Ghettoside

Ghettoside, in addressing black-on-black violence, also makes the case that circumstance matters more than people typically believe in our outcomes. Leovy portrays the community as, in many respects, trapped: her point regarding the relative immobility of blacks is that while racism has kept many other minority groups in bad jobs, such jobs have historically not been open to blacks in the first place, which has led to an immobile poverty that keeps the people of South Central trapped, whereas other impoverished communities experience much lower rates of violence because they have the ability to leave if necessary. A frequent refrain among gang members and those adjacent to gang life is that they, mostly, do not want to be part of it—many fell into it or were forced into it when they were younger, but have been unable to escape. Starks and Davis both ended up accepting protective custody in prison to allow them to sever their gang ties, and Midkiff struggled for years to escape a cycle of prostitution, abuse, and poverty prior to Skaggs’s assistance.

Circumstance is addressed in other ways, as well. Many of the victims in Ghettoside have no known gang ties and often find themselves simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, perhaps wearing the wrong colors. This includes Bryant Tennelle; it was believed, for example, that his Astros hat may have contributed to his killing, as a symbol of gang affiliation; however, it was later suggested that the only thing that seemed to have made him a target was that he was a black man at a moment when Devin Davis needed someone to kill. Many detractors throughout the book look for ways to assign blame, but Leovy suggests that circumstance is often the only (immediate) thing to blame.

Ghettoside frequently interrogates methods and philosophies of policing and criminal justice more broadly. At the one end are the many who have no real philosophical approach to the job, which Leovy characterizes as the (lack of) philosophy of most of the police force, at least in Los Angeles: most officers, and even most detectives, according to Leovy, view their job as a very surface-level crime suppression position without thinking much about what it means to suppress crime, or how to best go about doing so.

When police do consider these matters, though, they broadly fall into two camps in two areas. First is the proactive versus reactive camp. Proactive policing, favored by the “brass,” is policing that attempts to prevent crime through innovative techniques. Leovy seems to argue that this kind of policing sounds good on the surface, but in reality is neutral, at best, and malicious at worst, as it leads to problematic policies such as “broken windows” or “stop and frisk” policing. In contrast, detectives such as Skaggs believe in reactive policing. Although this philosophy is less publicly-favored, Ghettoside argues that in the long run, reactive policing is more effective, explicitly because it shows the community that its society is not lawless, while implicitly still allowing for its freedom. The book sometimes allows for proactive methods—e.g., it seems to be sympathetic toward Coughlin’s methods of using drug charges as a pretext for finding weapons—but it generally sides with the reactive approach.

The other area is in technological methods, used in a very broad sense to mean an approach that is manual and instinctive versus an approach that is rooted in high-tech solutions and science. The book appears to prefer the former—though Skaggs, for example, is very neat and organized, he approaches his investigations more intuitively and tends to document only what he feels is truly important, relying on his own memory for everything else. Other areas are more overtly critical of explicitly-technological solutions; for example, the book describes the NIBIN system implemented to make computerized matches from guns to weapons as being completely ineffective, whereas it was the skilled eye of Daniel Rubin, using low-tech methods, that actually made the match between the murder weapon and the bullets.