The Crawling Nightlife

A work of immersion journalism

Crime for many is either a window of opportunity to a better life or a life behind iron bars. Those who choose the life, for whatever reason, may or may not understand the consequences. It is the city’s dark heartbeat that pumps blood and anxiety into every crevice of the street; it splatters on window sills, bottlenecks traffic and looms on street corners. Crime is a body, crime is a mother, crime is a father, crime is always there. But as every city is different its crime and enforcers are different. As the sun sets, and civilian life winds down, S. Yang of Hawthorne Police Department and Officer S. Ortiz of UCI Police Department strap on their bulletproof vests and utility belts, pat down their freshly ironed uniforms and get ready for their 13-hour shift.  They are about to enter vastly divergent worlds.

* * *

As one of 90 sworn officers, Yang enforces the law in the 3898.88 acres of urban ghetto that is Hawthorne. With its nightly gun fire and high crime rate of 359 Hawthorne dwarfs Irvine’s meager 93. Laced with gang violence in the dimly lit back alleys, transients lying under broken street lights, and suicides, Hawthorne features a wide array of crime that is visible on the streets. Streets that are unforgiving, and don’t have enough resources and manpower, like UCI to keep crime invisible on the main streets.

Thefts (47%), auto thefts (17%), burglaries (15%), robberies (8%), assaults (11%) and other (2%) fill Hawthorne’s crime reports in 2015, compared to Irvine, where assaults and robberies didn’t even make the list. It was these serious crimes that drew Yang in; at age 25, she satiated her hunger for fighting crime by applying, graduating from the academy, and being hired by the Hawthorne Police Department.  Now 28, Yang has a thriving career as a Hawthorne Police Officer, patrolling the urban ghetto at night.

S. Ortiz followed a different path to his current position as a UCI Police officer. At age 18, he enlisted in the Air Force and worked his way up for four years, gaining the title as Military Police, until he attended UCI as a student. Here the stillness of civilian life disrupted his learned normalcy of high stress, and he eventually found respite serving as an officer in the department he gained loyalty to. After a few years, he was police again; and at age 31, Ortiz is one of the youngest of UCIPD’s 40 sworn officers.

Irvine has the common thread of “money,” and UCI’s 1,526 acres, where Ortiz patrols, are filled with luxury cars and affluent housing districts. With its low amount of violent crimes and diverse community of academic experts, Irvine is a hub of knowledge, power, and wealth. Here, where the professors and students live a few miles apart, traffic stops and welfare checks are the most frequent calls.

From a distance, Officer S. Ortiz looked as young as the college students he pulled over, but there was always a fleeting moment when he sat in his car, waiting for dispatch to respond when you could see the subtle marks of age on his face. The slight crease next to his eye, the furrowed brow that made you question your answers, and the mature smile that calmed the situation.

Night had already fallen when I arrived, and he was ready to begin his shift. But before taking off, he walked me through the standard procedures. He flicked patrol lights on and off, switching between all three levels, showed me the built-in police radio, computer, and how each tab tracked the activity of the officers on shift.

It was 11:45 pm. Ortiz and I had barely made our way down Campus when he noticed the driver of a black Altima made an unyielded right turn and didn’t have his headlights on. You would never see this kind of car driven casually around Hawthorne, it was far too nice.

Ortiz accelerated to 40 miles per hour, and made the final stop at 11:47 pm, next to the San Diego Creek. While parked, he radioed in the plates to dispatch so they could run them, and made his way over to the driver. As they talked, Ortiz could smell alcohol on his breath. This was enough for a DUI test.

“You can stand here behind the door and watch okay?” Ortiz called out to me as he returned to the driver’s car. Not a minute later did post academy graduate Officer Duane Solomon and his Field Training Officer (FTO), Officer Giao Doan pulled up as Ortiz stood outside with the driver. When things are slow for UCIPD, everyone shows up to a traffic call.

All three moved onto the dirt patch etched by footprints and bikers besides the stagnant canal that reeked of sewage. Officer Solomon and Officer Doan stood as backup, as Ortiz performed a standard eye exam on the suspect, and I, behind the door of the patrol car.

From 11:50 pm to 12:18 am, the officers conducted three eye exams, followed by a line and balance test, and two breathalyzer tests because the driver didn’t perform well enough for the machine to get a reading the first time. When they finished, Ortiz packed up his yellow DUI bag, loaded it into the trunk and huffed as he sat in the car. “He barely made it under.”

Officer Ortiz was skeptical about the college atmosphere because of the young adults who pushed the limits of the law, and had the right to be.

The drivers just under the legal limit of 0.08% are the most dangerous because of their heightened sense of self confidence and functioning motor skills. Compared to the slow, completely intoxicated, and paranoid driver they drive erratically, and are more likely to cause an accident.

“These guys think they are okay, but they aren’t.” Ortiz seethed.

For an hour and a half, we roamed the streets of Culver, Harvard, and California, maneuvering through the Arroyo Vista, Vista Del Campo Norte, and Stanford housing complexes. The manicured streets were empty except for the few late night snackers, Ubers, and students walking home, textbooks in hand. As we roamed, cars slowed down, but some were not on their best behavior. During this time Ortiz conducted three traffic stops, one suspected of a possible DUI. 12:32 am in VDC parking lot, 12:48 am at Harvard and Culver, 2:26 am on Campus Drive for running a red light.

Between these stops Ortiz talked about a less visible type of cases at UC Irvine—suicide. Less spoke of because of its social stigma, and privacy issues, suicide is a common epidemic that plagues UCI’s campus because of the stressful academic and social environment. Here, welfare checks of suicidal people occur more often than other cities per capita.

On May 13 th, 2017 another welfare check occurred, when a freshman threatened to kill himself. He had planned this for months, and tonight he made tracks to jump. The student was last seen roaming Aldrich Park in the dead of night. As his friends, ex-girlfriend, and officers scoured the park and different parking structures, Ortiz called the subject and left him a voicemail, urging him to call back.

Three Community Service Officers were dispatched to the tops of the Anteater, East Campus, and Social Science Parking Structures to keep vigilance, and officers roamed on and off campus. Seven people devoted their time that night to find this student—an effort that would have been unimaginable in the busy streets of Hawthorne. There, welfare checks come in two forms, dead or alive, rarely in pursuit.

Three long hours passed after Ortiz left the voicemail, but at 1:30 am his phone rang. It was the subject calling back stating he was okay and willing to talk. It was crunch time. UCIPD kicked into high gear and rushed to ping his cell phone off the towers to try and pinpoint his exact location.  As Ortiz held him on the phone, coordinates were radioed to all the officers. 33°40′32″N 117°52′06″W – John Wayne Airport.

Ortiz rushed to the scene, and spotted the student at 1:37 am, sitting slouched on the southside ledge of the third level. From experience, he knew he wasn’t going to jump.

On the third floor, they both talked about life, like old friends would in passing. Ortiz politely asked the student how he was, and the student responded with a twinge of annoyance. He felt tricked into the meeting but Ortiz didn’t care; at least he was alive. Traffic on the radio ceased until 1:45 am, when Ortiz detained the subject, quickly escorting him to UCI Medical Center at 2:02 am, where he was placed under suicide watch—a happier ending than most.

The hours passed, still and quiet. There were no fire alarms, no sirens. Sometimes the only noise was the wind smacking the inside of the SUV as we drove around campus. Students walked freely, Macbooks in hand, rarely looking over their shoulder for robbers, unlike the citizens in Hawthorne. This was the culture of Irvine, a worry-free monitored bubble that somehow carbon copied living complexes, rendered transients and gangs non-existent, and kept the real world of violent crime as research within the lecture halls of the Criminology Department. Here UCIPD deals mostly with non-violent offenses such as property theft, petty and grand theft, traffic stops, sexual assault cases, and disturbance calls.

Here, Ortiz was always moving, unaccustomed to waiting.  He constantly searched for someone to falter.

Which is why in April 2017 he found himself scouring campus, helping another Orange County police agency find a missing UCI student. At the time he got the call, the student had been missing for a few hours. But at around midnight, Ortiz was the first of the other three officers, to find a running car that matched the description.

“952, located missing car,” he reported to dispatch, as he cautiously got out of his patrol car on the fifth level of the East Campus Parking Structure. He approached the car, flashed his light first into the driver’s seat, then noticed a body in the back seat, with a bag over its head. This was not like most welfare checks. He radioed his FTO for advice and once authorized, he smashed the car window. He took the victim’s arm, finding it stiff and cold.

“952, unable to find pulse on subject.”

***

With its underground garage for its platoon of cars for the Police, Parking, and Traffic control, as well as its own indoor shooting range, Hawthorne Police Department’s fortified grey walls stand as an authoritative figure in the urban ghetto. And because of its approximately 100 officers and a 60-person staff, Hawthorne PD is a monster of an agency who responds to a plethora of different crimes.

Before the night began, I signed a liability waver, strapped on a bullet proof vest, and then followed my assigned officer, S. Yang to the car.  She didn’t take a moment to pause before running me through the numerous procedures. The signals, our call sign, and how to take information from a subject if they were arrested.

If we do a traffic stop, she said, don’t stay in the car. That’s the first place they shoot. Get behind something sturdy so I know where to find you in case shit goes down. Don’t stand behind the door either.

As I was making mental notes, she asked, “How comfortable are you physically?” Laughing, I said I would throw a punch if needed. She slid her hand into her pocket, and pulled out a gun. “Good.”

It was like a scene from a movie. This was where the director was supposed yell, “Cut!” But no such thing happened. This was real.

“This gun doesn’t have a safety on it, and if anything happens, grab it, pull and shoot.” She didn’t wait for my response when she asked if I had ever shot a gun before, because my answer wouldn’t have mattered. The question of physical intervention let alone shooting had never come up for me in Irvine, so before this night began, I knew we were dealing with a different beast. We were, after all, in the gang strewn, drug laced, and crime imbedded streets of Hawthorne. My neighborhood, a neighborhood I thought I knew.

It was 9:20 pm. “We got a call!” She exclaimed just as we pulled out of the metal gate. “It’s a family disturbance, let’s see what we get. I think I’ve been there before.”

With the windows rolled all the way down, the wind throbbed through the car as we hit 50 miles per hour.  A minute later we pulled up to a residential area on El Segundo and Inglewood, and parked in front of a beige house where three teenagers stood on the sidewalk, clutching their scooters and skateboards. Yang asked who called and the oldest pointed to the front of the house. “It was our friend. His uncle went crazy.”

I followed Yang up the sidewalk path towards the dimly lit house, as she squeaked open a white metal door and then a wooden one. The light orange house smelled of chilies, and featured pictures of deceased family members on the walls. They were sometimes the only witnesses present.

In the living room, Yang and I approached a larger man named Joel, who towered over us by half a foot, and began asking him questions. His sister cowered behind him, with her elderly father and son, as Joel told his side of the story. In a thunderous, Spanish accented voice, gesticulating wildly, he yelled that his sister stole from him, making everyone uneasy. Yang had been in too many situations where this type of tension turned physical, so in an effort to calm the situation, she pulled Joel outside for questioning and turned to me, saying, “Ask them what happened. Get their side of the story.” With that, she left me with the shocked family and a notebook.

As the minutes drawled on, the rising argument, echoed through the house. Inside, I approached the sister with a facade of confidence and asked the only question I could manage: “What happened?”

“He is schizophrenic and stopped taking his medication,” the sister said, as I took Joel’s medical card from the father’s trembling hands. She swayed back and forth when Yang stepped in and asked further about the mental illness. “He thinks I stole from him and then pulled my hair, just yelling,” the sister said.  That was it. That was all Yang needed to file a 5150—an involuntary psychiatric hold.

Outside, Joel argued with the backup officer that responded to the scene, Officer Andrew, urging him to arrest his sister. But after seven minutes of bickering, Joel confessed to being off his medication and was subsequently hand-cuffed by Yang and transported to Centinela Hospital at 9:37 pm. “I couldn’t leave him there.” Yang sighed as we walked back to the patrol car. “He may have hurt someone else.”

We hoped back in the car hoping to find a place to get dinner, but instead got called to respond as backup to an arrest made by Officer Andrew. One that quickly turned into a heated community debate because Officer Andrew decided to handcuff an African American Little League Softball coach for urinating on a wall.

At 10:00 pm we arrived at Holly Park, Westbound on West 120th street, where the debacle hit its climax. Splayed out before me, an unknown African American man was sitting, handcuffed on the corner of the sidewalk, while a group of four ladies and five men screamed in agreement that the police didn’t handle the “important issues,” all while a   Little League softball team of ten boys stood off to the side as witnesses. What had started as a community softball game had ended in chaos.

One of the larger women pushed her face into mine, screaming, asking me to explain what was going on, and answered her own questions before I got a word out. “The police don’t do anything around here! They let tweakers and druggies shoot dice in the bathrooms but there are three police cars here when a black man pees!”

As she got louder, I finally interjected, to try and calm her down. I explained I understood her frustration, because I grew up in the same neighborhood. That seemed to sooth her for a second, until she lashed out again.

To my right, the kids were ushered into a little sports utility shack, and Yang soothed an elderly man. In the mess of overlapping voices, I gripped the edges of my bulletproof vest, watching a visually annoyed group of five men pace back and forth. The screaming didn’t bother me, I was more interested if someone had a potential weapon. Because all the officers’ backs were to the mob, I had to keep watch. I was on my own with the angry crowd.

For 30 minutes, everyone was on high alert, until Watch Commander and Lieutenant Robbie Williams arrived on scene to calm the angry group.  He was well known in the community for his involvement and they trusted him because was a black man in uniform. No one went to jail that night.

“Every officer uses discretion,” Yang scoffed as we got back in the car. “I’m not saying what Officer Andrew did was bad, but did we waste a lot of time. There are other, more important things to be worrying about here.”

Unlike Irvine, where specific organized protesters show their resentment towards the police, Hawthorne’s community widely believes the police hardly make a dent in the crime issues at large. In Irvine, the students and staff generally comply and support the police, but Hawthorne’s citizens hold animosity for their enforcers. This community teeters between seeing the enforcers as helpers, then as watch dogs who are hardly in tune with the larger issues of drugs and violence that hang on every corner and public bathroom. With diverse minority demographics and varying education levels, Hawthorne’s in-cohesive community sometimes hold false understandings of the law, the police’s job, and procedures.

An average of three to five officers and one Watch Commander is in service every night, but isn’t enough man power to serve its litany of violent crimes. Here the citizen’s concerns go largely unresolved because of the department’s short staff, compared to Irvine’s average of three to five officers and one watch commander who cover a third of the area.

As the night progressed, we moved from the lively streets of Rosecrans, where smokers hung out by the liquor stores, to a seemingly quiet neighborhood where Yang reminisced. She pointed to a house tucked away in a row, “We worked a dead body scene and it was unforgettable.”

The house in 2017 had not aged a bit from when Yang first visited it over two years ago. Its grass was still green, and the house itself was quaint, small, and cozily structured—a wonderful place to awaken when the rising sun hit the window just right. But in 2015, when Yang first walked in as a training recruit, the house was dark, and the sound of white noise from an old TV shrieked in the background, a tell-tale sign the cable was shut off. The elderly lady who lived there hadn’t paid the bills.

Following the white noise, Yang led the group of trainees and coroners forward as she gingerly stepped into the house, careful to preserve the crime scene. The shrieking grew louder as she passed the living room, kitchen, and finally the bedroom door frame into the master bedroom where the sound emanated from. As she passed the door, the multicolored pen marks on the frame caught her attention for a moment—they were height marks with dates and names of children the old woman left behind.

Yang stepped forward, and quickly inhaled the unforgettable smell of death. On the bed there was a body, completely covered by a blanket except for a black foot peeking out. Yang moved closer, confused. Five minutes ago, when she walked through the house, she discovered the woman’s driver license stating she was white.

Surrounded by the same trainees and licensed coroners, Yang stepped closer to the bed, covering her nose with gloved hands as she lifted the grey blanket; under the grotesque bloated black body the edge of a silver gun handle peeked through.

The suicide happened during the perfect time, 4th of July weekend, and now 41 days later, the coroner confirmed her body was going through active decay—stage three.

***

At 11:09 pm, Yang pulled into another neighborhood and reminisced once more about a suicide case that had stuck with her. And while she couldn’t mention the girl by name, she often referred her as “the subject.”

The subject was in her senior year of high school. She was smart and had a healthy home life and many friends because of her bubbly personality. No one suspected her daily battle with depression. Not even when she cleared out her room and sold all her possessions a day before she pulled the trigger.

The subject committed suicide on a summer evening in August during a family party. That day, family members squeezed into the small house, filling it with laughter and gossip before slowly collecting around the outdoor grill. With everyone outside, this was the perfect opportunity; hoping no one would notice, the subject locked herself in a room upstairs and sent a pop that sounded like fireworks ringing throughout the house. Surprisingly only the subject’s younger sister heard it.  She was 10 years old at the time. It was a funny noise, the sister later recalled.

She ran outside hoping to see a beautifully lit sky, but found a hazy one, drowned out by the city lights. She ran back inside, determined to find the source of the noise, and realized she hadn’t seen her older sister in a few hours. She knew what gun shots sounded like and began to get a bad feeling. The sister darted upstairs, tugging on the subject’s door. It was locked. There was no reason for it to be locked. In a panic, the younger sister dropped to her stomach to look under the door crack to find an answer, and she did. Inside the walls were splattered with a beautiful ruby red, as if newly painted, and in the corner, she saw the unmoving feet.

“Imagine being 10 and finding that,” Yang frowned.

11:47 pm struck, and we passed El Segundo for a third time that night. Yang sat in silence as we navigated the dimly lit alleys, and I watched a drunk man stumble to the left to avoid getting hit. Minutes passed, until Yang broke the silence.

This is TCG territory, see those group of guys up there past the dumpsters? Keep an eye out in case they reach.
We pulled up slowly to the five men. Three wore wife beaters and all had graffiti block letter tattoos that peaked through their shirt every time they took a sip from their beer can, or cranked their neck. “Evening guys,” Yang smiled, “hanging out?”

I prepared for the worst, but the biggest, most intimidating man turned to face her and casually said, “yeah, just chillin.’” His face remained stoic and his thin lips barely parted as he spoke. “Have a good night,” Yang responded as we drove away, she started schooling me on gang territory.

“The Tongan Crip Gang has been gaining a lot of repo in the last few years.” Yang said.  The gang is based in Inglewood, mostly on 102nd and 104th street, but go all the way from El Segundo to Cranbrook. “The killings are mostly family affair issues, now let’s go take care of the traffic call.”

1:40 am flashed on the dash, as we made it to Acadia and Imperial. We had shooed away transients from Hawthorne Park, made two traffic stops, advised a young male from Palos Verdes to “get better friends,” assisted a homeless woman who had been off her medication, and cited a woman at her house for a noise complaint. “Today is a slow day.” Yang remarked, “We really had to look for things to respond to. It’s not normally like this.”

Time felt never ending to her, but I was surprised we only had a few hours left. I was on constant alert in Hawthorne, while I had never felt a ping of nervousness making a traffic stop in Irvine. The quiet streets of Irvine never have to watch for ricocheting bullets, or blood spilled by rival gang members, or transients scaring passersby with their un-medicated hallucinations. In Irvine, no sirens, bullets, or rambunctious fights upset the quiet still of the night. It is a safe place for young adults to make mistakes, and learn how to grow up. Hawthorne is less forgiving.  With its inequality, poverty, and diverse demographics Hawthorne is a city with a darker, more thumping heartbeat.

*The names in this piece have been changed for privacy reasons