Burning Blades

We fly low and quick, over another area in conflict: the neighborhoods south of the 10 freeway. This area is now known as South Los Angeles; the “Central” has been erased, but not its madness. We zoom over Vernon, Florence and Slauson avenues and fly over the Lizarraga shooting scene at the intersection of 48th Street and Western Avenue. As we hover there, we see the large perimeter of LAPD cars waiting while detectives finish up on the two-story-apartment crime scene. Harrell and Stevenson point out the alley where the suspect was found hiding in the trunk of an abandoned car. Homeboy had no chance; every possible K-9 unit in the city was on the scene. We then fly over to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where Officer Lizarraga died of his injuries.

“I’m mad at the city because we need more officers; we need a massive recruitment drive. Maybe after this [the Lizarraga shooting] they might give us more money for more police,” says Stevenson.

With a crippling budget crisis, it’s doubtful that they’ll get more patrol cars driving the streets soon, but the eye in the sky will continue.

I ask Harrell and Stevenson what they think about the term ghetto bird. Stevenson starts singing “Run, Run, Run From the Ghetto Bird” — Ice Cube’s song from the 1993 album Lethal Injection. The term ghetto bird comes out of the South Los Angeles community to describe the bird they most often see fly over their neighborhood. You’re more likely to see a police helicopter than a red-tailed hawk in South Los Angeles.

In the first verse of “Ghetto Bird,” Ice Cube raps, “Why, oh why must you swoop through the hood like everybody from the hood is up to no good.” Many black Angelenos feel that the LAPD unfairly targets South Los Angeles residents as either suspects or criminals. “We spend more time in South L.A. because more requests are made for us,” says Stevenson, who grew up in South L.A. and graduated from Crenshaw High. “When it’s busy on the ground, it’s busy in the air.” Unlike calls elsewhere in the city, requests in the South are usually “shootings in progress.” Of the 51,000 responses to calls the ASD averages yearly, 20,000 put them on the scene first. So the ghetto bird is first on the scene. Some describe it as the South-Central symphony — gunshots and ghetto birds.

 

“Attention, officers, you can now go into Watts, the tactical alert is over,” the female police service representative’s (PSR) voice comes over the radio, a message for those officers on the ground. The ASD was originally created in 1956 for traffic control and then slowly began assisting patrol officers in a non-formal way. That all changed during the 1965 Watts riots, when the LAPD deployed helicopters to assist ground officers. The ASD now averages 8,000 assisted arrests per year; 4,000 of those are felonies.

We fly along Imperial Highway over Nickerson Gardens, home turf to the notorious Bounty Hunter Bloods, where the FBI and LAPD recently arrested 41 homeboys in a gang sweep. We then fly over the Imperial Courts, PJ Watts Crips’ turf, and then to Jordan Downs, which the Grape Street Crips claim as their hood. There’s been a full-on war on these streets. Lately, homeboys have been blasting on the “Five-0’s” or “one times” — as the police are called around here — including the Air Support Division. According to the LAPD, from January 2003 until March of 2004 there have been a total of 105 officers who have been fired upon; of those, 40 were in South L.A., including 22 in the LAPD’s Southeast Division, where the projects are located. Why the surge? Some would say that Watts is in worse shape now than in 1965. It was just five years ago that Watts was part of Clinton’s “Poverty Tour.” If you fly overhead or drive through, it’s hard to miss the kids playing in streets that are filthy from the lack of city services. It’s hard to “fight crime” when there is clearly no investment, either financial or otherwise, in South Los Angeles.

A barrage of calls comes over the headphones as we fly over South Los Angeles: “suicide,” “domestic violence,” “suspect with a gun,” “211-robbery,” “missing child,” “stolen car.” The majority of the calls end with “male black or male Hispanic.” After a while, the female PSR’s monotonous voice just becomes part of the background noise, like the blades of the choppers. Up in the ghetto bird, for the first time I really feel like I am living in an urban war zone.

“Code 415 [suspects with a gun]. Drive-by shooting in progress,” cries out the PSR voice over the radio. “Male black and male Hispanic, one in a black car and another in a white van.”

“Go, go, go!” screams Harrell to Stevenson, and we’re off, swooping down over South Los Angeles like a bad roller-coaster ride, our bodies gyrating at 120-knot speed.

“White van, west on Jefferson,” exclaims the PSR.

“There! Over the park,” Harrell points while looking through his gyroscope-stabilized binoculars. He reaches for the toggle switch and skims the streets below with the “Nightsun” searchlight and locks on the white van. The south-side neighborhood resembles a huge labyrinth as black-and-whites flashing their red and blue lights emerge from everywhere to pursue the van. Eleven patrol cars swarm the scene, bringing the van to a halt. Officers quickly draw their handguns and shotguns as they stand behind the doors of their squad cars. Tonight is extra-tense, and no one is taking any chances, due to the shooting death of Officer Lizarraga earlier in the day, near these same streets.