Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

by Jill Leovy

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.