I first met Tim Brennan and Robert Ladd in December of 2012. They were seeking a writer for a book they were working on. Tim was the more talkative one. Blond hair, animated green eyes, and a boundless zeal when it came to sharing tales of their astonishing career in law enforcement. Dark-haired, hazel-eyed Robert - whom Tim calls Bob, but I call Bobby - was reserved, often letting Tim lead the stories they told, but I immediately sensed there was a great deal of depth and substance behind his quiet. When he did speak, he was always pointed and informative, and what he said was oftentimes punctuated with an unexpected and delightful humor.
I liked them both right away.
White detectives from Compton, I mused. Cops involved in the investigation of Tupac’s murder and the murder of the Notorious B.I.G., firsthand experts on the L.A. riots, and well-known fixtures in Compton during the rise of gangsta rap. And wait, what was this other thing they were telling me? The Compton Police Department was ultimately shut down? SHUT DOWN? Because of corrupt politicians? I’d never heard of such a thing. It happening to a police department that had been in existence for more than one hundred years made it all the more shocking. As they laid out one startling event after another, I realized there were more than enough elements to pull me in.
Music is my first love, and it would be an understatement to say I’m passionate about hip-hop. I loved Tupac and Biggie. Gangsta rap - N.W.A., Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, DJ Quik, Ice-T, and Snoop Dogg, in particular - had been significant parts of the soundtrack of my life. My interest in Tim and Bobby’s story was beyond piqued. I wanted to know more about them and their years running the gang unit for the now defunct Compton Police Department.
Little did I realize how much I would come to admire them. Little did I know how much their story would come to mean to me. Even less did I understand how important it would be in relation to the current national dialogue about policing with respect to Blacks and People of Color (PoC).
***
Our initial meeting had taken place at the end of 2012. Earlier that year, in February, seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin had been killed by George Zimmerman. As a Black woman born of parents who grew up in the Jim Crow-era Mississippi Delta and had fled that harsh world, after they were married in 1960, for better opportunities in South Florida, I’d heard my share of stories about extreme racism. I had seen vestiges of it during our summer visits to their Mississippi hometown. I’d seen Ku Klux Klan marches as we journeyed through parts of Alabama, as well as in Davie, Florida, a suburb of Broward County not far from where I grew up. I’d encountered institutional racism in its various forms in my life, along with an array of microaggressions most Black folks experience daily; things we learn to live with, especially in our professional lives, so that we’re not perceived as “too sensitive,” “disruptive,” “not a good fit,” and aren’t accused of seeing things that “aren’t really there.” I’ve always had a heightened and active interest in leveling the playing fields for my culture and others operating at a societal disadvantage.
I’m also someone who’s been very vocal about how much I deplore so-called “white savior” stories. Dangerous Minds, The Help, and a litany of other tales of said ilk trotted out by Hollywood and the publishing world were basura as far as I was concerned. Black characters couldn’t triumph on their own without it being through the selfless, noble filter of someone white telling the story. As a writer working in both the publishing world and developing projects in Hollywood, it was imperative to me to shift that paradigm to something more balanced. Yet here I was, seriously contemplating what, on the surface, might appear to be the whitest white savior story ever writ: two heroic white cops policing a city that was predominantly Black and Latino, and being damn good at it. So good, they were chosen - over their Black colleagues - to run the predominantly-Black Compton Police Department’s gang unit.
Two white men versus fifty-five Black and Latino gangs in a ten-square mile city. The more I heard it, the whiter it sounded.
It was the whitest white to ever white.
But there were levels to this, and it had nothing to do with their whiteness. These two men excelled at what they did - dealing with gang warfare, drugs, shootings, and murder on the daily - and had a humanity and regard for the people of Compton whom they served, even for the gang members they were up against, that defied anything I’d seen in narratives about police. They were go-to sources in law enforcement seminars and training programs around the country, in the media, and in television and film documentaries for their expertise in dealing with gangs. They were experts on the murder of Tupac Shakur and had been very familiar, in the years preceding the incident, with the players who’d been involved. Over the course of my research and my development of another project, an eighteen-year-old Black youth, Michael Brown, was killed in Ferguson, Missouri. I, along with the rest of the world, watched in horror as peaceful protestors and on-the-scene journalists were met with tanks, tear gas, rubber bullets, and unwarranted, often illegal, arrests by a heavily-militarized police force. As I delved deeper into this project with Tim and Bobby, the Black Lives Matter movement began to spread across the country.
During this time, I kept seeing example after example in the media of worst-case-scenario policing that, quite possibly, might not even be worst case, but closer to the norm. Three weeks before Michael Brown’s death, Eric Garner had died as a result of an illegal chokehold used by an N.Y.P.D. officer because Garner had been suspected of selling “loosies” (individual cigarettes). John Crawford III was killed by police in a Walmart in Ohio for holding a toy gun after a 911 caller falsely reported Crawford was terrorizing people in the store. Twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, playing in the park with a toy gun, was killed within seconds of the arrival of the Cleveland police. Walter Scott was shot in the back as he ran away by a police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina. A California Highway Patrol officer straddled Marlene Pinnock, a homeless bipolar woman, and punched her repeatedly in the face. A police officer in McKinney, Texas threw a fourteen-year-old bikini-clad girl to the ground and straddled her, also pulling a gun on other Black teenagers at a community pool. Sandra Bland died in the Waller County jail in Texas under dubious circumstances after being pulled over by an officer for a minor traffic violation. That same officer was later fired and charged with perjury for lying about the details of her arrest.
All the police officers in these instances were white. All their victims were Black and unarmed. Almost all of them saw little to no criminal penalty for their actions, short of termination from their jobs, if that. It wasn’t just white police officers, though, who were quick to kill the unarmed. It was also Black, Latino, and Asian officers such as Chinese-American Peter Liang, the officer who shot and killed Black and unarmed Akai Gurley within moments of Gurley entering a darkened stairwell in the building where he lived. Liang was terminated and, ultimately, convicted of criminally negligent homicide, but was sentenced to just probation and community service. He served no time for taking the life of a young man who was committing no crime at the moment he was killed. Liang blamed his training for the reason he was so quick to shoot.
The one instance that stood out during this period where a police officer did receive a just criminal penalty occurred in the case of Oklahoma City cop Daniel Holtzclaw, who targeted and raped dozens of poor Black women with criminal histories and drug problems, knowing their backgrounds would prevent them from lodging a complaint and, if they did, their credibility would be challenged because of their backgrounds. He was caught after forcing fifty-seven-year-old Jannie Ligons to perform oral sex on him during a late-night traffic stop. She immediately reported him. Holtzclaw was convicted of eighteen counts of sexual assault against thirteen women and received a sentence of two hundred and sixty-three years, but the trial and the verdict was little talked about in the mainstream media, as if to brush this horrific case under a proverbial rug as though it never even occurred.
The more these types of incidents - shootings, rape, assault of Blacks and PoC by law enforcement - kept being played out before the public, the more it was becoming apparent that the problem lie within the culture of policing - a culture which was deeply-rooted in the racism that has been an inseparable part of the infrastructure of America for over four hundred years.
With case after case popping up each week, I feared this kind of “kill first, ask questions maybe later (maybe not)” policing where Blacks and PoC were the victims was more indicative of the way things really were,[1] and it was only coming to light because we live in an age where everyone has a cellphone and social media allows for information to spread lightning fast.
Over the course of four years, I spent time with Tim and Bobby, attended their annual Christmas get-together with their former Compton Police Department colleagues, talked to people in Compton they served during their tenure on the force, learned of others they’d put away who they still visited in prison, and attended Tim’s retirement party and watched person after person share heartwarming, and sometimes funny anecdotes about his and Bobby’s outstanding service to Compton and beyond. I learned that in the twenty years the two served, there had only been six officer-involved shootings that resulted in the deaths of the suspects, two of whom were Black and two Latino. The officers involved were not white. These stats seemed to fly in the face of what I’d been seeing in the media.
The more I got to know Tim and Bobby and learned about them from others, the more obvious it became that these men represented a bright example of how policing should be. This was the kind of thing the world needed to see. The police shootings of unarmed citizens had stirred in me feelings of outrage and revolution, but Tim and Bobby reflected a hopefulness that all wasn’t lost. That good, fair policing did exist, could be taught and effectively implemented. That maybe the negative paradigm could be shifted if law enforcement agencies across the country were open to moving police culture toward more humanistic methodologies instead of the violent, reactive approaches that we were seeing, reading, and hearing about every day.
The clincher that made me want to be a part of getting their story out to the world occurred just a few months after I met Tim and Bobby. I’d asked them to show me Compton the way they knew it. I had a version of Compton in my head based on N.W.A, Ice Cube, DJ Quik, and The Game’s music, and I’d been bumping Kendrick Lamar’s Compton-centric album Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City since the prior fall. I wanted to have a more visual and visceral experience of things beyond what Tim and Bobby had told me and the source material and affidavits I’d read.
So they drove me around the city. I sat in the back seat of Tim's truck with my trusty Flip Video HD camcorder - filming, listening and asking questions as we passed landmarks, drinking it all in. At one point, they took me through a neighborhood and were pointing out the division between Acacia Blocc and Nutty Blocc - two feuding gang territories - when Tim glanced down a street and noticed a man they had arrested many times. He stopped his truck and backed up a bit, getting a better look.
“That’s G-Ray,” he said, surprised.
“He’s out?” Bobby asked.
“I think he just got out.”
“G-Ray” had just been released after serving a fifteen-year sentence. G-Ray’s brother had been murdered in 1990, an event that G-Ray explained to me a short time later, had been the catalyst that “turned him” cold and hard, ready to step, with a literal vengeance, into gang life. It was his activities in that life, including murder, that sent him to prison for such a long stint. Regarding his murdered brother, even though more than two decades had passed, Tim had never stopped looking into the case. He often dropped by to see G-Ray’s mother, to check on her and assure her that he was still on top of things.
“I owe her a visit,” Tim said as he glanced down the street at G-Ray. “Maybe we can stop by and you can meet them, Lo. They can give you an idea of how we were from their perspective and what times were like back then.”
I was excited. My camera was recording, so this would be perfect. Tim seemed a little reluctant, though.
“I usually call her first,” he said. “I don’t just drop in.”
How respectful, I thought.
“Well,” he said, “I guess it won’t hurt to ask.”
He backed up the truck and turned down their street. We pulled into the driveway. G-Ray - a tall, striking, prison-fit brother with a Las Vegas smile - was standing outside. His face broke into a luminous grin the moment he recognized Tim and Bobby in the truck. He approached, his hand extended.
“Blondie!” he said as Tim stepped out. G-Ray shook his hand.
“Blondie” was how Tim was known throughout Compton. It was a nickname made popular in the eighties by an underground song local rapper DJ Quik (not yet famous nationally) had made because Tim and Bobby were such a pervasive presence on the streets.
Tim went to the front door to talk to G-Ray’s mother. I was at his heels filming it all.
“Hey, Blondie!” she said from behind the metal outer door. I couldn’t really see her.
“I hate to spring up on you,” Tim said. “Bob and I were in the neighborhood. I wanted to let you know I’m still working on things.”
“Okay,” she said, now visible from the shadows. She was wearing a black bonnet, and even resembled my late mother. Their house, sans the metal outer door, looked a lot like my childhood home in South Florida.
I said hi and introduced myself. She immediately noticed my camera.
“This ain’t gon’ be on TV nowhere, is it?” she asked, self-consciously touching her bonnet.
“No, ma’am,” I explained. “This is just for me, for my notes.”
She welcomed us into the house and over the next hour, G-Ray recounted his many adventures with Tim and Bobby. We laughed a lot. There wasn’t an iota of animosity in the room, even when Tim and Bobby spoke of the times they’d arrested G-Ray.
“They were just doing their job,” G-Ray said to me good-naturedly. “I was doing wrong. I couldn’t be mad at ‘em.”
G-Ray’s mom said, “Blondie and Ladd were always coming here telling me he was doing stuff,” she said, “and I was like, ‘Ain’t no way my son can be doing all this stuff y’all are saying!’”
She said she eventually learned they were telling the truth and that G-Ray had, in fact, been doing it all.
“Did you apologize to them?” I asked. “Bake them a cake or something?”
We all laughed.
Not that any of the things they were reminiscing over were jokes. It had been all seriousness on both sides when it was happening, but there was enough time and distance between it all now to speak with candor. There was a bittersweetness in the reflection and, with that, some room for levity.
I’d never seen anything like what was happening at this moment. This kind of warm regard and respect between a former gang member and the men who’d chased and arrested him was something I didn’t hear about, in real life or in the media. I’d seen it in cartoons with Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner as they amiably clocked in and out for the day after another round of chase-vs-outwit, but never imagined it could exist in real life. If I hadn’t experienced it and someone told me about it, I probably would have called that person a liar. At the very least, I’d say hyperbolic.
***
After that Saturday afternoon, I went on to learn of several others in Compton and beyond - citizens, prosecutors, judges, former higher-ups and co-workers - all with the same high regard for Tim and Bobby.
Per K.D.[2], a native of the city who was once affiliated with the Bounty Hunter Bloods and, at one time, worked for the Compton Police Department: “What I loved about Blondie and Ladd is they weren’t scared of nothing. They were always polite and mannerable [sic], but they weren’t scared to roll up anywhere, no matter where it was.”
Statements like that were what closed me. I was already highly interested in their story, but the universal respect others had for them turned my interest from high to unavoidable. There was no way I could walk away from this project.
Their approach to policing and dealing with gangs - one based on actually “serving and protecting” the people of the community and seeing the humanity in others first and foremost - could and should be models for law enforcement agencies across the country.
Mixed in, was what initially attracted me to this project: their having been involved in some of the most important events in American pop culture and hip-hop history.
I got a glimpse of what a true rapport between citizens and cops looked like and also discovered two incredible human beings.
- Lolita Files