Ghettoside summary

With violence at every turn, you’d think that cops must be churning out case after case. But they’re not. As it turns out, most homicides involving black male victims go unsolved and unpublicized, despite (or perhaps because of) their prevalence.

The conviction rate – that is, the number of convictions divided by the number of cases – for black homicides is significantly lower than those of other demographic groups. For instance, in the early 1990s in Los Angeles, around 36 percent of perpetrators of murders of black people were convicted. That’s not much better than the 30-percent conviction rate in Jim Crow-era Mississippi!

As citizens of our respective countries, most of us feel confident that the State will intervene when our personal safety is violated. That’s because the State has an exclusive right to practice legitimate force. After all, it’s the State, not your neighborhood that runs the police.

Sociologist Max Weber called this a state monopoly on violence, and it’s what fundamentally guarantees both rule of law and individual autonomy. A state monopoly on violence is why you can feel safe walking down the street – you know the police will protect you.

We now understand why black communities today don’t have a state monopoly on violence. But why does this matter? Well, it ultimately leads to the formation of an alternate system of justice – one that cultivates violence and resists the involvement of law enforcement.

Without the threat of State intervention, violence becomes a legitimate tool in interpersonal relations.

So far, we haven’t touched on another reason for high crime and low conviction rates in black communities. It’s the factor that explains why things still have yet to change: misguided police policies.

Rather than focusing on investigations, police forces in the United States have centered their strategies around patrols, mass arrests and other “preventative” measures. Often, large urban police departments with long patrolling traditions like the LAPD simply see crime prevention as a more effective practice, while detective work is looked down upon as merely reactive.

Despite the widespread idea that the homicide epidemic in poor black communities is permanent, re-establishing a state monopoly on violence is possible. It’s pretty simple: police must start solving murder cases. All it takes is some persistence. Murders that occur within shadow systems of justice are often easy to solve if you know where to apply pressure.

Shadow justice cases are shaped by a tit-for-tat exchange of offences and retributions, and the details of a murder are often well known by members of the community, who exchange rumors and gossip. This network of rumors is so active that officers in Southeast Los Angeles have a name for it: the GIN, or Ghetto Information Network.