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| Paula's
Comments on Inner
City Blues |
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The
Birth of a Cop
Living in Los Angeles, which has always had one of
the most, shall we say, aggressive police forces in the
country, I saw first-hand what it was like to be "policed."
When I was five I saw my father get stopped by the LAPD
and humiliated for DWB (driving while black). He and I were
first-hand witnesses to white officers beating black citizens
during the Watts riots in 1965. And, unfortunately, I was
also front and center when the city of tarnished angels
exploded in fires and freestyle shopping without a credit
card in 1992.
But from the sixties to the nineties, policing in Los Angeles
had changed dramatically to include officers who looked
like my father, my mother, and me.
But an organization's culture doesn't change as dramatically
as its complexion, something I'd learned myself working
in corporate America for almost twenty years. Because I
had faced a crisis of conscience in my own career—a point
when I had to decide could I remain in an organization whose
values did not mesh with mine, regardless of the job titles
and monetary baubles dangled before me—I wondered whether
women, and specifically black women, faced similar challenges
in policing.
That question sparked months of research, of talking to
women detectives in the LAPD and other law enforcement agencies,
of discussing research on sexual harassment with sociologists,
of tracking every instance of sexual and racial discrimination
in policing I could find. My work culminated in the creation
of "Inner City Blues" and Charlotte Justice, a
black female homicide detective working in the LAPD's Robbery-Homicide
Division, the same division that investigates high-profile
cases like the Ennis Cosby and Nicole Brown Simpson/RonGoldman
murders.
Birthing Charlotte was simple enough in some ways—there
are no female homicide detective in RHD, so I had full creative
license there—but very difficult in others. She had to be
very good at her job or there would have been no way she
could have shattered RHD's bulletproof glass ceiling, which
required me to learn just what makes for a stand-out detective
in the LAPD. But I also wanted Charlotte to reflect the
conflicting emotions I'd seen in every female officer I
encountered—how to be tough as nails while being feminine
enough to have your nails done! And if you do express your
femininity—do your nails and wear a little lipstick—will
you be taken seriously by your colleagues? Or will some
male predator riding in your squad car, or sitting at the
desk across from you, interpret your expressing who you
are as a personal come-on?
For black officers, the dilemma gets even deeper—how do
you maintain your self-esteem on the job when you come from
a community that generally despises police officers as oppressors,
that has seen some of its members "taken downtown for
questioning," never to return? Does a career in policing
make you a sell-out, an Oreo—black on the outside, but white
on the inside? What motivates you to "keep on keeping
on?"
Another issue I wanted to explore stems from a common mistake
I see people make all the time—assuming cops don't have
a life beyond their jobs. So it was especially important
to me that Charlotte have a family, that she come from a
culture that I hoped readers would find fascinating, one
which would give them a rich slice of contemporary black
L.A. life beyond the gang bangers, athletes, and entertainers
seen on television. So I intentionally made Charlotte's
View Park family a group of high-achievers but a little
wacky, too—from her Southern-talking, mad scientist of a
father (actually a successful cosmetics chemist) to her
Saks-shopping, aging debutante of a mother, from her big
brother, a cop-turned-crusading attorney, to a younger sister
who's working on a second doctorate degree in psychology
and thinks Charlotte's career in the LAPD is part of an
unresolved "Supersister" complex. Not to mention
her boxer, Beast—modeled after our own beloved Sampson,
an eleven-year-old boxer with an attitude who exhibits his
own crime-fighting abilities. Is there any wonder poor Charlotte
sees herself at family gatherings as "a cloth coat
in a room full of mink?"
As you can see, my girl Charlotte does have a good sense
of humor which she needs—along with some good loving, courtesy
of Aubrey Scott, an old flame (see Chapter 13 for a sample)—to
get through the adventures she undertakes in "Inner
City Blues."
Because I love L.A. and feel it's always gotten a bad rap
as a tarted-up tinsel town with no history or culture, I
also tried to bring a bit of historical perspective to the
proceedings and predicaments in which Charlotte finds herself
embroiled. For example, in the novel, which is set in the
1992 riots, Charlotte unravels the long-ago disappearance
of a black radical, which gave me a chance to comment on
everything from the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 to the Black
Panthers and the Symbionese Liberation Army. And the buildings
where some of the action takes place are designed by Paul
R. Williams—not the seventies songwriter but an exceptionally
talented black architect who designed everything from mansions
to mortuaries, territory Charlotte comes to know quite intimately
over the course of the novel.
There was a phrase chanted in L.A. during the riots of 1992,
"No Justice, No Peace." Birthing Charlotte Justice
has made me understand just how true that slogan is. Charlotte
has become a part of my psyche now, and writing of her adventures
in a post-modern paradise was a way of exploring and exorcising
the demons and misconceptions that plague us all.
I hope you enjoy her adventures.
—Paula L. Woods, January 4, 1999 |
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