Ghettoside (48 page)

14
But historians have traced
For example, historian Eric Henry Monkkonen found that disproportionately high black rates emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century in his study of New York (Eric H. Monkkonen,
Murder in New York City
[Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001], p. 164.). Vandal found the same in his study of Louisiana, and Lane in his study of Philadelphia (Roger Lane,
Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia 1860–1900
[Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986]). Explaining why high black murder rates should not be attributed to developments in black industrial “inner cities” of the twentieth century, Vandal wrote: “The first signs of this even predated the great migration.… It was in the political and economic conditions of the Reconstruction era that the roots of modern African American violence can be traced” (
Rethinking Southern Violence
, p. 208). The gap between black and white rates in New York is distinct by the late 1880s, Monkkonen found. It grew wider and became a chasm as early as the 1930s. “The twentieth-century difference in black and white rates is so large as to cry out for explanation and understanding,” he wrote (p. 139).

Historians once talked about a U-curve in homicide rates over time, based on research that suggested that homicide in the United States fell to comparatively low levels in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then rose sharply after. This is incorrect. Work by Douglas Lee Eckberg and others has shown that homicides were almost certainly undercounted in the decades at the bottom of the U-curve. The omission of Southern homicides and the large number of killings classified as justifiable—up to 50 percent in some cities—led to the error. We now know there was probably no turn-of-the-century dip, and that Americans have been fairly murderous all along. See Douglas Lee Eckberg, “Estimates of Early Twentieth Century U.S. Homicide Rates: An Econometric Forecasting Approach,”
Demography
, vol. 32, no. 1: pp. 1–16.

15
black death rates from homicide nationwide
H. C. Brearley, “The Negro and Homicide,”
Social Forces
9, no. 2 (1930): pp. 247–53.

16
Southern observers also noticed startling rates of black violence
All the great social scientists of the South in that era—Powdermaker, Charles S. Johnson, John Dollard, and Davis/Gardner/Gardner—remarked on the phenomenon. Later studies echoed their findings. One found that
85 percent of homicide victims in Birmingham, Alabama, were black, though blacks were less than half the city’s population. Howard Harlan “Five Hundred Homicides,”
Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology
40, no. 6 (1950): pp. 736-52.

17
in the 1940s, a Philadelphia study found
Marvin E. Wolfgang,
Patterns in Criminal Homicide
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958; 1975 reprint), pp. 33, 223, 84. Interestingly, Wolfgang also found that those black Philadelphians used guns far less than they used pen knives, ice picks, and various blunt instruments, yet they maintained death rates similar to today’s. This reinforces the conclusion that guns are not a root cause of black homicide. Wolfgang examined the years 1948 to 1952 and found that nonfirearm killings such as stabbings and beatings were 61 percent of black male homicides in Philadelphia in that era, and this mix of weapons produced an overall black homicide death rate of 23 per 100,000 per year. Nationally, in recent years about 67 percent of homicides nationally were committed with guns, and the black rate of death from homicide was about 21 per 100,000. In L.A. in the 2000s, guns were used in 70 percent of black homicides, and the black rate of death was probably in the low thirties per 100,000. (FBI Uniform Crime Reports and Mary-Ann Hunt, “2007 Homicide Analysis,” Los Angeles Police Department Robbery-Homicide Divison, Powerpoint presentation, slides 13, 15).

18
remained as much as ten times higher
Health, United States
, National Center for Health Statistics (Hyattsville, Md.: 2005, etc.), Mortality trend tables. See also Henry Allan Bullock, “Urban Homicide in Theory and Fact,”
The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science
45, no. 5 (1955): pp. 565–75; U.S. Census statistics; and A. Joan Klebba, “Homicide Trends in the United States 1900–1974,”
Public Health Reports
90, no. 3 (1975): pp. 195–204.

19
five to seven times higher
Fox and Zawitz, “Homicide Trends in the United States.” According to them, the black rate was six times that of whites in 1980; five times in 1985; seven times in 1990; nearly seven times in 1995; six times in 2000; and six times in 2005. More recent crime data is not available, but 2010 mortality data from NCHS Vital Statistics System shows black rates were eight times white rates, though, as noted above, this figure is not comparable to the previous ones.

20
young black men are murdered two to four times more frequently
Mortality file data was analyzed at the author’s request by the
Injury and Violence Prevention Program of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services and the county’s Department of Public Health, Data Collection and Analysis Unit. Many thanks to epidemiologist Isabelle Sternfeld for years of help with these records.

21
violent crime was plummeting in Los Angeles County
Countywide homicides reached a high of 2,113 deaths in 1992 and had fallen to 1,085 in 2006, according to statistics provided at the author’s request by Craig Harvey, Los Angeles County coroner’s office. Crime would, of course, fall much lower after that.

22
“progressives tend to avoid or change the subject”
James Forman, Jr., “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow,”
Faculty Scholarship Series
3599 (2012): p. 128.

23
“The familiar dismal statistics”
Randall Kennedy,
Race, Crime and the Law
(New York: Vintage, 1998), p. 145.

CHAPTER 2

1
such calls, at least in this year, came more than once a day, on average
There were 835 shooting victims in South Bureau in 2007, and 1,016 in 2006—Los Angeles Police Department,
Crime and Arrests Weekly Statistics
, Dec. 31, 2007.

CHAPTER 3

1
Los Angeles’s nineteen police precincts were called divisions
There were eighteen LAPD divisions for most of Skaggs’s career. By 2014, there were twenty-one. This point in the narrative takes place after the LAPD’s nineteenth police station, Mission, was opened in the San Fernando Valley. LAPD officers don’t like the word “precinct” and it has no official use, but it is sometimes used here for clarity.

2
One of Skaggs’s colleagues picked up a word
Detective Roger Allen.

CHAPTER 4

1
exceeded nine hundred per hundred thousand people
Various, including Fox and Zawitz, “Homicide Trends in the United States”; Alexa
Cooper and Erica L. Smith, “Homicide Trends in the United States” (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2011); FBI Uniform Crime Reports.

2
similar to the per capita rate of death for U.S. soldiers deployed to Iraq
County mortality data; Iraq data from Samuel H. Preston and Emily Buzzell, “Service in Iraq: Just How Risky?”
The Washington Post
, Aug. 26, 2006. Preston and Buzzell calculated a military death rate of about 392 deaths per 100,000 among American troops deployed to Iraq 2003-2006. According to their figures, if only combat deaths are considered, the military rate in Iraq would total about 309 deaths per 100,000. For twenty- to twenty-four-year-old black males, the homicide death rate in Los Angeles County hit a high of 368 per 100,000 population in 1993.

3
striking several with batons
Homicide of Stephanie Smith, Dec. 7, 2008, 546 W. 102nd St. Smith was thirty-seven.

4
the constitution places many constraints on legal procedure
Carol S. Steiker, “The Limits of the Preventive State,”
The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology
88, no. 3 (1988): pp. 771–808.

5
LAPD’s South Bureau and Central Bureau “homicide experts”
This term was technically applied within the LAPD to denote working D-3s in RHD. There were very few working D-3s in South Bureau, although such a position was badly needed to counter the chronic inexperience that hampered homicide units there. Skaggs and other south-end cops who were promoted to the D-3 supervisory rank liked the term and used it, however. The reason is obvious: They were, indisputably, homicide experts. For a long time, Skaggs hoped to devise a permanent working D-3 slot in South Bureau—solving cases, not overseeing people—but apart from his brief stint in Southwest, it never happened.

6
“Women work through men by agitating them to homicide”
June Nash, “Death as a Way of Life: The Increasing Resort to Homicide in a Maya Indian Community,”
American Anthropologist
69, no. 5 (1969): p. 462.

7
Canadian Inuits … Jim Crow blacks
E. Adamson Hoebel, “Law-Ways of the Primitive Eskimos,”
Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology
31, no. 6 (1941): p. 677; M.A.O. Malik, “A Profile of Homicide in the Sudan,”
Forensic Science
7 (1976): p. 143; Powdermaker,
After Freedom
, p. 164. See also John Dollard,
Caste and Class in a Southern Town
(Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1937; 1949 reprint), p. 278.

8
“touts” kneecapped in Northern Ireland, informants necklaced
in South Africa
See Rachel Monaghan, “Not Quite Lynching: Informal Justice in Northern Ireland,” in
Globalizing Lynching History: Vigilantism and Extralegal Punishment from an International Perspective
, Manfred Berg and Simon Wendt, editors (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 157–58; also Colin Knox and Rachel Monaghan,
Informal Justice in Divided Societies: Northern Ireland and South Africa
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).

9
murderous neighborhood-watches of Ghana
Mensah Adinkrah, “Vigilante Homicides in Contemporary Ghana,”
Journal of Criminal Justice
33 (2005): p. 423

10
grabbing one’s friends from police
Lars Buur, “Democracy and its Discontents: Vigilantism, Sovereignity and Human Rights in South Africa,”
Review of African Political Economy
35, no. 118 (2008): p. 580.

11
They fixate on honor and respect
John Dollard, discussing the premium Jim Crow black men placed on aggressive, boastful posturing, compared it to the “admiration felt on the frontier for the individual who is physically and morally competent to take care of himself.” The reason it arose, he said, was that “the formal machinery of the law takes care of the Negroes’ grievances much less adequately than of the whites’, and to a much higher degree the Negro is compelled to make and enforce his own law with other Negroes.” Dollard,
Caste and Class in a Southern Town
, p. 274.

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).