Jill Leovy’s Ghettoside: A Story of True Murder is a book about the homicides and Police enforcement residing in Los Angeles’ Watts. Moreover, The book focuses on victims that fall under unfortunate circumstances of historical violence in their residential area and how enforcers of formal law play a role around these territories with concentrated violence. Throughout the narrative of the book, it delves into an example of a homicide case that brought perspective on the aspects of homicide inclined communities. In these black enclaves, Levy stemmed on showing an undermined portion of America, such as Its subsistence on longstanding, unorganized and organized crime, its ignorance in media attention, its racial slur on why black lives do not matter, and its small portion on enforcement officers that care about this type of community.
The first main point that is evident in Leovy’s Ghettoside follows the plain and obvious fact that there are syndicates of organized and unorganized crime that thrive in areas such as Watts relating to the distribution of drugs, prostitution, and robbery. Though, the focus of the book is on homicide. The book centers around gangs, their families, and the people killed as a result of these crimes. For example, A few cases of murder that go into specific details according to the reading, included Barbara Pritchett’s son Dovan Harris, Wallace Tennelle’s son Bryant Tennelle, and Da’Quawn Allen among many other mentioned murders in the book. An example of certain factions of crime were mentioned in the court case for Tennelle’s murder. It stated,
“‘You have all heard of the Crips and the Bloods,’ he said. He launched into the oversimplified version of gang life in L.A. favored by the media and prosecutors. He talked of gangs as though they were rival governments, highly organized and bent on warfare. By many accounts, the so-called Rollin’ Hundreds were a relatively small, inconsequential, disorganized gang whose members were largely blood relations from a single family. But Stirling called it “a conglomerate.”… he displayed a map with gang territories blocked out in lavender. It looked like an L.A. version of the board game Risk. The Rollin’ Hundreds and the 8-Trey Gangster Crips ‘are mortal enemies, they hate each other’”(p. 278).
Faction of crime were divided under subcategories or “gang territories” for the case of Los Angeles’ crime ridden area. Leovy mentioned informal laws created by gangs where violence is the main form of control. Crime feuds engulfed the area and, in turn, affected the manner of how people in these areas lived. People took in forms of identity and gang association in order to have a live that is, in a sense, decent and survive. Since the typical resident of these areas were black families, it became a longstanding reinforcement that black men growing under these conditions of gang violence become victims and aggressors of crime.
Following high homicide rates among these specific environments, Leovy mentions the despair and grief that follows the rate of violence among the families that are affected by the murders. It is a problem that lacks attention from the general public. In the media, the lives lost in these communities were barely mentioned. The text states “When homicide did get attention, the focus seemed to be on spectacles—mass shootings, celebrity murders—a step removed from the people who were doing most of the dying: black men”(p. 6). Media is a depiction of what the general public focuses on or are fed in their daily lives and showed these black enclaves are not of interest to inform the general people. The idea of a black man dying has become commercially ignored because homicide has become viewed as a common and evidently unimportant occurrence in south central. To further exemplify this notion of under-representation in media Leovy stated, “Even when cases got some public attention, the tilt often seemed off. Gangs were a big topic, but atrocity, trauma, and lifelong sorrow were not part of the public’s vocabulary about black-on-black violence. Somehow, mainstream America had managed to make a fetish of South Central murders yet still ignore them. The principal aspect of the plague—agony—was constantly underrated” (p. 37). It was simply put by the statement of “plague—agony” that despair was not desirable in news and other media formats because the concept would negatively affect the morale of the public. The people affected by crime have essentially become a burden wherein the loss of friends and family controls them.
Leovy repeatedly showed the misconstrued concept that accompanies Watts history and diversity of having plain bad qualities. People that live there have created family and neighborly relationships that intertwine in a manner where it is stronger when compared to other communities. Leovy states,
“It was one of the defining aspects of the ghettoside setting: a substantial portion of the area’s residents were related to each other through extended family ties, marriage, or other intimate connections. Relatives who were only nominally related by blood often saw each other daily, ate together, celebrated together, quarreled and comforted each other. They shared food, money, and living quarters. They raised each other’s children. They traded off transportation and housework. Even people who were not related were networked into this complex mosaic.”(p. 64)
Although it was mentioned these communities essentially became second-class citizens due to the presence of heavy gang activity, social solidarity remained ever-present in the families that lived there. To contrast, the fear of having loved ones die was a large problem that Ghettoside acknowledges.
The narrative that Ghettoside focuses on throughout the whole book was the laws involvement in the murder case of Bryant Tennelle. The second part of the book surrounds the case by explanation of Robbery-Homicide Division’s detectives, the witnesses testimony and involvement in cases, and how the specific Tennelle trial played out in court. To reiterate, Bryant Tennelle is the son of Wallace Tennelle, an officer of the Los Angeles Police Department. Bryant was described as a decent teenager given the circumstances of where he lived, near where he became a victim of homicide.
A main point Leovy assembles through the experiences of the Robbery-Homicide Division’s detectives is the dedication that comes with being in the specific division. Throughout sections of the book, the Robbery-Homicide Division (RHD) was described as underfunded but the detectives were hardworking personalities. The narrative focused on John Skaggs as a RHD detective and followed his commitment to the south central area by saying how he and others in his department ignored the ignorant bias that caused other officers to look down on the citizens of the portion of territory affected by excessive crime.
Through witness testimony or interrogations by the interviews of Skaggs, Leovy reiterates capabilities of RHD detectives and the fears of people inside these crime communities. For example, in the interview done with Jessica Midkiff, when asked to testify, she stated, “‘I don’t even care about me anymore, I’ll do it,’ Midkiff said. She began to cry again, worried her family would be killed. ‘They’ll do it!’ she told Skaggs. He told her that he would be scared, too, if it were him.”(p. 188). It is apparent in a general amount of testimony cases that a lot is at stake when a persons life or their families lives are at risk. The fears of witnesses translates to their actions in court.
The general amount of homicide cases are unsolved. In the case of Bryant Tennelle, Leovy’s purpose was to show how evidence is important in court: witness testimony, historical evidence, chronological evidence, physical evidence, and the manner in which evidence is showed. The purpose of concluding the book with the court case was not only to show how the law plays a role as an effective combatant to crime but to show that justice through law is an achievable possibility .