Ghettoside Book Summary - Ghettoside Book explained in key points

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Ghettoside summary

Name: Ghettoside
Author: Jill Leovy

Jill Leovy

A True Story of Murder in America

(4 ratings)

14 mins

Table of Contents

Ghettoside
summarized in 6 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 6

What’s in it for me? Discover why the police fail so often in black communities.

We’ve all seen the tragically persistent news in recent years about police shootings in black communities across America. Although some might say these shootings aren’t a particularly new phenomenon, what has changed is that we’re now paying more attention to them. They’ve also raised a critical question: Why is the relationship between the police and black communities so terrible?

Journalist Jill Leovy has spent a large part of her career following cops – especially the Los Angeles Police Department – and brings a new approach to considering the police and the relationships between police and the communities they work in.

What is that approach? Stop trying to prevent all crimes, and put more effort into investigating and solving them. This is the only way forward.

In these blinks, you’ll find out

why most killers in black neighborhoods are never convicted;
how solving crimes can help prevent them in the first place; and
what “No Human Involved” meant to racist cops in the LAPD.

A disproportionate number of black men in the US end up being the victims of homicide.

What if you were told that in certain parts of the world, the chance of getting murdered was as high as 1 in 35? What if you found out that this wasn’t the reality in some impoverished, war-torn country, but in one of the world’s most developed nations?

That frightening statistic is a harsh reality for black males, both old and young, living in inner-city districts in the United States.

Black males become victims of crimes at a disproportionately higher rate than any other demographic in the US. In Los Angeles today, young black men are murdered somewhere between two and four times more often than young Hispanic men, even though the two populations often live in the very same neighborhoods. Although they constitute just six percent of the country’s population, they account for 40 percent of its murder victims.

The early 1990s marked a peak in homicides in the US; in Los Angeles county, on average, black men in their early 20s were murdered at an astonishingly high rate: 368 out of every 100,000. This is similar to the per capita death rate of American soldiers in Iraq in the aftermath of the 2003 invasion.

What could possibly cause such high homicide rates? That’s a difficult question. These rates are independent of nationwide trends. Over the last two decades, homicide rates in the US have plummeted. Despite this, the discrepancy between the rate of black male deaths and that of the rest of the population remains as high as ever. A historical analysis shows that this has been the case all the way back to the late 19th century.

Faced with such a large, senseless loss of life, you’d think that the authorities would be doing everything they could to solve it. But they’re not.

In most cases, the perpetrators of homicides are never prosecuted.

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!

Throughout history, black communities have lacked a state monopoly on violence.

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.

Lawlessness caused alternate justice systems to emerge in black communities.

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.

The US police forces’ focus on preventative measures is ineffective and damaging.

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.

By solving murders, police can begin to build a trusting relationship with black communities.

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.

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What is Ghettoside about?

Ghettoside (2015) is an incisive look into the failure of inner-city American police to protect the black communities that they are supposed to serve. These blinks explore the problem of high rates of homicide in black communities. They provide historical background, grapple with the social implications of violence and attempt to find a practical solution.

Who should read Ghettoside?

People curious about why police can’t seem to mitigate violence in black communities
Anyone interested in urban police strategies
Supporters of police reform

About the Author

Jill Leovy is an award-winning reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where she works as a crime correspondent. In 2007, she started the Homicide Report, a blog that, unlike any other blog before it, attempted to report on every single murder incident in Los Angeles with as much personal detail as possible. This is her first book.

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