In the Bull’s-Eye of Violence, Elders Look for Some Answers

If you pushed a pin into a map for every recent shooting in the killing fields, L. Tolliver’s barbershop on Florence Avenue near Western would be surrounded. So naturally, the crime wave in South Los Angeles has been all the buzz.

A customer named Bill Layne said he has ordered his 12-year-old son to stay indoors after dark, and everyone in the shop identified with his fear.

Eddie Ford, who is the eldest of the barbers at 80 and is fond of quoting Scripture, doesn’t leave the shop at night without his .38-caliber snub-nose revolver. Lawrence Tolliver, the owner, keeps a Beretta “very close to me.”

“I got mine in the glove box,” said Tony Wafford.

It’s a short walk from the barbershop to the corner of 83rd and Western, where a 17-year-old boy was shot dead two weeks ago for no apparent reason. I went to have a look at the neighborhood, and was struck as always by the juxtaposition of an ugly crime against a backdrop of well-kept houses of sun-washed Spanish stucco.

The regulars at Tolliver’s live in houses like these, and they, too, wonder what’s wrong with the picture. I’ve known them for a year and a half, and I’ve never seen them so subdued, and talking about their neighborhood with more fear than pride. The civil rights movement wasn’t fought for them to live like this, carrying guns to protect them, not from Jim Crow, but from their own wayward children.

Mr. Tolliver, a generous man with an abiding love for his community, expressed his anger and frustration.

“It’s tragic that you’ve got to worry so much about your kids, because wild animals are out there, ready to prey on anything,” said Tolliver, the father of three, including a son who had a gangbanger’s bullet whiz past his head a couple of years ago.

“I was a staunch, staunch supporter of Bernie Parks,” Tolliver added, referring to the black Los Angeles police chief who was replaced by Bill Bratton, a white man. “But I would join hands and walk down the street with the new chief in a minute if he could stop the killing in my community.”

One of the best features of the free-for-alls at Tolliver’s is that everyone slides into the fray from a slightly different angle. This time was no different.

Wafford, an AIDS prevention specialist, was more inclined to point to the endless rhythms of racial and economic isolation that contribute to black-on-black crime. The blue-collar factory jobs along the Alameda Corridor are gone, he noted, and families have disintegrated in their wake.

A gang offers “love, security and money” to kids who don’t find it anywhere else, Wafford added, and pulling yourself up by the bootstraps isn’t easy “when you ain’t got no shoes.”

Mr. Tolliver said he was sympathetic to all of that, but insisted something at the foundation of modern society is broken in the black community and beyond.

“The rap records make it out like that’s the thing to do. Let me get my gun and go shoot this and shoot that,” Tolliver said. “The horrible part is that we as black folks let them play that garbage in our community.

“I go up by the junior high to get my food, and I’m so embarrassed to hear the young girls call each other bitch this and whore that. I told one of them, ‘You think your mother would like to hear you say that about yourselves?’ They need someone to correct them, but you can’t if they’re listening to it every day. How do we let that go?”

Allen Humphries, a retired sheriff’s sergeant, had an answer.

“The first thing you have to do is take responsibility, and the parents are responsible,” Humphries said. “These are someone’s children and they’re out there running around doing this. If you have two idiots at home, and you send him to a school where you’ve got 35 more idiots in the classroom, the teacher’s not a teacher, he’s a survivor.

“Stop blaming the schools, saying it’s the teachers’ fault. It’s the parents’ fault. The bottom line is, we stopped giving children limits, and children don’t just need limits, they expect them.”

Mr. Ford liked what he was hearing, but said it didn’t go far enough.

“Spare the rod, spoil the child,” he said, eyes ablaze with passion.

If only it were that simple.

I heard quite a bit of talk of the so-called good old days, when neighbors looked out for one another and children respected adults. Guns and drugs have been devastating forces, Mr. Tolliver said, tearing at the fabric.

True enough. But part of what’s at play here is the same generational disconnect that crosses all boundaries of race and income. The barbershop guys are at a loss to understand the generation that followed them, and the Malcolm X banner notwithstanding, I felt a bit like I was on the set of a conservative talk show.

“In this African American community, if you really talk to people on the issues, you’ll find that it’s just as conservative on law and order as any group you can name,” Mr. Tolliver said.

“Whatever is happening right now is what we have to deal with,” Humphries added. “We can’t go back to the ‘50s. We have to deal with what is, and what never changes is a parent’s responsibility to a child. You have a responsibility to a child, whether you have a job or not.”

Mr. Tolliver gave him an amen.

“I’m sympathetic to those who don’t have two parents, don’t have money, but there are kids in the same predicament who don’t go the wrong way,” Tolliver said.

“I don’t want to have bars on my house. I refuse to have bars on my house.”

We all walked out on Florence together. Wafford showed me the gun in his glove box, and as I asked what exactly it was, two police cars approached from the east and barreled past us in a black-and-white blur, destination unknown.

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com