Rare Night of Quiet in L.A. Killing Fields

There’s nothing about Earl Paysinger’s appearance that gives away what he has seen the last 30 years. His eyes are clear, his shoulders square, and he looks impossibly healthy for someone whose navigational reference points are the scenes of homicides.

Too many times in a three-decade LAPD career, Paysinger has driven home to Long Beach in early-morning darkness, the smell of death still sharp in his nostrils.

“There was blood everywhere,” he’s telling me about the scene of a triple homicide years ago. “Enough blood to gag a maggot.”

Like all cops, he says he doesn’t let himself think too long about the carnage, but I don’t believe him. All good cops think about it, bury it in shallow graves and drag it up again. Some are destroyed and others are luckier than that, but nobody comes through it untouched.

It’s Friday night in the 77th Street Division, and this is the end of a tour for Paysinger, his final hours as deputy chief of the four divisions known as South Bureau. L.A.’s killing fields. Since 1976, Paysinger says, this blood-stained stretch of the basin has suffered 100,000 shootings and 7,000 murders.

“That’s more than some war-torn centers of the world,” says Paysinger, who has watched too many innocent bystanders and children get cut down.

LAPD boss Bill Bratton has called Paysinger up the ladder to be chief of operations for the whole city. Paysinger’s agreed to let me ride along on his last pass through the 77th in a black and white.

Sgt. Manny Santoyo, his driver, has just gone to grab me a bulletproof vest, and Paysinger takes me into an office while we wait. If it were up to me, we’d hit the road and do our talking out there, but Paysinger isn’t ready just yet. Once we roll, it’ll be the beginning of the end.

“This is home,” he says, having spent more than half his career south of the Santa Monica Freeway, including the last three years and nine months as top cop in the bureau.

It’s not uncommon for Paysinger to work 12 hours or longer, get home late, field calls from his supervisors half the night and still roll out of bed at 4 a.m. to start the next day. He reads the L.A. Times and the Wall Street Journal, goes to the gym and punches in by 7.

“I absolutely love every day of it,” he says of life as a cop.

That doesn’t mean it’s been easy.

At the same time he’s tried to keep the 50-plus square miles of South Bureau turf from blowing, he’s had to walk a fine line, sticking up for his cops even as he’s pushed them to change the way the LAPD does business.

He says Connie Rice made a fair point when the respected lawyer and local conscience of civil rights said the LAPD has had a wrong-headed philosophy of containment in the past.

“We’ve come a long way since the way things were when I started,” Paysinger says, but “there’s an enormous amount” of work remaining, including the “molecular reconstruction” of the way cops think.

The new way to do business, he says, is to “dare to stick your hand out, whether someone takes it or not.” Without pastors, parents, activists and business leaders on their side, the cops don’t stand a chance.

Paysinger told me he gets angry, dejected and overwhelmed when he travels through the neighborhood late at night and sees children as young as 6 and 8 wandering the streets.

“You want to herd them up, because you know something bad’s going to happen,” says Paysinger, whose other instinct is to go find the parents and throttle them.

Even as a hardened city cop, he’s stunned by the “amazing, abject lack of conscience” among killers who are morally twisted before they grow whiskers. But he also sees how they get that way.

When he was growing up in South L.A., he had two parents to answer to. A dad who worked as a cement finisher and a mother who cleaned houses. If he goofed around in school, he got it from the teacher, then he got sent to stay with a neighbor named Mrs. Hobson until one of his parents got home.

One, two, three. “You got it from all of them,” Paysinger says. “If you did wrong, you were in for it.”

Now, he says, any kid he sees on the street is likely to have a dad in a gang or prison, or a mom who’s selling “her precious body” on Figueroa. For some kids, he says, family is a gang.

He and I agree: It’s the kids. It’s the parents. It’s the schools. It’s the culture. It’s the death of the middle-income economy. It’s the black and brown skin and the isolation that usually keeps the blood from spilling west of the 405 or north of the 10.

“Goodness gracious, you’re going to make me sound like a Democrat,” Paysinger says as he covers all the bases of social and economic breakdown. “As a society, we made a conscious and deliberate choice not to do anything.... As a community of caring people, we have to have the audacity to make a change.”

As my friends at Tolliver’s Barber Shop always say, it would be nice to see the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons turn out occasionally to denounce the homicidal gangbangers who terrorize entire neighborhoods, instead of just showing up when a cop steps over the line.

For all the challenges, though, Paysinger says he’s optimistic.

Why? I ask.

Because crime is down despite much room for improvement. Because the LAPD is different from how it was in decades past. Because the majority of South L.A. residents are law-abiding citizens.

For a Friday night, it’s pretty quiet when we hit the streets, as if the gangbangers’ going-away gift to Paysinger is to lie low. At nearly every corner, either Santoyo or Paysinger recalls a murder, but the radio is almost silent and the avenues are so empty it’s spooky.

It’s all that good work by the LAPD, says Paysinger.

Reach the columnist at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at www.latimes.com/lopez.