Ghettoside

by Jill Leovy

  12 arson, for some reason, gets a starring role E.g., Stephen P. Frank, Crime Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia 1856–1914 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), p. 19; Michael Schwaiger, “Salmon, Sagebrush, and Safaris: Alaska’s Territorial Judicial System and the Adventures of the Floating Court, 1901–1915,” Alaska Law Review 26, no. 1 (June 2009): p. 97; E. M. Beck and Stewart E. Tolnay, “When Race Didn’t Matter: Black and White Mob Violence Against Their Own Color,” in Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, editor (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p. 140; Manfred Berg, Popular Justice: A History of Lynching in America (Lanham, Md.: Ivan R. Dee, 2011), p. 113.

  See also Julia Eichenberg, “The Dark Side of Independence: Paramilitary Violence in Ireland and Poland after the First World War,” Contemporary European History 19, no. 3 (August 2010): pp. 231–48.

  13 “individuals willingly give up their implicit power to the state” Monkkonen, Murder in New York City, p. 164.

  14 High homicide rates have also been recorded among hunter-gatherer peoples E. Adamson Hoebel, “Law-Ways of the Primitive Eskimos,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 31, no. 6 (1941): pp. 662–83; Bruce M. Knauft, “Reconsidering Violence in Simple Human Societies: Homicide Among the Gebusi of New Guineau,” Current Anthropology 28, no. 4 (1987): pp. 457–500, p. 458; Richard Borshay Lee, The !Kung San: Men, Women, and Work in a Foraging Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979; 1984 reprint), p. 398; Wilfred T. Masumura, “Law and Violence: A Cross-Cultural Study” Journal of Anthropological Research 33, no. 4 (1977): pp. 388–99.

  15 Thus, some Indian tribes in Canada and the U.S. Anthony N. Doob, Michelle G. Grossman, and Raymon P. Auger, “Aboriginal Homicides in Ontario,” Canadian Journal of Criminology 36, no. 29 (1994): pp. 29–35; Steven W. Perry, “American Indians and Crime: A BJS Statistical Profile,” U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics, BJS Profiles 1992–2002 NCJ 203097 (December 2004).

  16 as do ethnic and immigrant enclaves See Roberta Belli and William Parkin, “Immigration and Homicide in Contemporary Europe,” p. 253, and Nora Markwalker and Martin Killias, “Homicide in Switzerland,” p. 351, in Marieke C. A. Liem and William Alex Pridemore, editors, Handbook of European Homicide Research: Patterns, Explanations, and Country Studies (New York: Springer, 2012). See also Patsy Richards, “Homicide Statistics, Research Paper 99/56,” House of Commons Library, May 27, 1999: pp. 20–21. (This paper further notes that in only 40 percent of those black-victim cases in England and Wales was a suspect identified, compared to 90 percent in cases involving white victims.)

  17 non-Dutch ethnics suffer many times the homicide rate Soenita M. Ganpat and Marieke C.A. Liem, “Homicide in the Netherlands,” in Liem and Pridemore, Handbook of European Homicide Research, pp. 329, 336.

  18 Eighteenth-century rates among settlers Randolph Roth, American Homicide (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2009), p. 162. Rates among black people in South Los Angeles ranged from 20 to 40 per 100,000 in the period discussed in this book, according to the analysis by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, Data Collection and Analysis Unit; Roth reports that homicide-death rates for white adults were 25–30 per 100,000 from the Georgia Piedmont to the Ohio River Valley, 1760–1812.

  19 “As long as it’s Arabs killing Arabs” Edmund Sanders, “Arab Citizens Call for More Israeli Police,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 30, 2012. Estimated rate computation by the author.

  20 The ancient Greeks wrote of the Furies Aeschylus, The Eumenides. In the play, Athena convinces the Furies to surrender the power to adjudicate wrongs to her formal court. Thus, “the shackles of the primitive vendetta lend their rigor to the lasting bonds of law,” said classicists Robert Fagles and W. B. Stanford. The Oresteia: Agamemnon, the Libation Bearers, the Eumenides, translated by Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1966; 1977 reprint); quote is from the introduction by Robert Fagles and W. B. Stanford, p. 22.

  CHAPTER 5

  1 only about a tenth of all murders resulted in a conviction Monkkonen, Murder in New York City, p.167.

  2 Less than half did in Philadelphia and Chicago Chicago data for 1875 to 1920 kindly provided at the request of the author by Jeffrey S. Adler of the University of Florida. Adler found that about 41 percent of black-on-black murders involving men resulted in a conviction, and that rates for other groups were not much different. Philadelphia figures are from Roger Lane, Roots of Violence, p. 89. Lane notes only that fewer than half of homicide offenders arrested were convicted of any offense; convictions relative to all homicides committed were probably even lower. Also see William J. Stuntz, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2011), p. 137.

  3 a suspiciously large percentage of homicides Author’s computation based on LAPD annual reports. The reports reinforce Eckberg’s conclusions about uncounted homicides, noted above. For example, in fiscal year 1932–1933, the city reported 107 homicide deaths but called eight of these justifiable and twenty-one “killed while committing a crime.” An additional twenty remaining cases were reported closed because the suspects committed suicide—a much higher proportion than is typical today. In six cases, the suspects escaped, but, oddly enough, these were categorized separately from unsolved cases.

  In another forty-two cases, police declared the investigation closed because suspects had been “arrested or killed”—they didn’t specify which. Thanks to so many justified killings, mysteriously vanished suspects, and untimely deaths, the LAPD’s investigative results that year looked pretty good: the department reported that only ten cases were “unsolved.” Reports from the late twenties and thirties reports also mention a handful of homicides classified as “mercy killings.” They do not elaborate on what this meant.

  4 “had merely taken the law into their own hands” June 17, 1925, “Screen Writer Bandit Killed,” Los Angeles Times. The victim was a black man.

  5 But California prison rolls tell a different story These proportions were computed by the author based on statewide criminal-homicide data reported by the California Department of Justice, compared against historic censuses published by what is now the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The relevant tables contain tallies of felons newly committed to California institutions by offense. Women and juvenile offenders were included and vehicular manslaughter felons excluded. The analysis used ten-year increments to capture the lag time between killings and the time it takes for police to catch suspects and courts to process them. See, California Department of Corrections, “Summary Statistics of Felon Prisoners and Parolees,” “California Prisoners,” and “California Prisoners and Parolees,” and related reports; tables are titled “Felons Newly Received from Court.” Also, California Department of Justice, Homicide Crimes in California 2004, p. 14.

  Obviously, a better way to measure the vigor of criminal justice in response to murder would be to track individual case outcomes and assemble conviction rates from these. But there are problems in state justice department data in this area, so the prison reception counts were used instead. The downside of using these prison counts is that there is no way to differentiate between cases involving a single victim and suspect and those involving multiple victims or multiple suspects. However, studies suggest that one-on-one cases predominate among murders, and multiple suspects of single victims are more common than the reverse. Given this, these ratios perhaps understate the number of homicide cases in which no one went to prison.

  6 Killers of whites received the harshest penalties Tulsky and Rohrlich.

  7 people who kill blacks get lighter penalties David C. Baldus, Equal Justice and the Death Penalty: a Legal and Empirical Analysis (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), pp. 185, 401.

  8 a suspect was arrested in 38 percent of 2,677 killings Author’s computation from LAPD files, as above.

  9 In L.A. County, a much larger a
rea, similar patterns prevailed A suspect was in custody six months later in only 38 percent of killings involving black victims countywide in 2007. This finding, for the entire county, which is more than twice as populous as the city of L.A. alone, is based on the author’s interviews, six months later, of investigating officers involved with 710 homicide cases across all major police agencies in the county, excluding the city of Pomona’s. The survey eliminated murder-suicides from consideration and counted double and triple homicides as single cases. Cases in which the suspect remained outstanding on a warrant were counted as cleared, since they represent well-advanced investigations.

  10 an average of more than 40 per square mile Jill Leovy and Doug Smith, “Getting Away with Murder in South L.A.’s Killing Zone,” Los Angeles Times, Jan. 1, 2004. Mapping and data analysis by Smith, a colleague to whom the author owes thanks for his careful work on homicide statistics over many years.

  11 four or five injury shootings for every fatal one Various, including, Los Angeles Police Department “Weekly Crime and Arrest Comparison Report,” Dec. 25, 2004. The number of reported “shooting victims” investigated by police exceeded the number of people killed by four and a half times in 2002, 2003, and 2004. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention puts the ratio of assault firearm injuries versus deaths at about five times.

  12 A waggish colleague of Skaggs Detective Gerry Pantoja.

  13 Some thirty almocides occurred each month On average, Southeast Division had thirty-two cases per month involving nonfatal shooting victims in 2002, 2003, and 2004. Los Angeles Police Department, “Weekly Crime and Arrest Comparison Report, Dec. 25, 2004.

  14 only about 17 percent ended with an assailant convicted Official numbers are from LAPD Statistical Digests. The conviction rate here was calculated by detective-supervisor Lou Leiker of Southeast Division at the request of the author. Leiker considered 234 Southeast category-one assault cases that his “table” of detectives had handled in 2004. Category one cases include those involving serious injuries and those with strong leads.

  15 hundreds of arsons a year in Los Angeles Les Wilkerson, Los Angeles city fire investigator, interview by the author, Aug. 31, 2009. Wilkerson said about half were gang-related Molotov cocktail cases—“message-sending” arsons, he called them, aimed at intimidating people, and very difficult to solve. “No one wants to talk,” he said.

  16 When the Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal He further concluded that “leniency toward Negro defendants in crimes involving other Negroes is actually a form of discrimination.” Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1944; 1962 reprint), pp. 542, 551.

  17 “the principal injury suffered by African-Americans” Kennedy, Race, Crime and the Law, p. 19.

  CHAPTER 6

  1 and for years, the cops declined to do so In 2001, an LAPD press release reported that twenty-three percent of officers lived in the city. The release hailed this as progress, citing housing incentives. Los Angeles Police Department news release, March 8, 2001.

  CHAPTER 7

  1 the nine square miles of Watts were home to about 130,000 people, 39 percent of them black Los Angeles City Planning Department, Southeast Area population and housing study.

  2 they got the City of Los Angeles to annex it instead Douglas Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), p. 264.

  3 “An infected pocket of misery” Theodore H. White, “Lesson of Los Angeles: A Call for New Thinking About Race Relations in the Big City,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 22, 1965.

  4 George Kelling and James Q. Wilson’s famous essay James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety,” The Atlantic (March 1982), pp. 29–38.

  5 Southeast led the city in killings LAPD figures; race breakdown by Southeast detectives.

  6 So there was little political pressure to address them Police agencies are subject to civilian control, and in Skaggs’s time the Los Angeles police chief answered to the city’s elected mayor. So police executives could not responsibly enact any dramatic structural realignment of resources without some public backing even if they saw the need for it, which they frequently did. There is a tendency for critics of the criminal-justice system to lay blame on police professionals generally for failings that should more fairly be placed at the feet of political leaders and the voters who elect them.

  CHAPTER 8

  1 the “colossal” problem of ghettoside homicide cases Halim Dhanidina, now a Los Angeles superior court judge.

  2 40 percent of all cases in which witnesses played any role Survey conducted by the author. Findings are based on interviews with investigating officers involved in 381 L.A. homicides in 2008. Investigators were asked to give case details and prioritize reasons they remained unsolved.

  3 the real figure was probably at least a dozen Witness murder counts are based on the number of homicide defendants charged with a special allegation of witness murder—PC 190.2(a)(10)—in Los Angeles County Superior Court from 1999–2004. “Known” cases include those in which the killer of a witness was charged, not cases that remain unsolved. Report prepared by officials with the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office at the author’s request. Thanks to Sandi Gibbons.

  4 rewards offered for help on cases were virtually never collected See Susannah Rosenblatt, “Crime Rewards Net Few Payoffs,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 23, 2007; Jill Leovy, “Rewards Fail to Lure Witnesses,” Los Angeles Times, Aug. 25, 2003; Nicholas Riccardi, “Rewards for Crime Tips Rarely Help,” Los Angeles Times, Oct. 18, 1995; Hugo Martin, “Most Rewards for Crimes Go Unclaimed,” Los Angeles Times, May 29, 1994.

  5 They bartered goods, struck deals, and shared proceeds For this wording and these insights—as applicable to L.A. as to Chicago—I’m indebted to Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, and particularly his groundbreaking work in Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).

  6 an East Coast Crip gang member The name of this gang is said to refer to the old restrictive-covenant boundary along Main Street, not to the Atlantic coast of the United States. “East Coast” was a lyrical version of “eastside,” that is, the east side of Main Street, to which black people were effectively confined in the midcentury period. Main Street runs north-south behind Seventy-seventh Street Station.

  7 moonshiners who intimidated people and killed snitches Frank, pp. 124, 126; Lane, Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, p. 9; Monkkonen, Murder in New York City, p. 73; W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880–1930 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 23.

  8 “sown in the nature of man” Quoted from the Federalist Papers in Cass R. Sunstein, “The Enlarged Republic—Then and Now,” The New York Review of Books, March 26, 2009.

  9 so few gang homicides stemmed from drug deals Later, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study would confirm what LAPD homicide detectives already knew—that very few street homicides directly involve drug deals. The study found that less than 5 percent of all homicides in Los Angeles and Long Beach involved the drug trade. See Arlen Egley, Jr., et al., “Gang Homicides, Five U.S. Cities, 2003–2008,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Jan. 27, 2012. For a fascinating discussion of the idea that gangs are protective agencies, see Russell S. Sobel and Brian J. Osoba, “Youth Gangs as Pseudo-Governments: Implications for Violent Crime,” Southern Economic Journal 75, no. 4 (2009): pp. 996–1018. The authors argue that gangs may exist to compensate for the absence of a state monopoly on violence by providing people alternate means of protection, and so could actually serve to lower crime rates, not the reverse.

  10 “They have their own business” Porras is now a Los Angeles County superior court judge

  11 “there’s rules and regulations behind living there” This witness spoke at trial in the killing of Rende
ll Woods, age twenty-four, April 24, 2008, 1471 E. 109th St. Woods was an acquaintance of Barbara Pritchett.

  12 “the law to her is a vague and sinister force” Powdermaker, After Freedom, p. 190.

  13 “moral comfort” to people who didn’t want to testify James Q.Whitman, The Origins of Reasonable Doubt: Theological Roots of the Criminal Trial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

  CHAPTER 9

  1 “Murderers are mean” Monkkonen, Murder in New York City, p. 56

  2 the name of a typical seminar California Homicide Investigators Association, 35th Annual Conference and Golf Tournament, March 3–5, 2004, agenda, p. 7.

  CHAPTER 10

  1 the homicide death rate for San Bernardino’s young black men Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, Compressed Mortality File 1999–2010 on CDC WONDER Online Database, January 2013.

  CHAPTER 14

  1 “proxy crimes” to substitute for more difficult William J. Stuntz singled it out as a particularly damaging trend. Stuntz, Collapse of American Criminal Justice, pp. 270, 269-274.

  2 a man in a wheelchair from a gunshot injury had been murdered Akkeli Hollie, twenty-nine, killed July 4, 2003, on 114th Street.

  3 The high-tech NIBIN system NIBIN is administered by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. In an interview, ATF spokesmen Tim Graden and Chris Amon said that, although they did not know the specifics of the events described in this narrative, they had no reason to doubt Hudson’s account. They confirmed that NIBIN has had difficulty with revolver matches for the reasons she described, and the system mostly matches semiautomatic pistols to casings. It would therefore not be surprising that the LAPD, though a large-scale user of the system, had made no revolver matches as of 2007, they said.