Ghettoside (50 page)

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 Rendell 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.

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 Press, 1941; reprint University of South Carolina Press, 2009), p. 241.