Why A Black Man's Murder Often Goes Unpunished In Los Angeles
In the State of the Union this week, President Obama noted that crime in America is down. "For the first time in 40 years," he said, "the crime rate and the incarceration rate have come down together."
But in a new book, Los Angeles Times reporter Jill Leovy cites other statistics: About 40 percent of those Americans who are murdered each year are African-American males. And in Los Angeles, where Leovy covers crime, police arrest a suspect in those killings only 38 percent of the time over the last 30 years, amounting to what she calls "impunity for the murder of black men."
In Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, Leovy uses the story of a single murder to trace the loss of life and the failures of police and courts. She tells NPR's Scott Simon about the murder at the center of her book and the challenge of getting witnesses to talk.
Interview Highlights
On the 2007 murder of 18-year-old Bryant Tennelle
A car pulls up around the corner. A young black man jumps out of the car, raises his gun and shoots. Bryant is struck in the head and falls on the lawn. ... His father is a homicide detective, an RHD, which is the elite homicide unit in the LAPD. ...
The LAPD, I think, sensibly treated this case as any case. But there were some twists and turns when it went unsolved for a couple months. Frustrations mounted in the department. It was an extremely emotional case, as you might imagine, for all of Tennelle's [father's] colleagues. Eventually the case is transferred from one detective to another. The lieutenant in charge asks around and says, "Who really do we have who really knows the street, who really solves cases?" And they come up with the name of John Skaggs, who had been quietly toiling in a backwater ... solving these kinds of crimes. He has expended great effort doing thankless work on cases that no one in the city noticed at all.
On what the Tennelle murder investigation found
The [detectives] ... call it "profiling murder." And so what's happening is gang members will get in a car, they will go to the rival neighborhood to send a message and they will just look for the easiest, most likely victim they can find. And [it's] probably going to be a young black man. And if he fits the part, that's good enough. And an astonishing number of victims — I did a count in 2008 of 300-some LA homicides of the gang-related homicides, and I think something like 40 percent of the victims were this sort of a victim: non-combatant, not directly party to the quarrel that instigated the homicide, but ended up dead nonetheless.
http://www.npr.org/2015/01/24/379156732/why-a-black-man-s-murder-often-goes-unpunished-in-los-angeles
I've been pointing this out for years...Glad to see someone else is finally paying attention...
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