If you’ve got a ghost or some other supernatural phenomena, you could call the Ghostbusters; a fictional entity, true, but such a great catchphrase. But in real life, who do you call when you are in need of assistance—and the people you need assistance from either can’t or won’t help? Reporter Jill Leovy’s 2015 book Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, takes the reader into one such conundrum. Leovy started covering the streets of Los Angeles in 1993 for the L.A. Times. During that time she made a decision to track every murder in the city. In doing so she noticed something about the murders of African American men in particular:
Although black people make up roughly 13 percent of the US population, they made up more than half of homicide victims in 2014 across the country, according to FBI statistics.
While this epidemic may seem like it should be the top priority of the criminal justice system, Leovy demonstrates in Ghettoside that it is not. She points to, for example, homicide clearance rates, which measure how many murders are solved by police.
In New York City, for instance, 86 percent of 2013 homicides involving a white victim were solved, compared to 45 percent of those involving a black victim, according to an analysis by the New York Daily News. [...]
“Explicitly confronting the reality of how murder happens in America,” Leovy writes in Ghettoside, “is the first step toward deciding that it is not acceptable, and that for too long black men have lived inadequately protected by the laws of their own country.”
Leovy’s citing of the seeming indifference on the part of law enforcement to solve the murders of black men in particular gets compounded by the distrust of said entity in many black communities.
Distrust that stems not from the lack of solving murders, or the “underpolicing” of the community in this instance, but from the “overpolicing” that comes from far less serious issues than murder:
But it will harass and punish [black people] for what amounts to petty crimes — drug offenses, traffic violations, loitering, and so on — through police tactics like “stop and frisk” and “pretextual stops,” in which police stop someone under the pretext of a low-level crime, like speeding or failing to signal on a turn, to look for drugs or illegal guns. Studies show these tactics are disproportionately deployed against black communities — even though stops involving black people are typically less likely to turn up contraband than stops involving white people.
“Imagine that you’re a student at a school. There are bullies at the school, and the bullies beat you up every day on the playground. But the only time the playground supervisor comes around, he or she says, ‘Don’t chew gum on the playground,’ and walks away, and ignores the bruises and the fighting,” Leovy said. “You would be cynical. You would cease to believe in the system.”
In fact, you’d probably cease to believe that it’s just the bullies picking on you, but rather that the system is a bully in and of itself. Pulling back to the criminal justice system, this is how Leovy described the situation in her book: “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.”
The phrase “between a rock and a hard place” comes readily to mind.