Ghettoside (51 page)

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 America’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.

3
nearly 40 percent of Rampart residents remained below the poverty line
Data from the Los Angeles City Planning Department based on 2000 U.S. Census figures.

4
recent immigrants tend to have lower homicide rates
Ramiro Martinez, Jr.,
Latino Homicide: Immigration, Violence, and Community
(New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 105–8.

5
Instead, they were stopovers
For demographic studies indicating that Hispanics were dispersing, see Philip J. Ethington, William H. Frey and Dowell Myers, “The Racial Resegregation of Los Angeles County,” Public Research Report 2001-04,
Race Contours 2000 Study
(University of Southern California–University of Michigan, 2001).

6
an “unabashed preference” for Hispanic labor
Josh Sides,
L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 4, 6, 14, 25, 33, 60, 65–74, 80–88, 94.

7
“Black segregation was permanent, across generations”
Douglas S. Massey, interview with the author, March 8, 2012.

8
No one else had it as bad
Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton,
American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

9
black people were no more likely to have white neighbors
Ethington, Frey and Myers, pp. 8, 14.

10
Indices of residential segregation are strong homicide predictors
E.g., Ruth D. Peterson, Lauren J. Krivo, “Racial Segregation and Black Urban Homicide,”
Social Forces
71, no. 4 (June 1993): pp. 1001–26; and Matthew R. Lee, “Concentrated Poverty, Race and Homicide,”
The Sociological Quarterly
41, no. 2 (Spring 2000): pp. 189–206

11
Prison was safer than freedom
The overall homicide death rate for black, white, and Hispanic men over eighteen in California in 2009 and 2010 was two and a half times greater than the corresponding death rate in the prison population. Men outside prison suffered a much higher homicide death rate even though they are, on average, older than the prison population, and so should be at lower risk.

The safety benefit of prison for the highest-risk group—young black men—is probably even greater than these figures suggest. Prison homicide victims are nearly always older men. Press releases on homicides during the year above, nearly all of which list the age of the victim, mention only one inmate victim who was in his twenties, a twenty-six-year-old, and nearly all the rest were in their forties or even sixties. Given the very high death rates of black men in their early twenties outside prison, the absence of any victims in this age category inside prison walls is especially noteworthy. This is not to dispute that there are a lot of nonfatal assaults in prison—fistfights and worse—but simply to note that the lethality is on a much lower scale than outside. (Computation by the author. Prison population statistics and homicide releases are published by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Homicide counts to verify them were provided by CDCR at the request of the author; thanks to Bill Sessa. California homicide death rates for adult males are from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Injury Prevention and Control: Fatal Injury Reports. Demographic age data provided at the request of the author by Jonathan Buttle, California State Census Data Center, Demographic Research Unit, California State Department of Finance.)