Jill Leovy

involved. They were murdered every day, in every city, their bodies stacking up by the thousands, year after year.

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.”

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.

Homicide activist LaWanda Hawkins, whose son was killed, summed up the objection: “ ‘Gang member’ is the new N-word,” she said. Phrases such as “at risk” were worse, rolling victims and perpetrators into one indistinguishable mass. Vicky Lindsay grew so tired of palliating terms that she had a sticker made for her rear windshield: “My son was murdered,” it declared.

It was hard not to take it personally. Detectives felt they were fighting an invisible war. By then, the notion of a lot of black and Latino drug dealers and gangsters shooting each other down in the ’hood had become normal. It was often not news. “I remember a banner headline in the Los Angeles Times one weekend,” recalled a detective named Paul Mize. “A bomb in Beirut had killed six people. We had nine murders that weekend, and not a one of them made the paper. Not one.” It was aggravating, crazy-making. “You were dealing with problems and people that the majority of society doesn’t want to think about—doesn’t want to deal with their tragedy and grief,” a detective named John Garcia recalled in the early 2000s, talking of his years in the Newton Division and South Bureau. “They are not the ones who have to knock on that front door at two A.M. and say, ‘Your loved one has been killed.’ ”

Finally, the detectives who learned their craft in those years came to know the profound grief of homicide, the most specialized knowledge of all. They knew the way the bereaved struggled to function hour by hour. They knew about good days and bad days. Good detectives said to family members, “I can’t possibly know how you feel.” The best didn’t have to say it. Years of such work endowed practitioners with an almost spiritual understanding of their craft. A detective named Rick Gordon, for example, still working in South Bureau as of this writing, had come to view the moral dimensions of his cases so profoundly that he talked of them in almost religious terms, talked as if their outcomes were predestined. Something put witnesses there, Gordon would say—something bigger than themselves.

Gangs issued informal “passes”—essentially granting waivers that exempted people from the rules that governed everyone else. A star athlete in a gang neighborhood, for example, might be issued a “pass” that exempted him from participation in gang life. Or passes might be extended to people allowed to conduct illegal businesses in rival territories. “Selling without a pass” was an occasional homicide motive.

Coughlin’s methods were guaranteed to look like straight harassment to those on the receiving end. After all, how important was a bag of marijuana in a place where so many people were dying? But Coughlin’s motivation wasn’t to juke stats, boost his department “rating,” or antagonize the neighborhood’s young men. He had seen the Monster, and his conscience demanded that he do something. So he used what discretion he had to compensate for the state’s lack of vigor in response to murder and assault. This practice of using “proxy crimes” to substitute for more difficult and expensive investigations was widespread in American law enforcement. The legal scholar William J. Stuntz singled it out as a particularly damaging trend of recent decades. In California, proxy justice had transformed enforcement of parole and probation into a kind of shadow legal system, sparing the state the trouble of expensive prosecutions. State prisons, already saddled with sick and elderly inmates, were all the more crammed as a result. But in the squad rooms of Southeast station, cops insisted that desperate measures were called for. They would hear the name of a shooter, only to find they couldn’t “put a case” on him because no witnesses would testify. So they would write a narcotics warrant—or catch him dirty. “We can put them in jail for drugs a lot easier than on an assault. No one is going to give us information on an assault,” explained Lou Leiker, who ran the detective table in Southeast in the early aughts. To them, proxy justice represented a principled stand against violence. It was like a personalized imposition of martial law.

[...]

LAPD brass used a vocabulary their underlings did not. They spoke of “victimology,” and of “biasing” and “stacking” resources, of responding “surgically.” Mostly it meant deploying lots of cops to stop and search people and to conduct parole and probation searches.

At this writing, homicides in Los Angeles County have fallen to levels that would have been unimaginable to Skaggs at the turn of the century, when he came to Southeast. By 2010, the year Starks and Davis were tried, homicide death rates for black men ages twenty to twenty-four had fallen to about 158 per 100,000, or less than half their peak in the Big Years, though of course this figure is still twenty or thirty times higher than the national mean. Killings have gone down further since. In the city of Los Angeles, the drop has been especially dramatic. There were 297 homicides in the city in 2011. By 2013, there were 251, a breathtaking decline. But the figures had a similar tilt as in years past: Three high-crime station areas—Southeast, Southwest, and Seventy-seventh—accounted for 109 homicides, or 43 percent of the city’s total. Nearly all the victims in the three divisions were men, more than three quarters of them were black (double the proportion of black people in the area’s population)—and 84 percent of the killings with known suspects were intrarace.