by Jill Leovy
Boundless thanks to Farley Chase, who saw the potential of this work when there was no reason to, and to Cindy Spiegel and Julie Grau and their colleagues at Spiegel & Grau, who embraced its complexities and stuck by it through difficulties. To my genius editor, Chris Jackson, whose work transformed this book, I am not just indebted but in awe. Thanks also to W. Fitzhugh Brundage, who kindly reviewed historical portions of this manuscript, Grace Rai, La Wanda Hawkins, Douglas Lee Eckberg, Carter Spikes and Butch Lemon of the Businessmen, eyewitness expert Steven E. Clark for research help, Ben Adair, Brian Vander Brug, Jill Connelly, Craig Harvey, Tom Dotan, Jeffrey Adler, Douglas Massey, Luis Montes and his colleagues at Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center, Timothy Tyson and the staff of L.A. City Street Trees, Monique Jordan, Ferroll Robins of Loved Ones Victims Services, and many other family members of victims who courageously chose to speak out. Apologies to the hundreds whose loved ones’ names did not appear here; you are the reason for this book. Deep thanks to my friends and family, who buoyed me through years of sometimes trying work—my parents, both of whom passed away during its research, my steadfast sisters, and my husband, Marc, incomparable journalist, editor and friend.
NOTES
CHAPTER 1
1 The Plague The name “The Plague” is borrowed from Albert Camus, as are various themes in this book. The opening quote and subsequent ones are drawn from both Stuart Gilbert’s and Robin Buss’s translations of his 1947 novel The Plague (in French, La Peste).
2 Most had been killed by other black men and boys who still roamed free Analysis by the author, LAPD homicide data. Characteristics and status updates of 16,435 homicides in the city of Los Angeles from 1986 to the first quarter of 2009 were provided by the LAPD at the author’s request. To reach this conclusion, 3,333 killings of black males were considered, committed between 1991 and 2006. Thirty-eight percent were cleared by arrest in this period. The clearance rate presented here is calculated differently than the federal rate. It represents the outcome of each case, not the sum total of cases cleared each year measured against new homicides, and it excludes cases “cleared by exceptional means,” that is, cases closed with no arrest made. (In recent years, the LAPD has balked at providing this data and said it would no longer update the status of cases or release information more than six months old.) As in the rest of the country, homicide in Los Angeles occurs mostly between people of the same race. In 2006, for example, just 22 of 236 LAPD South Bureau homicides—or ten percent—crossed racial lines.
3 “Nigger life’s cheap now” Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), p. 275
4 “a simple mention is made of it” Gilles Vandal, Rethinking Southern Violence (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), p. 180.
5 “Providence has chosen to exterminate them in this way” Vandal, Rethinking Southern Violence, p. 159.
6 “This is a case of one negro killing another” Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2008), p. 305. Governor Cole Blease provided the lyrics to this “song” in his explanation: “Hot supper; liquor; dead negro.”
7 “complaisance toward violence among the Negroes” Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South (New York: Viking Press, 1939) p. 173.
8 “One less nigger” Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance & Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th Century American South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 231. The full quote offered by the anonymously cited Southern police officer is as follows: “If a nigger kills a white man, that’s murder. If a white man kills a nigger, that’s justifiable homicide. If a nigger kills another nigger, that’s one less nigger.” It would seem to have folkloric status. Black sources interviewed in Los Angeles rendered it various ways, including, “One less of ’em to deal with” and “one less gang member.”
9 “if a black man kills a black man,” Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), p. 308.
10 what Max Weber called a state monopoly on violence Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures: Science as a Vocation, Politics as a Vocation (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004), p. 33.
Here and throughout this book, I am indebted to the work of legal scholar Markus Dirk Dubber for articulating the problems of legal theory inherent in preventive policing. For a fuller exploration of the connection between legal autonomy, violence, and what Dubber terms the policing of “inchoate” crimes, that is, crimes that have not yet been committed, see Markus Dirk Dubber, Victims in the War on Crime: The Use and Abuse of Victims’ Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2002).
11 In Jim Crow Mississippi Mississippi figures from Powdermaker, After Freedom, pp. 173, 395. Los Angeles figures based on Fredric N. Tulsky and Ted Rohrlich, “And Justice for Some: Solving Murders in L.A. County,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 1, 1996, and Dec. 3, 1996.
Tulsky and Rohrlich’s in-depth analysis of 9,442 cases found less than one-third of reported killings resulted in conviction for murder or manslaughter, and that black- and Hispanic-victim cases were less likely to result in charges and brought lighter penalties than white-victim cases. (The study found that cases involving white victims were 40 percent more likely to be solved than those involving black or Hispanic victims.) But Tulsky and Rohrlich did not include in their findings the 7 percent of all cases that remained to be adjudicated. So the percentage presented here for blacks in the early 1990s is the author’s estimate. It takes into account lower clearance rates for black victims but adds pending cases to the count, adjusted for average conviction rate. It is compared against the author’s analysis of LAPD homicide case data for those years and reported conviction rates published by the California Department of Justice, which yield a similar result. See also Catherine Lee, “The Value of Life in Death: Multiple Regression and Event History Analysis of Homicide Clearance in Los Angeles County,” Journal of Criminal Justice, 33, no. 2 (November–December 2005): pp. 527–34. Lee analyzed the Times data and arrived at similar conclusions.
12 “which places the Negro outside the law” Powdermaker, After Freedom, p. 173. She expands elsewhere, saying: “Since no Negro can expect to find justice by due process of law, it is better in the long run to suffer one’s loss—or to adjust it oneself. From this angle, the ‘lawlessness’ sometimes ascribed to the Negro may be viewed as being rather his private individual ‘law enforcement’ ”(p. 126).
13 black-on-black homicide is much of the reason Blacks, who make up about 12 percent of the county’s population, account for nearly half of its homicide victims. Homicide data from several sources, including the FBI data and James Alan Fox and Marianne W. Zawitz, “Homicide Trends in the United States” Bureau of Justice Statistics (2007); see “Trends by Race, 1976–2005.” A total of 186,807 people died from homicides in the United States between 1995 and 2005, according to Fox and Zawitz. Of these victims, 89,991 were black, or 48 percent.
Homicide numbers reported by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are consistently a little higher that the FBI’s because they are drawn from a different data set—mortality records. But the racial disparity is similar. For example, between 2005 and 2010, the agency reported that about 47 percent of U.S. homicide victims were non-Hispanic blacks. (See “Fatal Injury Reports”).
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 “inne
r 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, Ne
w 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.
