A force for good in the killing fields
We Americans have often had an ambivalent relationship with the police. We need them as a defense against social chaos, but we may disdain and even fear them all the same. This is especially true in Los Angeles, where the police have come to embody a peculiar mythos, as if they were an urban strike force, storm troopers for the law.
To some extent, this has to do with the history of the Los Angeles Police Department, which is nothing if not checkered, marked at times by corruption and brutal excess, not to mention a casual arrogance toward the citizenry. I’m not talking just about Watts, Rodney King or Rampart; as far back as the 1930s, Miles Corwin notes in “Homicide Special: A Year With the LAPD’s Elite Detective Unit,” local businessmen “paid LAPD officers handsomely for their after-hours work, storming picket lines and busting the heads of union strikers. During the Depression, LAPD officers deputized by counties bordering Arizona formed the infamous ‘bum blockade.’ They met Oakies and Arkies at the state border and roughed them up, discouraging them from looking for work in Los Angeles.”
In the 1950s, Chief William Parker reformed the LAPD into an “aggressive, efficient, militaristic organization,” an identity that lingers to this day. Still, for all the validity of this image, it obscures a far more useful truth about police culture, which is that cops, both good and bad, are people whose attitudes and sense of order are inseparable from their stresses and frustrations, conditions heightened by the nature of their work.
This notion of the LAPD as somehow human resides at the center of “Homicide Special,” which traces a year Corwin spent shadowing members of the department’s select Homicide Special squad. It’s an endeavor for which the author is well qualified; a former crime reporter for this newspaper, he has also written “The Killing Season,” which deals with homicide detectives, and he understands the intricacies of the department.
Such understanding is essential when it comes to Homicide Special, for this is a unit distinct even from Robbery-Homicide. Operating citywide, outside L.A.’s geographic police divisions, Homicide Special has, over the years, investigated many of the city’s most iconic killings, from the Black Dahlia case to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, also pursuing such high-profile suspects as O.J. Simpson and Robert Blake. Of course, not every Homicide Special case involves celebrity; during Corwin’s stay, its detectives also looked into killings linked to the Russian mafia, as well as cold cases and others too complex and time-consuming for a division detective -- with a heavy caseload -- to take on.
Still, this is a highly specialized investigative team, one that, in Corwin’s words, “is perfectly suited to Los Angeles. Teetering on the edge of the continent, the city has always been an urban outpost, conceived in violence, nurtured by deception, enriched by graft, riven by racial enmity and plagued throughout its history by heinous homicides.”
That’s a key statement, for, as Corwin admits, the idea of a reporter spending time with a police squad is not a unique one; perhaps the best-known example of the genre is David Simon’s “Homicide,” which recounted a year with a Baltimore investigative unit and inspired the television series of the same name. In “Homicide Special,” however, Corwin means not only to explore the daily details of police work but also to use them as a window on Los Angeles -- to have “Homicide Special” tell us something of the way we live.
At first glance, it might seem a stretch for a book about a homicide squad to operate as social metaphor. Yet the further we read, the more apropos the idea. Murder, after all, is ecumenical: It crosses all cultural and economic borders, from the Japanese woman killed, along with her 4-year-old daughter, by a faithless husband to the hooker executed in a business deal gone wrong.
The same is true of the detectives who form an astonishingly diverse company. Among the cops are Brian McCartin, a former New York City firefighter who brings blunt energy to his investigations; Dave Lambkin, a one-time punk rocker turned rape specialist, who “teaches LAPD investigators the nuances of sex crimes at the department’s detective school, lectures throughout the state and advises many agencies, including the FBI”; and Lt. Don Hartwell, one of the unit’s supervisors, who, during the late 1980s, spent four years moonlighting as a chef at the Santa Monica restaurant Les Anges.
For Corwin, these individuals, as much as the ins and outs of each investigation, are what make “Homicide Special” compelling, and his ability to capture the personality of the squad room helps to draw us in. This emerges most vividly in the area of police humor, which many detectives embrace as a strategy for dealing with the horrors of the job. After a pimp named Mher, who is a suspect in the murder of a Russian call girl, tells a polygraph examiner that he’s currently between jobs, one of the investigating officers “snorts derisively and mimics Mher: ‘I’m temporarily unemployed because my prostitute’s dead.’ ” The reaction may be cynical, brutal even, but it’s also very funny. And in laughing, we collapse the distance between cop and reader, gaining entry into this otherwise arcane and fluid world.
Nowhere are things more elusive than in the detectives’ interactions with the rarified realm of celebrity. That, too, is a quintessentially L.A. aspect of the story in which fact and fiction, fantasy and illusion collide in unexpected ways. Of the unit’s celebrity investigations, none bristles as much as that of O.J. Simpson, which nearly a decade later haunts the detectives like a specter, the proverbial one that got away.
Simpson’s acquittal, Corwin notes, represented a low point for the squad, which would be significantly overhauled. This becomes a kind of subtext, especially when, in May 2001, Robert Blake’s wife Bonny Lee Bakley is found shot to death in the actor’s car.
For all the gallows humor this provokes -- “I see a glove,” one investigator at the murder scene deadpans. “I think it’s O.J.’s glove” -- there is a profound undertone of tension, an almost physical desire not to repeat the past. This emerges on a variety of levels, from the detectives’ insistence that every shred of evidence be scrupulously handled to their anger at how Blake’s celebrity has reduced Bakley to a footnote in her own death.
“You know what bothers me?” one officer asks early on. “The press is already calling this the ‘Blake’ murder. It’s like the victim doesn’t count. Her past might have been pretty questionable, but she’s still the victim. It’s not the Blake murder. It’s the Bakley murder.”
More to the point is the toll that celebrity, with all its media attention, takes on the detectives, pulling focus from every other case. Throughout his account of the Bakley case, Corwin documents the investigations that have been set aside, the victims for whom justice is postponed. “This Blake case,” McCartin complains, “is burning everyone out.” The irony is that detective burnout is a key factor in homicide investigation, without which Corwin’s narrative would be incomplete. In that sense, it opens up “Homicide Special” more widely, further humanizing the officers of whom he writes. That’s not to say the book is without problems: The prose is occasionally lackluster, and Corwin’s descriptions tend toward the perfunctory, the shorthand of the blotter sheet.
Yet in the end, all this pales beside the story that he has to tell. Whatever our reservations about the police, the detectives of Homicide Special have a quiet heroism all their own. It takes guts to face the worst a city has to offer on a daily basis, to go from murder scene to murder scene, to try to reconstruct the shards of endless broken lives. In offering a three-dimensional portrait, Corwin has helped demystify not just Homicide Special, but all of police culture, and given it a very personal face. *
