Wednesday, April 13, 2022

Riding Compton's very mean streets with a black officer

Frederick Douglass Reynolds is the son of poor sharecroppers from rural Virginia. When his family moved north, he associated with the Errol Flynns, a street gang founded on the lower east side of Detroit during the 1970s. He was a criminal, receiving six-months probation for a fight in juvenile hall where he’d been confined for stealing a bicycle.

He joined the Marine Corps and served for four years. When he tried to re-enlist the Corps would not have him because he’d been reduced in rank twice. He ran through his savings and became homeless, worked two jobs, and slept in cars and all-night movie theaters, unable to earn enough to house, clothe, and feed his growing family. And just when the rent “was two months past due, the city of Compton offered me a career as an armed security officer.” 

Black, White, and Gray All Over: A Black Man’s Odyssey in Life and Law Enforcement is two books in one: Reynolds’s memoir as a cop and a history of Compton, CA. The memoir elements of this self-published book are much more interesting than the details of Compton’s growth, decay, and politics. Although, given the city’s history in the last twenty-years and Reynolds’ position, that could have been a fascinating separate story.

Reynolds was a cop and detective for 32 years in Compton, a 10-square mile city in southern Los Angeles County. In 1991 the city had 87 murders for a rate of about 90 per 100,000 people. The entire county rate that year was 9.8 per 100,000. “And the Compton total didn’t include those labeled suicides because the city’s four-man homicide unit was too overburdened to investigate them.”

Most of the murders were the work of the gangs—Black gangs, Hispanic gangs, and splinter gangs from larger gangs. “At least one gang claimed every neighborhood and they were always fighting,” Reynolds writes. “Piru gangs fought Crip gangs. Crip gangs fought other Crip gangs. Piru gangs fought other Piru gangs, and Hispanic gangs fought them all. At least three people were shot on average every day. And someone was murdered on an average of seven times a month.” (Piru gangs are African-American; they originated in Compton.)

We ride with Reynolds and his fellow officers as they do their best to keep the peace or pick up the pieces after a drive-by shooting. He is candid about his personal history, his marriages, his weakness for alcohol and gambling. The life sounds brutal, and as a result “I believe that every cop who worked at Compton PD suffers from various degrees of PTSD. In addition to all the violent crime incidents I also responded to horrific fatal traffic accidents, including hit-and-runs involving pedestrians, some of whom were children.”

Much of the memoir is made up of war stories, which are well-told and fascinating, while at the same time “TV shows and the movies make it seem as if police work is nonstop shootouts, car cases, and fighting, real police work is long bouts of boredom, mundane conversations, and insults interrupted by short bursts of fear.” Which does not make for exciting television.

Reynolds carrying an historic name has interesting things to say about race relations. He writes that when a white Jewish landlord began renting him a condo for less than the going market rate, he began to realize the color of your skin is irrelevant. “Nothing matters except the content of your character. People of good character don’t see race. And I’m talking about the so-called ‘liberals’ who call themselves helping Blacks because we can’t help ourselves. We don’t need your pity, your condescension, or your extra test points because of our skin color. In my eyes, to accept such help is an admittance that Blacks need help because Whites are superior. We just demand the same opportunity. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

In July 2000, the Compton City Council voted to disband the police department and hired the LA Country Sheriff’s Department to replace the police. The reason: the Compton PD was “powerless to stop the out-of-control violence.” As one of the officers who traded a police badge for a sheriff’s, Reynolds argues that disbanding the department had more to do with city corruption and politics than the over-worked and underfunded police. The violence, by the way, continued.

Reynolds is not a professional writer and the book could have used better editing. In an attempt to recognize his fellow officers, he gives a thumbnail description of virtually every one. These do not help the reader keep the large cast straight but tend to slow the book. I would also like to better understand the motivations and needs of the gangs. They’re protecting sources of income from crack and other drug sales, but are there other reasons for the violence?

But Reynolds sounds like a guy that a mystery writer like Michael Connolly could use as a source to understand the life of a cop in a high crime neighborhood. The rest of us will enjoy reading about an absorbing life in Black, White, and Gray All Over.

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