Ghettoside by Leavy
Ref: Leavy (2015). Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America. Spiegel & Grau.
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Summary
Ghettoside is a book about a very simple idea: where the criminal justice system fails to respond vigorously to violent injury and death, homicide becomes endemic. African Americans have suffered from just such a lack of effective criminal justice, and this, more than anything, is the reason for the nation’s long-standing plague of black homicides. The answer to the epidemic of violence in the black community seems to be much more policing.
Society’s efforts to combat black-on-black murder epidemic are inept, fragmented, underfunded, contorted by a variety of ideological, political, and racial sensitivities.
Lawless violence burdens black men as no one else. Walking with a bopping limp that suggests you have survived your share of street fights, yelling a lot, wheeling your eyes around angrily—these were learned behaviors among ghettoside men, affectations they adopted as preemptive defense against attack. Appearing weak was dangerous. Many men described having been robbed and threatened from childhood, relieved of their lunch money on the way to school, beaten up for backpacks and shoes, constantly called out to fight. Undersized boys were tormented, tall ones tested. It was frustrating and draining. Many black men were left with a version of the sickening sensation most males probably feel at some point in childhood, knowing a bully awaits them after school. But the difference for these men was that the feeling was sharpened by fear of death and pervaded their adult lives. The stress wrought deep unhappiness. In the streets of the Seventy-seventh, men talked of suicide. Others were fatalistic and resigned. Lots of men, deep down, didn’t want to fight. They tried to avoid it, acting tough to discourage challengers. They conveyed, with every gesture, a message that said “Don’t mess with me.” It was an exhausting act to keep up. But it was worth it to feel safer.
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Historical Sources of Black Gang Violence
Following abolition, black people had no formal means of resolving disputes among themselves. Instead, they experienced law, both its action and inaction, as a systematic extension of the campaign of terrorist violence that had brought an end to Reconstruction and stripped them of their rights under the Constitution.
Black people had long been vastly more segregated and had remained more crowded together and isolated much longer than any other racial or ethnic group in America.
The Monster arose from what was meanest and most vicious in human nature. But the dark swath of misery it had cut across generations of black Americans was a shadow thrown on the wall, a shape magnified many times the size of its source because of a refusal to see the black homicide problem for what it was: a problem of human suffering caused by the absence of a state monopoly on violence. The Monster’s source was not general perversity of mind in the population that suffered. It was a weak legal apparatus that had long failed to place black injuries and the loss of black lives at the heart of its response when mobilizing the law, first in the South and later in segregated cities. The cases didn’t get solved, and year after year, assaults piled one upon another, black men got shot up and killed, no one answered for it, and no one really cared much.
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Gangs
Gangs could seem pointlessly self-destructive, but the reason they existed was no mystery. Boys and men always tend to group together for protection. They seek advantage in numbers. Unchecked by a state monopoly on violence, such groupings fight, commit crimes, and ascend to factional dominance as conditions permit. Fundamentally gangs are a consequence of lawlessness, not a cause.
The tendency for people to band together when state power is weak is so inevitable it can even seem innate. “The latent causes of faction,” wrote founding father James Madison, are “sown in the nature of man.” Without law, people use violence collectively to settle scores and right wrongs, and commonly refer to violence as their own law. Wherever law is absent or undeveloped—wherever it is shabby, ineffective, or disputed—some form of self-policing or communal justice usually emerges.
Skaggs had long been struck by how many gang members, like this young man, seemed to be pretty regular guys. They were gang members in spite of their normalness. They had joined gangs as thirteen- or fourteen-year-old boys. Some were forced. Others sought protection. Still others were seduced by teenage enticements: Girls. Money. Adventure. A chance to brawl and “party.” By their twenties, they were sick of it. They appeared despondent, as repelled by the violence as any sane person would be. They cried a lot. Their loyalties had shifted to girlfriends and kids. But they couldn’t shake their adolescent ties.
Take a bunch of teenage boys from the whitest, safest suburb in America and plunk them down in a place where their friends are murdered and they are constantly attacked and threatened. Signal that no one cares, and fail to solve murders. Limit their options for escape. Then see what happens.
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Gang Violence & Homicide
Debts and competition over goods and women—especially women—drive many killings. But insults, snitching, drunken antics, and the classic—unwanted party guests—also were common homicide motives.
A vacuum of legitimate authority has been filled by extralegal violence.
Violence substituted for contract litigation. Young men in Watts frequently compared their participation in so-called gang culture to the way white-collar businesspeople sue customers, competitors, or suppliers in civil courts. They spoke of policing themselves, adjudicating their own disputes. Other people call police when they need help, explained an East Coast Crip gang member. “We pick up the phone and call our home-boys.”
Gangs have a tendency for legal self-help.
“We police our own. Soldiers are heroes. Why are we called gangsters?”
Homicide flares among people who are trapped and economically interdependent, not among people who are highly mobile.
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Law Enforcement
The principal injury suffered by African-Americans in relation to criminal matters is not overenforcement but underenforcement of the laws.”-Randall Kennedy.
If you asked most LAPD patrol officers why they chose to be cops, they would shrug and answer vaguely: “To help people.” It was a little poignant. Cops enjoyed good pay and lavish pensions. But many seemed to want to be do-gooders without really knowing how.
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Justice System
The reluctance of witnesses to testify was the primary reason so many murder cases went unsolved.
One of the primary reasons to have a legal system is to take certain people out of the picture. It is what justifies the immense power the police hold. If you don’t incapacitate violent actors, they keep pushing people around until someone makes them stop. When violent people are permitted to operate with impunity, they get their way. Advantage tilts to them. Others are forced to do their bidding.
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Economics
Money translates to autonomy. Economic autonomy is like legal autonomy. It helps break apart homicidal enclaves by reducing interdependence and lowering the stakes of conflicts. The many indigent black men who now report themselves to be “on disability”—many of them with mental disabilities, such as ADD and bipolar disorder—signal an unprecedented income stream for a population that once suffered near-absolute economic marginalization. An eight-hundred-dollar-a-month check for an unemployed black ex-felon makes a big difference in his life. The risks and benefits of various hustles surely appear different to him. He can move, ditch his homeys, commit fewer crimes, walk away from more fights.
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