Ghettoside Read online

  Ghettoside is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

  Copyright © 2015 by Jill Leovy

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  SPIEGEL & GRAU and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Leovy, Jill.

  Ghettoside : a true story of murder in America / Jill Leovy.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-385-52998-3

  eBook ISBN 978-0-385-53000-2

  1. Murder—United States. 2. Homicide—United States.

  3. Murder—California—Los Angeles—Case studies. I. Title.

  HV6529.L46 2014

  364.152’30973—dc23 2013046367

  www.spiegelandgrau.com

  Jacket design: Greg Mollica

  Jacket photograph: Ken Schles/GalleryStock

  v3.1

  When you see the suffering and pain that it brings, you’d have to be blind, mad, or a coward to resign yourself to the plague.

  ALBERT CAMUS, The Plague

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  PART I: THE PLAGUE

  1. A Circle of Grief

  2. A Killing

  3. Ghettoside

  4. School of Catastrophe

  5. Clearance

  6. The Circumstantial Case

  7. Good People and Knuckleheads

  8. Witnesses and the Shadow System

  9. The Notification

  PART II: THE CASE OF BRYANT TENNELLE

  10. Son of the City

  11. “It’s My Son”

  12. The Killing of Dovon Harris

  13. Nothing Worse

  14. The Assignment

  15. “Everybody Know”

  16. The Witness

  17. Baby Man

  18. Mutual Combat

  19. Witness Welfare

  20. Lost Souls

  21. The Victims’ Side

  22. The Opening

  23. “We Have to Pray for Peace”

  24. The Missing

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  About the Author

  A CIRCLE OF GRIEF

  Los Angeles Police Det. John Skaggs carried the shoebox aloft like a waiter bearing a platter.

  The box contained a pair of high-top sneakers that once belonged to a black teenage boy named Dovon Harris. Dovon, fifteen, had been murdered the previous June, and the shoes had been sitting in an evidence locker for nearly a year.

  Skaggs, forty-four, was the lead investigator on the case about to go to trial.

  At six foot four, he was a conspicuous sight in Watts, the southeast corner of the vast city of Los Angeles, a big blondish man with a loping stride in an expensive light-colored suit.

  He stepped out of the bright morning light, turned down a narrow walkway along a wall topped with a coil of razor wire, and approached a heavy-duty steel “ghetto door”—a security door with a perforated metal screen of the kind that, along with stucco walls and barred windows, represented one of L.A.’s most distinctive architectural features. He knocked and, without waiting for an answer, pushed the door open.

  On the other side of the threshold stood a stout, dark-skinned woman. Skaggs walked in and placed the open shoebox in her hands.

  The woman stared at the shoes, choked and speechless. Skaggs’s eyes caught her stricken face as he walked past her. “Hi, Barbara,” he said. “Having a bad day today?”

  This was Skaggs’s way, disdaining preliminaries, getting right to the point.

  His every move was infused with energy and purpose. In conversation, he jingled his keys, swung his arms, or bounced on the balls of his feet. The movements were not fidgety so much as rhythmic and relaxed, like those of a runner warming up. Forced to hold still in a court proceeding or a meeting, Skaggs would freeze in the posture of a man enduring an ordeal, a knuckle pressed to his lips, a pose that conveyed his bunched-up vigor more than any restless tic.

  Now, having deposited the shoes in Barbara Pritchett’s hands—and having received no answer to his question—he came to a halt in the middle of the living room carpet. Pritchett remained silent, head bowed, eyes fixed on the contents of the shoebox.

  She was forty-two, in poor health. She had recently been diagnosed with diabetes, and her doctor had urged her to get out and walk more. But her son had been shot to death a few blocks away, and Pritchett was too frightened to venture out. She spent days lying in the dark, unable to will herself to move or speak. That morning, as always, she was wearing a big loose T-shirt with Dovon’s picture on it. All around her, in the tiny living room, were mementos of her murdered son. Sports trophies, photos, sympathy cards, certificates, stuffed animals.

  With great care, Pritchett perched the shoebox on the arm of a vinyl armchair by the door and slowly lifted one shoe. It was worn, black, dusted with red Watts dirt. It was not quite big enough to be a man’s shoe, not small enough to be a child’s. She leaned against the wall, pressed the open top of the shoe against her mouth and nose, and inhaled its scent with a long, deep breath. Then she closed her eyes and wept.

  Skaggs stood back. Pritchett’s knees gave out. Skaggs watched her slide down the wall in slow motion, her face still pressed into the shoe. She landed with a thump on the green carpet. One of her orange slippers came off. On the TV across the room, the Fox 11 morning anchors pattered brightly over the sound of her sobs.

  Skaggs had been a homicide detective for twenty years. In that time, he had been in a thousand living rooms like this one—each with its large TV, Afrocentric knickknacks, and imponderable grief.

  They made a strange picture, the two of them: the tall white cop and the weeping black woman. Skaggs, like most LAPD cops, was a Republican. He would vote for John McCain for president that year. His annual pay was in the six figures, and he lived in a suburban house with a pool. It might be said of him that he was not just white, but a Caucasian archetype with his blond-and-pink coloring and Scots-Irish features. Watts had twice risen in revolt against such an icon—the white occupier-cum-police-officer—and so Skaggs’s presence in this neighborhood was all the more conspicuous for the historical associations it evoked.

  Pritchett had a background typical of Watts residents. She was the granddaughter of a Louisiana cotton picker. Her mother had followed the path of tens of thousands of black Louisianans who migrated west in the 1960s, and Pritchett was born in L.A. a few months after the Watts riots. She lived in a federally subsidized rental apartment, and she was a Democrat who would weep in front of CNN later that fall when Barack Obama won the presidential election, wishing her mother were still alive to see it.

  Despite their differences, they were kin of a sort—members of a small circle of Americans whose lives, in different ways, had been molded by a bizarre phenomenon: a plague of murders among black men.

  Homicide had ravaged the country’s black population for a century or more. But it was at best a curiosity to the mainstream. The raw agony it visited on thousands of ordinary people was mostly invisible. The consequences were only superficially discussed, the costs seldom tallied.

  Society’s efforts to combat this mostly black-on-black murder epidemic were inept, fragmented, underfunded, contorted by a variety of ideological, political, and racial sensitivities. When homicide did get attention, the focus seemed to be on spectacles—mass shootings, celebrity murders—a step removed
from the people who were doing most of the dying: black men.

  They were the nation’s number one crime victims. They were the people hurt most badly and most often, just 6 percent of the country’s population but nearly 40 percent of those murdered. People talked a lot about crime in America, but they tended to gloss over this aspect—that a plurality of those killed were not women, children, infants, elders, nor victims of workplace or school shootings. Rather, they were legions of America’s black men, many of them unemployed and criminally involved. They were murdered every day, in every city, their bodies stacking up by the thousands, year after year.

  Dovon Harris was typical of these unseen victims. His murder received little media attention and was of the kind least likely to be solved. John Skaggs’s Watts precinct kept records of scores of such homicides dating back years—shelves and shelves of blue binders filled with the names of dead black men and boys. Most had been killed by other black men and boys who still roamed free.

  According to the old unwritten code of the Los Angeles Police Department, Dovon’s was a nothing murder. “NHI—No Human Involved,” the cops used to say. It was only the newest shorthand for the idea that murders of blacks somehow didn’t count. “Nigger life’s cheap now,” a white Tennessean offered during Reconstruction, when asked to explain why black-on-black killing drew so little notice.

  A congressional witness a few years later reported that when black men in Louisiana were killed, “a simple mention is made of it, perhaps orally or in print, and nothing is done. There is no investigation made.” A late-nineteenth-century Louisiana newspaper editorial said, “If negroes continue to slaughter each other, we will have to conclude that Providence has chosen to exterminate them in this way.” In 1915, a South Carolina official explained the pardon of a black man who had killed another black: “This is a case of one negro killing another—the old familiar song.” In 1930s Mississippi, the anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker examined the workings of criminal justice and concluded that “the attitude of the Whites and of the courts … is one of complaisance toward violence among the Negroes.” Studying Natchez, Mississippi, in the same period, a racially mixed team of social anthropologists observed that “the injury or death of a Negro is not considered by the whites to be a serious matter.” An Alabama sheriff of the era was more concise: “One less nigger,” he said. In 1968, a New York journalist testifying as part of the Kerner Commission’s investigation of riots across the country said that “for decades, little if any law enforcement has prevailed among Negroes in America.… If a black man kills a black man, the law is generally enforced at its minimum.”

  Carter Spikes, once a member of the black Businessman Gang in South Central Los Angeles, recalled that through the seventies police “didn’t care what black people did to each other. A nigger killing another nigger was no big deal.”

  John Skaggs stood in opposition to this inheritance. His whole working life was devoted to one end: making black lives expensive. Expensive, and worth answering for, with all the force and persistence the state could muster. Skaggs had treated the murder of Dovon Harris like the hottest celebrity crime in town. He had applied every resource he possessed, worked every angle of the system, and solved it swiftly, unequivocally.

  In doing so, he bucked an age-old injustice. Forty years after the civil rights movement, impunity for the murder of black men remained America’s great, though mostly invisible, race problem. The institutions of criminal justice, so remorseless in other ways in an era of get-tough sentencing and “preventive” policing, remained feeble when it came to answering for the lives of black murder victims. Few experts examined what was evident every day of John Skaggs’s working life: that the state’s inability to catch and punish even a bare majority of murderers in black enclaves such as Watts was itself a root cause of the violence, and that this was a terrible problem—perhaps the most terrible thing in contemporary American life. The system’s failure to catch killers effectively made black lives cheap.

  To that unseen problem, John Skaggs was the antidote.

  Had Dovon’s case been assigned to another detective, it might easily have gone unsolved like hundreds of others—just another blue binder on a shelf. But in Skaggs’s hands, it had become a relentless campaign for justice.

  And Dovon’s mother knew it. That was the basis of their kinship.

  So now Skaggs stood with one hand in his pocket, one on his hip, regarding Pritchett on the floor, and did what years of homicide work had taught him to do: he waited, silent and unhurried.

  Not the least embarrassed, Pritchett closed her eyes as if she were alone, pressed her face into the shoe of her dead son, and sobbed.

  This 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. Specifically, black America has not benefited from what Max Weber called a state monopoly on violence—the government’s exclusive right to exercise legitimate force. A monopoly provides citizens with legal autonomy, the liberating knowledge that the government will pursue anyone who violates their personal safety. But slavery, Jim Crow, and conditions across much of black America for generations after worked against the formation of such a monopoly. Since personal violence inevitably flares where the state’s monopoly is absent, this situation results in the deaths of thousands of Americans each year.

  The failure of the law to stand up for black people when they are hurt or killed by others has been masked by a whole universe of ruthless, relatively cheap and easy “preventive” strategies. Our fragmented and underfunded police forces have historically preoccupied themselves with control, prevention, and nuisance abatement rather than responding to victims of violence. This left ample room for vigilantism—especially in the South, to which most black Americans trace their origins. Hortense Powdermaker was among a handful of Jim Crow–era anthropologists who noted that the Southern legal system of the 1930s hammered black men for such petty crimes as stealing and vagrancy, yet was often lenient toward those who murdered other blacks. In Jim Crow Mississippi, killers of black people were convicted at a rate that was only a little lower than the rate that prevailed half a century later in L.A.—30 percent then versus about 36 percent in Los Angeles County in the early 1990s. “The mildness of the courts where offenses of Negroes against Negroes are concerned,” Powdermaker concluded, “is only part of the whole situation which places the Negro outside the law.” Generations later, far from the cotton fields where she made her observations, black people in poor sections of Los Angeles still endured a share of that old misery.

  This is not an easy argument to make in these times. Many critics today complain that the criminal justice system is heavy-handed and unfair to minorities. We hear a great deal about capital punishment, excessively punitive drug laws, supposed misuse of eyewitness evidence, troublingly high levels of black male incarceration, and so forth.

  So to assert that black Americans suffer from too little application of the law, not too much, seems at odds with common perception. But the perceived harshness of American criminal justice and its fundamental weakness are in reality two sides of a coin, the former a kind of poor compensation for the latter. Like the schoolyard bully, our criminal justice system harasses people on small pretexts but is exposed as a coward before murder. It hauls masses of black men through its machinery but fails to protect them from bodily injury and death. It is at once oppressive and inadequate.

  America has long been more violent than other developed nations, and black-on-black homicide is much of the reason. This is not new. Measurements are problematic, since few official efforts were made to track black homicide before 1950. But historians have traced disproportionately high black homicide rates all the way back to the late nineteenth century, and in the
early twentieth, “nonwhite” homicide rates exceeded those of whites in all cities that reported federal data. In the 1920s, a scholar concluded that black death rates from homicide nationwide were about seven times white rates. In the 1930s, Southern observers also noticed startling rates of black violence, and in the 1940s, a Philadelphia study found that black men died from homicide at twelve times the white rate. When the U.S. government began publishing data specific to blacks in 1950, it revealed that same gap nationwide. The black homicide death rate remained as much as ten times higher than the white rate in 1960 and 1970, and has been five to seven times higher for most of the past thirty years.

  Mysteriously, in modern-day Los Angeles, young black men are murdered two to four times more frequently than young Hispanic men, though blacks and Hispanics live in the same neighborhoods. This stands out because L.A., unlike well-known murder centers such as Detroit, has a relatively small black population, and it is in decline. By Skaggs’s time, there were few solidly black neighborhoods left; most black residents of South Los Angeles lived in majority-Hispanic neighborhoods. Yet black men died here as they died in cities with large and concentrated black populations, like New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Chicago—more often than anyone else, and nearly always at the hands of black assailants. In L.A., it was strange how all those bullets seemed to find their black targets in such an ethnically jumbled place; it was, as one young man put it, as if black men had bull’s-eyes on their backs.

  Violent crime was plummeting in Los Angeles County, as it was across the country, by the spring of 2007, when Dovon Harris was murdered. But the disparity between black male death rates and those of everybody else remained nearly as large as ever. No matter how much crime dropped, the American homicide problem remained maddeningly, mystifyingly, disproportionately black.

  Despite so much evidence of a particularly black homicide problem, however, there was relatively little research or activism specific to black-on-black murder. That gruesome history of Southern racism made the topic an uncomfortable one for many Americans. One of the enduring tropes of racist lore had been the “black beast,” the inferior black man who could not control his impulses and was prone to violence. By the early twenty-first century, popular consensus held that any emphasis on high rates of black criminality risked invoking the stigma of white racism. So people were careful about how they spoke of it.