible thing in common with nearly all the adults: glassy stares and nowhere else to go just now.
But it's calm, relatively peaceful. Much better than it used to be.
The thick stink of marijuana drifts through the open cruiser window. "This is where the weed is," he says.
It used to be "the biggest open-air drug market almost anywhere." People selling rock cocaine, smoking it in tents, gang members brutalizing people and exploiting them, and the cops so undermanned they couldn't make much headway.
The sheriff wouldn't help with extra jail space - nowhere to put 'em. The DA didn't help enough - even dead-bang cases of dealing and assault were sometimes thrown out because of case backlogs, and the offenders were sent right back to the streets.
The mental health agencies were underfunded, and did little of substance to help the mentally ill and the dually-diagnosed stay off the street.
And in the post-Rampart malaise - with the ACLU and community organizations second-guessing the cops constantly about whether street stops or arrests were valid - it was just plain harder making enough of the kind of arrests needed to make a dent.
So Joseph had his officers start "the Sitdown Technique" on San Julian, Winston and San Pedro. Just pull up the cruiser and sit. Maybe use the PA to run people off. They'd scatter, then return when the patrol car left.
But the car kept coming back around. Sitting longer.
And eventually, the dealers shuffled off elsewhere, dispersed by the attention. The market - a major source of violent crime in the district - was broken up and shifted away from the missions and other homeless-services providers, Joseph says.
They used the tactic on Main Street and, with the help of the loft-dwellers - who were much more confident about reporting crimes than the street people - they cleaned that up some, too.
"I had four of the most difficult streets aesthetically clean," he says, meaning the open drug trade was dispersed, the graffiti and trash abated, the general loitering and tent-based crime reduced.
"And then the 9th Circuit ruling [on the ACLU's challenge to the city's vagrancy law] came down in April and completely destroyed it," he says. "With all the tents going up and the prostitution coming out of the tents, the rapes started going up."
Joseph quotes a Times story by Cara Mia di Massa, which called the ruling "a small victory for the homeless."
"How is getting your ass kicked every night and passing out on the sidewalk a victory?" he scoffs.
A young man pulls his car alongside the cruiser at a stoplight: he's looking for his brother, who apparently checked out of one of the missions 2-1/2 months ago and hasn't been seen since.
Joseph shakes his head. He invites the man to visit the station to look through the arrest logs, but unless he turns up there or at one of the missions, he tells the guy ruefully, "He could be hard to find."
We cruise San Pedro, then San Julian again. Most people just hang out, like it's a nice autumn day in the park. A few - you see their gaze snag for a second on the cruiser, then slide off toward the less-intimidating pavement.
"Homelessness is not the problem. That's a lot of crap, we all know the problem is there's a criminal element with roots deep in this community, and the problem is the drug trade."
We roll on. Joseph waves to a few people here and there, hops out to chat with a front-gate worker at the bustling Union Rescue Mission, then back into the cruiser.
Uniformed beat cops - the newer, younger ones just added to the division - stroll down San Julian, talking with people. At one point, an officer talking with a slender, middle-aged guy with clear eyes and a neatly-packed grocery cart tells Joseph he just managed to get the man a mission bed. "That's great," Joseph says.
Joseph drives up past the base of the 6th Street Bridge, where a gaunt woman in tight clothes squats on a sun-baked curb.
"How you doin?" he calls brightly. "I'm gettin' high!" she cackles, but with no evidence evident, he rolls on.
She's a prostitute, he mentions almost matter-of-factly.
"Picture a table top, and on top of the table are violent crime and gangs and the narcotics trade," he says. The gang, narcotics and violent crime units attack the higher-penalty crimes, he says, while "We try to cut the legs out from under that table - sitting on the sidewalk and smoking crack and shooting up."
Joseph tells of good street people he's lost over the years: A crackhead who called police to stop two robbers who she saw dragging a guy into a tent. They could have killed him if she had not reported it.
A few months later she was found with a belt around her neck, her throat slit from ear to ear. Not retaliation, he said they learned later. Just random violence.
He cruises up 5th en route to a favorite convenience store to pick up a Red Bull and a Gatorade. En route, he pulls up to the curb and chides an old man and two old women squatting on the sidewalk, fresh cigarettes laid out at their feet.
"Hey. I said no street sales," Joseph declares coldly. Grudgingly, they gather up the cigarettes and move on. Gang members, he explains, often beat up people selling cigarettes and other stuff from the sidewalk, and take what little money they have earned.
Drinks in hand, he heads back down Main, past the Huntington Hotel. Joseph says pretty much everything goes on in there - gun sales, drug deals, prostitution, counterfeit money exchange, even rumors of kiddie prostitution. "People tell me that if I can shut down the Huntington Hotel, I'd cut down on 40% of the narcotics trade," he says.
He talks of the district's perpetual victims - the elderly, and the mentally ill, who have been left high and dry by ineffectual county and state mental-health services.
Social workers out working the beat with police officers are definitely helping push some addicts into rehab.
Whenever the police push the issue of getting violent, dually-diagnosed or severely psychotic people into longer-term care, Joseph says, the mental health people say, "Oh, yes, let's dialogue on it." And then nothing happens.
All that Prop. 63 money - the $1.8 billion supposed to filter into California's mental health system in the three years following its 2004 passage?
Not one penny of it seems to have reached Skid Row, Joseph says, and other cops I talk to there back him up.
There are mentally ill women who get raped three times a week, a woman known for blowtorching people's faces with a can of hairspray and a lighter, a guy who threatened to stab everyone he saw - and then ran down the street doing just that - every one of them is still on the street, tossed out again after a 72-hour hold and a few of the right meds got them stable enough.
"Today's victim is tomorrow's suspect," he says, adding that when homeless addicts can get a meal from a mission eight times a day, "we have become this enabler for our crime."
On virtually every block we cruise, it seems, young, new-looking officers are on patrol.
We roll over to one of the blocks where the hardcore heroin junkies are concentrated now - Stanford, between 6th and 7th.
It looks like a bomb has hit. Gutshot furniture sprawls by upended pallets. Half-torn tents flap in the breeze, the streets and sidewalks around it awash in litter. The air is dead, broken only by the occasional passing of a truck.
Joseph spots a woman sprawled face up on a mattress, wearing only a paisley brassiere.
"That's not good, she's all naked," he says, and hops out to wake her. She comes to - all buggy blue eyes, leathery skin and wild hair - jabbering. She's pretty obviously mentally ill, possibly under the influence, and definitely at risk.
"You need to get some clothes on, you can't lie there all naked," he says, looking over her yardsale of a shopping cart, which is mostly full of trash. "You got any pants in there somewhere? You can't be lying around like that."
She struggles to her knees, rummages around in the cart, flops back onto the mattress and shimmies into a pair of too-tight pants, still mumbling, her privates waving in the air.
It might be slapstick-comical if she were sane and this were some frat-boy movie. But none of those things is true. It's a sickening sight. Clothed now, she sags back to the mattress and passes out again.
Some 400 registered sex offenders live in the district, Joseph says later. Any one of them could easily have raped her.
Another unit pulls up, Officers Nichols and Schultz, a he-and-she team who have been working Skid Row together for some time now. Officer Stephen Nichols says they've made six felony arrests that day - all for minor crimes that wound up being serious parole or probation violations. Nichols used to work over in Wilshire, among the more-affluent west-siders. He was bored, he said, but this beat, he loves.
He confirms that none of the Prop. 63 money seems to have filtered down to the streets. When I mention Steve Cooley's stay away plan to prosecute parolees and probationers for returning to Skid Row, he seems to brighten a bit, but says it hasn't filtered down to roll call in the form of orders just yet.
Joseph says later that Nichols has a nose for parole violators, and a fine record for pulling some of the hardest criminals off of the district's streets to face long sentences.
We move down Stanford past more rows of tents. More junkies, crooks of their arms black with needle damage, squat and hunker, chatting to each other.
Bike skeletons and tireless rims hang from the cyclone fence, part of what looks like a gypsy open-air bike business.
We drive back toward the station, Joseph occasionally stopping to chat with street people. One pale, thin woman looks like she's managed to stay off the crack - she's clear eyed and her hands aren't shaking- he notes. But she stays down here because her husband lives down here.
He grouses a bit about all the supposed do-gooder organizations that criticise the department for being "racist" because the vast number of Skid Row people it arrests are black. "Most of the people down here are black," he says. "It's simple demographics."
And he says that the drug trade isn't limited to the hard-core addicts or the down-and-out homeless: Loft-dwellers buy dope on Skid Row too.
"The dealers figure, 'We charge a crackhead $5 for a rock, we can charge them 10.' 'Lofties, they call 'em.'"
Not long ago, he saw a little Asian guy come out of a loft and start shoving around a huge 250-pound black parolee - a violent repeat offender known as "Knockout" - because the man had supposedly shortchanged him on a drug deal.
"Anyone else, he wouldn't have let 'em push him around," he said. "But he let this guy push him around because the lofties pay them good money."
He pulls back down San Julian en route to the station, spots someone hurriedly stuffing a glass pipe into his jacket.
Joseph stops, lets his glare and the black-and-white's presence sink in a bit, then gets on the PA. "You got any drug paraphernalia, you need to move," he rumbles. "You guys have crack pipes, beercans, roach clips, weed on you? You need to step off right now."
Muttering darkly, the guiltiest ones shamble off down the street. And we glide down into the Central Station garage.
Posted by: Mack_Reed on Wednesday, September 27, 2006 - 11:46 PM
The station looks busy today, maybe even cheerful. With 50 new cops on the Skid Row beat - many on foot patrol - the drug, assault and robbery cases are flowing in thick and fast. Add roughly 16 cops per shift to a 10-officer shift, and you get some pretty dramatic results. 
We slow to a crawl down 
But the car kept coming back around. Sitting longer. 
"I had four of the most difficult streets aesthetically clean," he says, meaning the open drug trade was dispersed, the graffiti and trash abated, the general loitering and tent-based crime reduced. 
Uniformed beat cops - the newer, younger ones just added to the division - stroll down San Julian, talking with people. At one point, an officer talking with a slender, middle-aged guy with clear eyes and a neatly-packed grocery cart tells Joseph he just managed to get the man a mission bed. "That's great," Joseph says. 
"Picture a table top, and on top of the table are violent crime and gangs and the narcotics trade," he says. The gang, narcotics and violent crime units attack the higher-penalty crimes, he says, while "We try to cut the legs out from under that table - sitting on the sidewalk and smoking crack and shooting up." 
He talks of the district's perpetual victims - the elderly, and the mentally ill, who have been left high and dry by ineffectual county and state mental-health services. 
On virtually every block we cruise, it seems, young, new-looking officers are on patrol. 
It might be slapstick-comical if she were sane and this were some frat-boy movie. But none of those things is true. It's a sickening sight. Clothed now, she sags back to the mattress and passes out again.
We move down Stanford past more rows of tents. More junkies, crooks of their arms black with needle damage, squat and hunker, chatting to each other. 
He grouses a bit about all the supposed do-gooder organizations that criticise the department for being "racist" because the vast number of Skid Row people it arrests are black. "Most of the people down here are black," he says. "It's simple demographics."
