He was slumped in a chair in the corner, face pointing straight up at the ceiling, fingers curled stiff, long hair matted and slick with blood at the sides of his head. The gun lay on the floor pointing toward the door of the backyard shack where he was found. He was breathing but he would be dead in about 15 minutes.

“Weak, that’s weak,” said Sgt. Alex Salinas about 20 minutes before we arrived at the Compton home for the last call of the night, when we learned over the radio that the “shots fired” call we were racing toward was a suicide. “But if he shot himself in the head, it’s good to look at,” he said, rethinking.

“It’s Friday night in Compton and shit happens,” another officer had told me as I got ready at the beginning of the night to accompany Salinas, 47, on his patrols. I read that Compton was the 7th most-dangerous city in the States. I wanted a bulletproof vest but I didn’t get one.

“This city’s like a beast,” said Salinas, a 23-year veteran of law enforcement and an 18-year veteran of the Sheriff’s Department, describing the lack of action in recent weeks. “It sleeps… but when it wakes up, watch out.”

“Most small towns have bad areas,” he said. “But I’ll tell you the truth— it’s all fucked up here.”

Salinas came to Compton a few months earlier, having requested a transfer to the crime-plagued city after a number of years with the K9 unit. He relished the action, the main reason he said he was in law enforcement.

“I used to do shit that would get me fired or put in prison,” he recalled, reminiscing about how things had changed for law enforcement over the years, especially since the Rodney King beating and the riots that followed. “Nobody raised any questions before Rodney King.”

“The good thing is that we’re more accountable, and can’t use force as much now,” he said. “The bad thing is that the bad guys know that, and they push the envelope. Bad guys are like bratty little kids. You gotta hit them to make them go, hit them to make them stop. Same thing in prisons. Same thing in the streets. We used to kick ass and so they knew not to fuck around.”

Salinas said many veteran deputies agreed with him about all of that, and he should know, because his job is to oversee the conduct of the other deputies, to make sure they don’t overstep the legal limits in dealing with suspects. “If there’s a chance someone may be shot, beat, or tazed, I’ll be there.”

My night with Salinas wore on but aside from dinner at El Pollo Loco (“They take care of us at El Pollo Loco!”) and the hysterical yelling of a man on PCP who had been mildly restrained, nothing much had happened. Then the radio crackled to life with the “shots fired” call.

A couple deputies were there when we arrived. After securing the scene, Salinas called me out back to the decrepit shack where the young man was sitting bloodied in the chair, the gun on the floor. The deputies were chatting outside, the conversation jovial considering the circumstances. One of the deputies was chewing on a Twizzler.

“I took these out of the kid’s pocket. He’s not going to need them anymore,” he said with a chuckle. The other officers chuckled too. Most enthusiastic was a young recruit on a ride-along for the night.

“You have no idea how ready I am for this,” he said. “I’m so ready.”

We waited around for the ambulance to show up while the officers discussed the credibility of the story being told by the victim’s nephew, who was about 20 years old, the same rough age as the victim. He said he and his friend were smoking weed out front of the house, getting ready to go to a party, when they heard the gunshot. They waited about two minutes, then rushed back to the shack only to discover the suicide.

The officers weren’t buying the story. They said it looked like maybe the victim and the guys out front had been playing Russian roulette. The chambers of the gun were empty. Four bullets rested on a table in front of the victim.

The ambulance eventually came, followed by the mother, hysterical as she hugged and spoke to the nephew on the front lawn. Then she left for the hospital. The nephew, though, was ordered to stay with the deputies. They all waited for word that the victim had died, at which point the shack became a crime scene and Homicide was called to investigate.

Salinas and I left a couple of minutes later. In the car, we learned that the victim had died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. “Well, you saw his last breaths,” said Salinas.

I asked him if seeing death on a regular basis affected him. “Adults don’t stay with me,” he said. “I’ve seen kids who caught strays in drive-bys. That stays a bit. But adults, fuck ‘em.”

——
Matt Mundy is a regular contributer to Pop and Politics and a graduate student at USC.

Tags: compton, occupation