by Jill Leovy
4 one of the most dangerous tasks a state can perform From Stuntz: “Enforcing criminal law is one of government’s most important tasks, yet also among the most dangerous.” Collapse of American Criminal Justice, p. 63.
5 a gang called the Rollin’ Sixties This style of gang names reflect L.A.’s grid geography. “Rollin’ ” refers to the gangs associated with blocks north and south of streets bearing that number. Thus, the sets of the Rollin’ Thirties are associated with South 30th through 39th streets, sets of the Sixties with South 60th through 69th streets (roughly), and so on. The fact that numbers grow bigger as streets move south often added a few killings to the official tallies every summer and fall. Numbered gangs celebrated their “birthdays” on corresponding calendar days. The 8-9 Family Bloods from South 89th Street, for example, gathered on August 9; the 9-7 Gangster Crips from South 97th Street gathered on September 7, and so forth. Such gatherings could lead to violence.
6 Vigilantism and vendettas flourished For an extraordinarily thorough description of violence in America before and after the revolutionary war, see Randolph Roth, American Homicide (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2009). See also Stuntz, Collapse of American Criminal Justice, p. 68; Monkkonen, Murder in New York City, pp. 162, 167; and Berg, Popular Justice.
7 roughing up people to teach them lessons Monkkonen quotes a popular refrain: “More justice in a nightstick than in a statute book.” Monkkonen, Murder in New York City, p. 166.
8 their work consisted largely of rounding up drunks in paddy wagons As late as 1956, Los Angeles police arrested more than two hundred thousand people yearly for “drunkenness” and various municipal code violations, a number equal to nearly a tenth of the city’s population. Police today don’t arrest nearly so many people—Los Angeles Police Department statistical digests (population figures from historic U.S. census data, 1950 and 1960).
9 long, painful history of caste domination and counterrevolution The emphasis here on the counterrevolutionary foment in the south is not accidental. First, conservatives opposed Reconstruction; then blacks and dissenting whites occasionally challenged and, more often, surreptitiously resisted the ruling order of the Redemption period. This culminated, eventually, in the second Reconstruction. All this upheaval in the decades following the Civil War leads the author to conclude that the legitimacy of the state was never really a settled question in the South, creating a situation that inevitably fuels high rates of personal violence. Civil wars and revolutions are homicide engines, said homicide historian Randolph Roth. Just as homicide exploded in the South after the Civil War, Roth noted, it surged among the French following the French Revolution, the Germans in the Weimar period and the Italians and Belgians after World War II. Nothing fuels homicide quite so well as what Roth calls “an unending series of revolutions and counter revolutions.” (Roth, pp. 243, 146, 436–43.) For an eye-opening exploration of the patterns of intra- and interracial violence before Redemption, and the change after former Confederates regained power, see Vandal, Rethinking Southern Violence.
10 the racist atrocities of Southern law Powerfully catalogued by Blackmon in Slavery by Another Name, a story of law gone very wrong. Blackmon noted, incidentally, that black people in the early twentieth century were sometimes punished severely for murdering other black people, and the murder of a single black person could result in the arrest of many others (p. 334). This runs counter to the observations of other Jim Crow sociologists and anthropologists, who emphasized the leniency of the southern system on black-on-black violence. But to this author, it does not seem a contradiction. No one has asserted that black people weren’t punished for murder—they were, and still are, in significant proportion. But the picture Blackmon paints of a system corrupted by the need to conscript black men as labor fits with a larger picture of law rendered plastic and meaningless, which was also the conclusion of many contemporary observers. Whether lax or excessive, law in the south was twisted to serve a shadow state; the fact that it functioned partially—arresting some killers, some of the time—gave the whole system plausible deniability and a staying power that it would not have had if southern authorities had refused to prosecute any black killers. This situation of law-as-window-dressing is perhaps even more conducive to homicide than outright lawlessness.
11 black people dismissed the whole framework E.g., Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 278.
12 a “winking” system Mark Schultz, The Rural Face of White Supremacy: Beyond Jim Crow (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), p. 135.
13 real power was upheld outside the law This section owes much to the work of Christopher Waldrep, Roots of Disorder: Race and Criminal Justice in the American South, 1817–80 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998).
14 that historian Mark Schultz dubbed “personalism” Schultz, Rural Face of White Supremacy, p. 37. See also Kennedy, Race, Crime and the Law; Litwack, Trouble in Mind; and Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988; 1989 Perennial Library edition). Also Vandal, Rethinking Southern Violence.
15 “shot down for nothing” 1899 black tenant farmer reporting from Mississippi, quoted in Terence Finnegan, “Lynching and Political Power in Mississippi and South Carolina,” in W. Fitzhugh Brundage, editor, Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p. 205.
16 “so much cutting and killing going on” Charles S. Johnson, Shadow of the Plantation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934; 1966 Phoenix Books edition), p. 190.
17 In Atlanta in 1920 … In Memphis in 1915 “Mortality Statistics reports, 1921 and 1920, Twenty-First Annual Report,” U.S. Department of the Census. Thanks to Douglas Eckberg. These are astoundingly high rates for a general population—much higher than on tough streets of LAPD’s South Bureau—because women and children dilute the count. One can assume the rates for adult men, who always dominate among homicide victims, were much higher. It’s not clear what was happening in these places, but whatever it was, it must have been horrible for those who lived through it.
18 Black people even lynched each other We know details of this thanks to Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck’s astonishing study: A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995).
19 White people “had the law” E.g., “They got the law,” in Litwack, Trouble in Mind, p. 278. Also, interviewed in Schultz, a black sharecropper from Hancock County, Georgia who said: “What little you made, they’d take it … They’d say they had the law” (Schultz, Rural Face of White Supremacy, p. 34).
20 “serve the ends of the white caste” Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town, p. 280.
21 together just because they were the same color The anthropologist Bruce M. Knauft has suggested that, contrary to what is sometimes assumed, egalitarian societies whose members share power evenly may be more, not less, likely to have high personal homicide rates. A scholar of the traditional Gebusi people, who were extraordinarily homicidal, Knauft identified the group’s reliance on consensus, not headman or elders, as one of the conditions for violence. This is not to overstate the similarities: Gebusi killings often had to do with witchcraft, and their homicide rate has plummeted since Knauft first wrote about it. But his suggestion that equality disperses violence among individuals, resulting in more argument deaths, remains relevant. Black people in the Jim Crow south must have been similarly leaderless and disorganized, thrown together in conditions of chaotic equality. They were subject to social restrictions that did not permit even the minimal stratification that would produce class structure. Knauft, “Reconsidering Violence,” p. 476. For the lack of class distinctions among black southerners, see Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner, Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Pre
ss, 1941; reprint University of South Carolina Press, 2009), p. 241.
22 They enlisted blacks as spies Mention of spies and informants crops up in many accounts of the Jim Crow south—for example, Powdermaker’s description of a “mulatto man who acts as a ‘go-between’ for the white and colored people and who is something of a spy, with an unsavory reputation” (Powdermaker, After Freedom, p. 184), and also Gunnar Myrdal’s mention of the use of black “informers, spotters, and stool pigeons” by police (Myrdal, An American Dilemma, p. 541). But one of the most vivid examples was offered to this writer by Ray Knox, a retired L.A. County Youth Authority counselor born in 1951, who is black and was a frequent childhood visitor to his family’s native McComb, Mississippi. “If someone was lynched, or shot, killed, or whatever … and if you knew what happened, you couldn’t talk about it among other black people,” Knox said. “There was always someone there that was receiving something from people in charge: white people.”
23 favored “their Negroes” Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town, p. 283. Southern history offers many examples of how white patrons and protectors placed some black people at an advantage over their fellows in criminal and business matters, including the white practice of obtaining leniency for black criminals who worked for them. Reports Dollard, “If a white man gets a Negro off on a murder charge because he ‘needs him on the plantation,’ that Negro is indebted to him.” Interestingly, Dollard compares this unofficial system to premodern legal settings. He called it “a feudal protectoral relationship.” Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town, pp. 282–85. See also Davis, Gardner, and Gardner, Deep South, pp. 520–23; Schultz, Rural Face of White Supremacy, p. 152.
24 and used them as pawns in their battles The many incidents when southern white police, and occasionally white civilians, challenged and fought mobs in an effort to protect black people from lynching come to mind here. At least half of threatened lynchings failed because they were averted in this manner. Brundage’s finding that many lynchings were committed furtively, as if the perpetrators could not trust other whites to back them, also hints at the degree of white division in the south. In courtrooms, white people also sometimes saw to it that black people they liked were given an advantage over whites held in low esteem. See Larry J. Griffin, Paula Clark, and Joanne C. Sandberg, “Narrative and Event: Lynching and Historical Sociology,” in Brundage, Under Sentence of Death, pp. 26, 24–47. See also Davis, Gardner, and Gardner: They describe a case in which a black woman, considered a “ ‘good nigger,’ deferential and hardworking,” prevailed in a court case over a white “young city man” whom locals disliked and viewed as arrogant. Deep South, pp. 524–26.
25 a contested prize in a low-level, unfinished revolution For good reason, this phrase finds its way into the subtitle of Eric Foner’s history of Reconstruction. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863–1877.
26 as a systematic extension of the campaign of terrorist violence For example, in Litwack, Trouble in Mind: “When whites after Reconstruction moved on every front to solidify their supremacy, nowhere was the reassertion of power over black lives more evident than in the machinery of the police and the criminal justice system” (p. 247).
27 “submit to … arrest by any damned rebel police!” Howard N. Rabinowitz, “The Conflict Between Blacks and the Police in the Urban South 1865–1900,” in Black Southerners and the Law, 1865–1900, Donald G. Nieman, editor, African-American Life in the Post-Emancipation South, volume 12 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), p. 292.
28 they wrested friends from police hands Rabinowitz, “Conflict Between Blacks and the Police,” pp. 292–98.
29 Nashville’s “Black Bottom,” Atlanta’s “Darktown” Rabinowitz, “Conflict Between Blacks and the Police,” p. 297.
30 “but rather stayed on the main thoroughfares” Mydral, An American Dilemma, p. 1341.
31 “at least to some extent, self-policing” Harlan Hahn and Judson L. Jeffries, Urban America and Its Police: From the Postcolonial Era Through the Turbulent 1960s (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2003), p. 125.
32 They brought with them their high homicide rates In Los Angeles, the black homicide problem clearly predated the rise of crack cocaine and modern gang organizations, such as Crips and Bloods. As early as 1941, twenty-one percent of homicide victims in the city were black, although blacks made up less than 5 percent of the population, and all but one of these victims was killed by a black suspect. Similarly, in 1952, mostly black Newton Division—the original “South Central” since it lies along South Central Avenue—the homicide rate was shockingly high: more than 80 deaths per 100,000. Most people don’t associated the fifties with high crime, but this rate of killing in what would come to be known as L.A.’s “Negro Community” was much higher than the citywide black rate in the 2000s. (LAPD annual reports and historic U.S. Census data).
Older black men in Los Angeles are often the strongest proponents of the idea that black homicide is a new phenomenon, created by a vicious young upstart generation. They insist that they fought with fists not guns, and that the new gangs are more lethal than the old. But statistics suggest otherwise, and, as the Philadelphia study quoted earlier found, a lot of people end up dead even when guns are not the weapon of choice. Shane Stringer, a member of an old-style L.A. gang called the Businessmen, active in the 1960s and 1970s, offered a typical view: “In my time, it was ninety percent fistfights,” he insisted. “Very seldom would we see gunplay. Stabbings, yes. We had the normal stabbings.” And of course, he admitted, the “fistfights” included assaults with “bumper jacks and ties—they’d hurt ’em bad.”
33 the LAPD spent four times as much per capita in Newton Division Los Angeles Police Department, 1961 Annual Report, author’s computation.
34 remains a cherished template for left-leaning critics of criminal justice I’m indebted to James Q. Whitman for a version of this wording.
35 It practiced victim-discounting on a mass scale The scale of the Monster swiftly swamped the deployment formulas mentioned above. By 1975, LAPD’s mostly black Southwest Division had more than six times the murder rate of West Los Angeles Division, but only one and a half times as many police per capita. (Los Angeles Police Department, Statistical Digest 1975).
36 making this country one of the world’s most lenient Mark A. Kleiman, When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 8–15; Stuntz, Collapse of American Criminal Justice, pp. 2, 34, 246.
37 only a third of California’s convicted homicide perpetrators “California Prisoners, 1977 and 1978: Summary Statistics of Felon Prisoners and Parolees,” State of California Health and Welfare Agency, Department of Corrections (table 30a), p. 79.
38 seemingly blind to the ravages of underenforcement Two recent exceptions: Forman, cited above, and Alexandra Natapoff, “Underenforcement,” Fordham Law Review 75 (2006); Loyola Law School Los Angeles Legal Studies Paper No. 2006-44.
39 the largest single category of new prison arrivals California State Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, Prisoners and Parolees (2007), p. 3 (Arrivals). They churned in and out and ended up comprising about one-sixth of all incarcerated inmates.
40 In fact, homicide solve rates dropped From 79 percent to 62 percent nationally between 1976 and 2005 (including cleared other), according to Fox and Zawitz, “Homicide Trends in the United States.”
41 not the harshness of punishment but its swiftness and certainty Kleiman, When Brute Force Fails, p. 23.
42 homicide rates for all Americans still lag behind those of the safest European nations Aki Roberts, “Predictors of Homicide Clearance by Arrest: An Event History Analysis of NIBRS Incidents,” Homicide Studies 11 (2007): p. 82.
CHAPTER 17
1 He never expressed resentment of Miranda Skaggs may have not minded all those procedural reforms, but the legal scholar Stuntz wrote provocatively about what he said was Americ
a’s misplaced focus on them. He found fault with Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren for not seeing that violent crime is a civil-rights issue, too, and suggested that it’s unjust for black people to suffer disproportionately. There’s an alternate interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, Stuntz suggested—that “equal protection” could imply a right to an equal measure of safety. In the murderous early days of the amendment, he wrote, the idea might have spawned more robust violent-crime prosecutions, and even a federal homicide law (Stuntz, Collapse of American Criminal Justice, pp. 104–22, 232–33).
CHAPTER 18
1 One detective coined a noun in the aftermath of the arrests—a “John Skaggs Special” Bill Ritsch.
CHAPTER 19
1 Felony conviction rates in California were much higher California Department of Justice, Crime in California 2007, p. 149. The agency’s adult felony arrest disposition data shows that 48.4 percent of felony cases ended in conviction in 1975, and an average of 56 percent of cases in the subsequent five years. By 2005, conviction rates for felony arrests had reached 71 percent.
CHAPTER 20
1 At the same time, homicides had plummeted Jill Leovy, “A Complex Portrait of Rampart’s Redemption,” Los Angeles Times, July 13, 2006.
2 poverty does not necessarily engender homicide Monkkonen makes this point forcefully. He singles it out as one of the chief lessons of the history of homicide. “In some of New York City’s most miserable periods, murder rates were at their lowest,” he writes (Monkkonen, Murder in New York City, p. 8). Nor was there a homicide spike during the Great Depression.