Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

by Jill Leovy

Officers who chose to work south of the Ten Freeway were respected for their toughness. But the type of policing they did was not considered a launching pad for an ambitious career. In fact, hard-core south-end cops were often seen as damaged goods in the LAPD, ruined for other work by the large number of complaints they generated and the narrow arena of policing they were perceived to occupy.

Without an attorney present, gang suspects could get a sense not just of what the police were thinking, but also of what was happening on the streets. If your homeys had snitched, you wanted to know it. If it was in your best interests to snitch on them first, you wanted to know that, too. The cops were only part of the equation. The willingness of gang suspects to be interrogated demonstrated, again, how such men inhabited two legal structures—a formal one and an informal one. They had to negotiate both, and the LAPD interrogation room was a space to explore their options, play one side against the other.