Jill Leovy > Quotes

“This is a book about a very simple idea: where the criminal justice system fails to respond vigorously to violent injury and death, homicide becomes endemic. African Americans have suffered from just such a lack of effective criminal justice, and this, more than anything, is the reason for the nation’s long-standing plague of black homicides.”
― Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

“Fundamentally gangs are a consequence of lawlessness, not a cause.”
― Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

“The system’s failure to catch killers effectively made black lives cheap.”
― Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

“It might not seem self-evident that impunity for white violence against blacks would engender black-on-black murder. But when people are stripped of legal protection and placed in desperate straits, they are more, not less, likely to turn on each other. Lawless settings are terrifying; if people can do whatever they want to each other, there are always enough bullies to make it ugly. Americans are nostalgic for the village setting and hold dear the notion of community, so the idea that the oppressed do not band together in solidarity is counter to our myths. But community spawns communal justice; the village gives rise to the feud.”
― Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

“This is a book about a very simple idea: where the criminal justice system fails to respond vigorously to violent injury and death, homicide becomes endemic.”
― Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

“White people “had the law,” to quote a curious phrase that crops up in historic sources. Black people didn’t. Formal law impinged on them only for purposes of control, not protection. Small crimes were crushed, big ones indulged—so long as the victims were black.”
― Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

“If every murder and every serious assault against a black man on the streets were investigated with Skaggs’s ceaseless vigor and determination—investigated as if one’s own child were the victim, or as if we, as a society, could not bear to lose these people—conditions would have been different.”
― Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

“There was, of course, a whole complex range of people in the ghettoside world. Some men liked hurting people. Some didn't. Some men started out not liking it but became brutalized and sadistic. Maybe the mix would differ in other groups of Americans. Maybe some other racial or ethnic cohort would contain a higher ratio of regular guys, or a lower ratio of men susceptible to becoming violent. Maybe the gnawing fear of getting murdered-- estimated as high as one in thirty-five by a Justice Department report in the 1990s-- would influence another group of men differently.

But this was hairsplitting. Take a bunch of teenage boys from the whitest, safest suburb in America and plunk them down in a place where their friends are murdered and they are constantly attacked and threatened. Signal that no one cares, and fail to solve murders. Limit their options for escape. Then see what happens.”
― Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

“In Jim Crow Mississippi, killers of black people were convicted at a rate that was only a little lower than the rate that prevailed half a century later in L.A.—30 percent then versus about 36 percent in Los Angeles County in the early 1990s.”
― Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

“He said it simply, as if it were obvious. Axiomatic, even. And it was. A black assailant looking to kill a gang rival is looking, before anything else, for another black male. This was the fundamental fact of Bryant Tennelle’s death. Other elements may have contributed—the neighborhood in which he lived, the company he chose to keep, the hat he was wearing that evening. But for all that—and for all the rhetoric about bad choices, senseless acts, at-risk behavior, and so forth—what killed Bryant was the one fact about himself that he could not change: he was black.”
― Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

“Before anything else, Bryant was black. To Devin Davis, that meant he was killable.”
― Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

“If you don’t incapacitate violent actors, they keep pushing people around until someone makes them stop. When violent people are permitted to operate with impunity, they get their way. Advantage tilts to them. Others are forced to do their bidding. No amount of “community” feeling or activism can eclipse this dynamic. People often assert that the solution to homicide is for the so-called community to “step up.” It is a pernicious distortion. People like Jessica Midkiff cannot be expected to stand up to killers. They need safety, not stronger moral conviction. They need some powerful outside force to sweep in and take their tormentors away. That’s what the criminal justice system is for. It was what Skaggs was for, and he knew it.”
― Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

“The hurt was too great for crying—tears belonged to a realm of earthly physics, but the murder of her son had transcended the coordinates of her world.”
― Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

“Death was bad enough. The death of a child, unbearable. But the murder of a child? There was nothing worse.”
― Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

“When you see the suffering and pain that it brings, you’d have to be blind, mad, or a coward to resign yourself to the plague. ALBERT CAMUS, The Plague”
― Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

“Many critics complain that the criminal justice system is heavy-handed and unfair to minorities. We hear a great deal about capital punishment, excessively punitive drug laws, supposed misuse of eyewitness evidence, troublingly high levels of black male incarceration, and so forth.
So to assert that black Americans suffer from too little application of the law, not too much, seems at odds with common perception. But the perceived harshness of American criminal justice and its fundamental weakness are in reality two sides of a coin, the former a kind of poor compensation for the latter. Like the schoolyard bully, our criminal justice system harasses people on small pretexts but is exposed as a coward before murder. It hauls masses of black men through its machinery but fails to protect them from bodily injury and death. It is at once oppressive and inadequate.”
― Jill Leovy

“They had assumed the attack would be just another barely noted, barely investigated skirmish in South Central-- in short, a typical gang case-- until word got back to them that they had killed a police officer's son. The case was eminently solvable-- once the right kind of pressure was applied. Lyle Prideaux had called Skaggs "a hard man." But he was not exactly hard. He as just unequivocal. In his hands, the murders were elevated in law to what they were in fact: Atrocities that must be answered for every single time.

The world wasn't watching. The public, his superiors, and a large share of the country's thinking classes gave only glancing notice to the battle Skaggs had devoted his life to. But Skaggs didn't care; Skaggs turned his back to the parade.

And just as it is impossible to imagine that things in the South would not have been different if the legal system had operated differently-- had black men's lives, for example, been afforded profound value as measured by the response of legal authorities-- it is impossible to imagine that the thousands of young men who died on the streets of Los Angeles County during Skaggs's career would have done so had their killers anticipated a "John Skaggs Special" in every case.

If every murder and every serious assault against a black man on the streets were investigated with Skaggs's ceaseless vigor and determination-- investigated as if one's own child were the victim, or as if we, as a society, could not bear to lose these people-- conditions would have been different. If the system had for years produced the very high clearance rates that Skaggs was so sure were possible-- if it did not function, in the aggregate, as a "forty percenter"-- the violence could not have been so routine. The victims would not have been so anonymous, and Bryant Tennelle might not have died in the nearly invisible, commonplace way in which he did.”
― Jill Leovy

“There is a perception that blacks are doing it to blacks, and if I’m white, it doesn’t affect me,” said the white jury foreman. His eyes flashed with sudden anger. “Well, get over it. It does.”
― Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

“Paul Williams and reflected his deepest values—California living and “a passion for small homes for everyday people”—according to his Memphis archivist, Deborah Brackstone.”
― Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

“There was something faintly comic about it all, DeeDee found herself thinking as she scrambled around the floor, her grandmother screaming nearby. The next instant, she marveled at life's paradoxes, the way human nature perceives humor even at the height of disaster... Wally Jr. has a similar insight: he woke up the next morning surprised to find he had slept through the night. He was unfamiliar with the way a breathless, suspended state of shock precedes grief.”
― Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

“She sensed that they expected her to fall apart, but she didn't know how to fall apart. She knew it was strange. She looked the same despite this massive piece of herself that had gone missing. She acted the same. She went to work, greeted people, went home. Everything normal on the outside, except the occassional muffled crying on the job.”
― Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

“He presented justice as a psychological relief.”
― Jill Leovy

“He presented justice as a psychological relief...”
― Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

“Homicide thrives on intimacy, communal interactions, barter, and a shared sense of private rules. The intimacy part was also why homicide was so stubbornly intraracial. You had to be involved with people to want to kill them.”
― Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

“There was something faintly comic about it all, DeeDee found herself thinking as she scrambled around the floor, her grandmother screaming nearby. The next instant, she marveled at life's paradoxes, the way human nature perceives humor even at the height of disaster... Wally Jr. had a similar insight: he woke up the next morning surprised to find he had slept through the night. He was unfamiliar with the way a breathless, suspended state of shock precedes grief.”
― Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

“It was an evil thing, as the pastor had said. The Monster arose from what was meanest and most vicious in human nature. But the dark swath of misery it cut across generations of black Americans was a shadow thrown on the wall, a shape magnified many times the size of its source because of a refusal to see the black homicide problem for what it was: a problem of human suffering caused by the absence of a state monopoly on violence.

The Monster's source was not general perversity of mind in the population that suffered. It was a weak legal apparatus that had long failed to place black injuries and the loss of black lives at the heart of its response when mobilizing the law, first in the South and later in segregated cities. The cases didn't get solved, and year after year, assaults piled one upon another, black men got shot up and killed, no one answered for it and no one really cared much.”
― Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

“Forty years after the civil rights movement, impunity for the murder of black men remained America’s great, though mostly invisible, race problem. The institutions of criminal justice, so remorseless in other ways in an era of get-tough sentencing and “preventive” policing, remained feeble when it came to answering for the lives of black murder victims. Few experts examined what was evident every day of John Skaggs’s working life: that the state’s inability to catch and punish even a bare majority of murderers in black enclaves such as Watts was itself a root cause of the violence, and that this was a terrible problem—perhaps the most terrible thing in contemporary American life. The system’s failure to catch killers effectively made black lives cheap.”
― Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

“They were murdered every day, in every city, their bodies stacking up by the thousands, year after year.”
― Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

“If every murder and every serious assault against a black man on the streets were investigated with Skaggs’s ceaseless vigor and determination—investigated as if one’s own child were the victim, or as if we, as a society, could not bear to lose these people—conditions would have been different. If the system had for years produced the very high clearance rates that Skaggs was so sure were possible—if it did not function, in the aggregate, as a “forty percenter”—the violence could not have been so routine. The victims would not have been so anonymous, and Bryant Tennelle might not have died in the nearly invisible, commonplace way in which he did.”
― Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

“...ghettoside. ... It was both a place and a predicament....”
― Jill Leovy, Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America