The screenplay could develop into one of Hollywood’s most provocative and politically-charged films. Lots of cops. Plenty of bad guys. Loaded with pathos and sentimentality for those wishing to find justice. But the aspect of “suspended disbelief” would be too taxing on the audience. The tears too frequent. The neighborhood too close. The reality far too depressing.
Author Jill Leovy’s powerful and revealing book, “Ghettoside” (Random House, 2015) is a heart-wrenching, blow-by-blow revelation of how Los Angeles Police Department detectives manage their way through the blood-soaked streets of their home turf, South Bureau. And while curious Angelinos may know where this area is—and residents of the area often revolted by what happens there—Leovy offers a unique, inside analysis of the series of gang-related murders, assaults and societal havoc so common to America’s inner cities.
Unlike the popular local police narratives once popularized by Joseph Wambaugh (”The New Centurions,” “The Onion Field”), Leovy took on this work as a reporter whose police beat took her to a part of town beset with poverty, anger, violence and young dreams forever unfulfilled. Each page seems to spill with the blood of young Black boys and middle-aged men who, no matter what their original intent in life, never made it out of the ghetto. Many of the notorious characters in the book who did manage to live another day in this historically neglected part of the City of Angels are likely sitting in prison, on parole or on probation. And all to often within the confines of South Bureau, the book reveals in dramatic detail how the guilty as well as the innocent die on the streets.
The title could easily been spelled with a “c” as in (“Ghettocide”) considering the familiar way that the mostly young Black residents depart life. Yet the title is not a stereotypical moniker attached by a suburban White woman who, at first glance, would appear to be a foreign correspondent dropped off in an hellacious landscape with only her pen and notebook. The veteran detectives coined and suggested the title—part of the “gallows humor” so common when you have a stack of new, ongoing and unsolved murders piling up monthly on their desks. The “absence of law,” these sworn men and women attest, is a primary reason why this deadly social pathology is so common in South L.A. And many of them know the mean streets as well as any gang-banger, dope pusher, homeless addict or “baby-momma/daddy” who ever awoke and slept there.
But it takes a special detective to eventually find justice for the heart-broken parents, relatives and friends of the majority-young lives snuffed out by rivals. John Scaggs was one such man. He had the very regrettable responsibility to track down the killer of young man who had a special connection to the LAPD…he was the teenaged son of a fellow detective who dared to live in the same community that he took an oath to protect.
Halfway through Leovy’s book, the reader may begin to substitute the detectives as “armed coroners” as their daily shift during the “Big Years” (1990 through 2000) involved constant roll outs to pick up dead teenaged and young-adult Black persons. It never seemed to end. The detectives ran out of room at the 77th Street Precinct and had to add a trailer to the back parking lot in order to gather all the cases—old and new—into a “clearinghouse” of sorts operated by some of the LAPD’s most seasoned personnel, a few of which have become nationally renowned for their investigative prowess.
Leovy put in pain-staking research at 77th and Newton divisions—sometimes, she revealed, working out of her car out back—which is always the hallmark of a good “police beat” reporter. She brought out the personal ambitions and motivations of the detectives assigned to South Bureau and did a remarkable job at peeling back of the layers of mental toughness with compassion among the detectives. This insight proved especially poignant when they would come upon the latest blood-spattered Black boy or girl whom onlookers believed the LAPD or Sheriff’s department considered merely “…just another dead niger.”
The job of finding justice for the victims is very difficult in South Bureau. Witnesses are reluctant. They’re frightened by reprisal. “Don’t snitch” was not only unsolicited advice to residents, but also served as a warning that if you said anything to law enforcement, you’d surely be next. These detectives had the unique responsibility of determining if this or that child was actually “banging” or was he or she simply an innocent bystander who caught one of the thousands of bullets fired day and night throughout the “hood” with relative impunity.
Through hundreds of hours tracking down and interviewing witnesses and participants in the murder of the popular detective’s son, they found and brought to justice the driver/orchastrator and the gunman—both “Blocc Crips”—each serving a life sentence.
“Ghettoside” is an excellent look at both sides in the ongoing—but certainly reduced—tragedies of L.A.’s Black-on-Black crime rate in South Bureau and the lingering effect on the community.
