Ghettoside (49 page)

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 area, 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).