Ghettoside: A True Story Of Murder In America Quotes
"A circle of grief encloses them, Los Angeles police detectives who investigate the murders of black men."
"Skaggs carried the shoebox aloft like a waiter bearing a platter, a solemn offering to the grieving mother."
"His every move was infused with energy and purpose, like a runner warming up, a constant rhythm of relentless pursuit."
"She leaned against the wall, pressed the open top of the shoe against her mouth and nose, and inhaled its scent with a long, deep breath. Then she closed her eyes and wept."
"Homicide had ravaged the country’s black population for a century or more, but it was at best a curiosity to the mainstream."
"Skaggs's whole working life was devoted to one end: making black lives expensive, worth answering for with all the force and persistence the state could muster."
"The failure of the law to stand up for black people when they are hurt or killed has been masked by a whole universe of ruthless, relatively cheap and easy 'preventive' strategies."
"The perceived harshness of American criminal justice and its fundamental weakness are in reality two sides of the same coin."
"To John Skaggs, the nation’s collective shrug toward homicide was incomprehensible."
"Violent crime was plummeting in Los Angeles County, but the disparity between black male death rates and those of everybody else remained nearly as large as ever."
"African Americans have suffered from a lack of effective criminal justice, and this, more than anything, is the reason for the nation's long-standing plague of black homicides."
"The task he walked through that evening was so familiar it was almost muscle memory: Secure the perimeter. Secure witnesses. Hold the scene for detectives."
"The preternatural neatness, the ability to control himself and the space around him, and the quiet certainty of his whole mien."
"Not surprisingly, when he worked that first homicide case, he was swept with the sense of certainty people experience when they discover what they were meant for in life."
"Whatever the wider world’s response, the homicide detective’s call was to treat each victim, no matter how deep their criminal involvement, as the purest angel."
"The murdered were inviolate. They all deserved the same justice. They were all some daddy’s baby."
"Homicide grief may be a kind of living death. Survivors slog on, diminished, disfigured by loss and incomprehension."
"Some people describe their worst spells of grief two, or five, or twenty years after the murder."
"Homicide could make pariahs of the bereaved."
"To 'work homicide' in South Central L.A. in those days was to dwell in a demimonde the outside world could not comprehend."
"The idea of being followed home or confronted in one’s own neighborhood was terrifying."
"He had a clarity of purpose that guided all his actions."
"Catching killers built law—that successful homicide investigations were the most direct means at the cops’ disposal of countering the informal self-policing and street justice that was the scourge of urban black populations."
"Gardens there burst with bird-of-paradise flowers and purple-blooming jacarandas."
"Community spirit" in the sense of both local pride and connections among neighbors was far more in evidence in Watts than elsewhere.
"They raised each other’s children. They traded off transportation and housework."
"There are no victims here" was a tired cliché seemingly echoed by half the officers in Southeast.
"You take your values and put them in the backseat while you are here. Then you go back to where you are from and get your values again."
"The place I live at—there's rules and regulations behind living there," he said.
"It's either society's racism, or something is wrong with them—something wrong just with black people. And I don't believe that!"
"Murderers are mean," as the historian Monkkonen said, and in Southeast, they seemed especially so.
"They are all innocent angels when they get to me," La Barbera would say.
"Nothing annoyed him like low professional standards."
"The cramped rows of shelves made a disturbing monument to the Monster."
"Recruitment became an increasingly urgent focus."
"He loved his job with an intensity that bordered on the self-destructive."
"Mentorship is important in policing, and especially in ghettoside homicide work, an art form so underrated that it had been relegated mainly to an oral tradition."
"Get to the point, get to the point is how Marullo summed up his mentor’s philosophy."
"Skaggs and Marullo solved every one of their first eight cases during those busy months of 2005."
"He wanted to make sure the values he’d fostered in Southeast were preserved in the next generation."
"All those frustrating years of trying to succeed at school, something he was so ill-suited for—years of squirming before math problems that bewildered him and gazing into textbooks that seemed incomprehensible. Year after year, he tried and tried, with the same dismal results, scraping by in school, burning through his parents’ money for remedial help, falling behind, staying behind, and yet 'he never once complained,' his father marveled. 'He wanted to make us happy.'"
"In his years of teaching, Brother Jim Reiter of St. Bernard High School in Westchester had discovered it was not necessarily students’ academic prowess that won over their teachers. It was character—some combination of earnest effort, curiosity, and intrinsic goodness."
"But Bryant, unlike his older brother, had a fearless temperament. Tennelle never connected the trait to his own personality. But like his father, Bryant refused to live with any trepidation."
"Bryant Tennelle had entered that period of late adolescence when parents find their power reduced to suggestion and hope."
"Lawless violence burdens black men as no one else."
"But he could also tell they were not 'hard-core.' He recognized them as that familiar, softer breed of 'affiliated' kids."
"And when he confronted Bryant, all those years of protective parenting were turned back on him: 'Daddy!' Bryant remonstrated. 'You raised me better than that!'"
"We had sons and we didn’t want them to be killed."
"His words marched into Angela’s chatter like soldiers in formation."
"You and I are going to be serious and honest."
"What did it mean that the civil rights struggle had landed black people here, knee-deep in murder?"
"If love could have saved you, you would have lived forever."
"What does it say when we can’t offer justice to one of our own?"
"It’s a necessary attribute if you are going to be a homicide detective. I don’t want it to sound negative. But they are harder than most people."
"Memories would sweep over her at unexpected moments, as real as if happening anew, the pain rivaling that of childbirth, she said."
"For once she received help from someone who asked for nothing in return."
"Midkiff’s story was typical of south end prostitutes, that is, it was sordid, dramatic, and monotonous."
"She was telling the truth: she wanted to change, but she didn’t know how."
"There is little celebrating in homicide units... Grim faces accompanied even the most dramatic investigative triumphs."
"One could never feel good about solving a case. No sense of a mission accomplished could minimize the horror."
"I know shots went off... But 'people usually can shoot a lot and not hit somebody. Especially gang-bangers.'"
"I’m not here to hurt or help... I’m here to find the truth. That’s why we need to get to the point."
"I ain’t never ever think I’d hurt somebody... I ain’t never did want to hurt nobody in this world."
"There ain’t no bringing him back to life... I took somebody off the planet. Off the earth."
"Why? 'Cause all's I do is go in there and say what happened."
"This was part of the emotional equipment of men capable of scorching earth."
"I told you my side. There is no side. I wasn't there. I didn't do nothing."
"You have all the burden of the families who think about nothing but this. And you can't do your best."
"It's hard to ask people to give up their life for this."
"Poverty does not necessarily engender homicide."
"Homicide thrives on intimacy, communal interactions, barter, and a shared sense of private rules."
"You had to be involved with people to want to kill them."
"Parenting a child in late adolescence is delicate work."
"The dead rested. The ones who stayed behind did all the suffering."
"His job was to anchor the law in the suffering of real human beings, to bring it down from on high and straight into the living rooms of Watts."
"It was not youth but leaving it that heightened risk."
"Justice is a casualty when police are preoccupied with control and prevention, neglecting to answer for black lives."
"When a suspect is sent to prison 'nobody wins—we have to find another way.'"
"For him to look up to us—it ain’t the way to be. We gotta give these babies a chance to live."
"I’m trying to live. At least to see twenty-one. That’s a lot."
"It is possible in our community to live on for a full life!"
"Protect them from the evil thing that lurks in our community!"
"Just keep going, keep pushing, until that door opens."
"Nothing worse than to see a hardened RHD detective up here with tears running down his face."
"If he is so smart, why would he put the tattoos on after he is in jail?"
"This reinforces the conclusion that guns are not a root cause of black homicide."
"Violent crime was plummeting in Los Angeles County."
"Progressives tend to avoid or change the subject."
"Women work through men by agitating them to homicide."
"Arson, for some reason, gets a starring role."
"Individuals willingly give up their implicit power to the state."
"Only about a tenth of all murders resulted in a conviction."
"Killers of whites received the harshest penalties."
"The principal injury suffered by African-Americans."
"One of the most dangerous tasks a state can perform."