RSS Feed
February 13th, 2015 
Awake Goy DAVIES: So there’s all these families who want justice for their victims, and it doesn’t happen, at least not from the police. What’s the impact on the community of the failure to solve so many of these shootings?
LEOVY: A pervasive atmosphere of fear, rampant intimidation because, I think, the killers are emboldened. I did a story in the early 2000s where a colleague, Doug Smith, and I looked at all the unsolved homicides in LAPD South Bureau over about 15 years. And we came up with the finding that there were 40 or so unsolved homicides per square mile…
DAVIES: Wow.
LEOVY: …In the South Bureau area of the LAPD. So think about what that means in real terms. It’s one thing if you hear, vaguely, of a homicide that doesn’t involve anyone you know far away from you. It’s another if it happens on your street. And it’s another, still, if you know who did it, and they never get arrested. And by the way, they did it again, and they still didn’t get arrested. And maybe there’s three or four others around you. Imagine what that does to people and what that does to their own assessment of safety and how they’re going to respond.
I spoke to a mother, once, in South Bureau – black woman – her son had just been murdered. I think this was maybe a couple of days after the murder. I had gone to her door. And it was one of these cases where the police just had no witnesses. The case wasn’t going anywhere. The mother told me that since the murder, the killers, who she knew, who were, I think, the gang members who lived on her street, had been knocking on her door and taunting her and laughing at her – her grief. She had another surviving son, and he was, I think, 15, 16. And you could see that he was thinking really, really hard about this situation. And that’s something you see all the time. I go to a lot of funerals, and I always study the pallbearers because they’re generally young men the same age as the victim. And you can just see the smoldering anger and grief in their faces and how they’re trying to hold it down and try not to cry. And then they march out and collect in knots in the parking lot after the funeral, and you could tell what they’re talking about. They’re talking about, what we do now?
DAVIES: You write that when there’s a homicide, you describe situations where there’s a murder scene, and a crowd naturally gathers. And things are said at the police lines that reflect a lot of the community’s attitude towards the police and what they perceive as their attitude toward the crimes and the victims. Do you want to talk a bit about that?
LEOVY: Police hear that all the time. They hear that all the time. You don’t care because he’s black. You’re not going to solve it because he’s black. And it’s very interesting, I – in terms of Ferguson and some of the other recent controversies – I was thinking that this is so complicated because there is, very definitely, a standard black grievance against police that you hear in South LA, that has to do with the generally understood problem – too much consent searches, we say, in LA, too much stop-and-frisk, too heavy of law enforcement, too much presumption of guilt when you take stops.
What I hear, when I’m in these neighborhoods, is a combination. It’s a two-pronged grievance. There’s another half of that. And the other half is, I get stopped too much for nothing, and the police don’t go after the real killers. They don’t go after the really serious criminals in this neighborhood. They’re stopping me for what I’ve got in my pocket, but I know someone who got killed down the street. And they haven’t solved the homicide, and yet, that second half seems to never break out and make it into the national dialogue about it. To me, it has always been that double-sided grievance of too much of the wrong kind of policing, not enough of the policing we actually want in these neighborhoods. …
DAVIES: You know, you write that most of these cases are made not by physical evidence, you know, fibers or that kind of thing, but by witnesses and a phrase that you hear a lot in some of these communities after a homicide is, everybody knows who did it. But it’s the reluctance of witnesses to cooperate that is such a huge barrier. You want to just explore that for a moment and talk about what fears witnesses have and why?
LEOVY: Well, witnesses I think justly fear retaliation. There’s a lot of kind you might call it soft retaliation – signals, hard stares. I had one witness on a case who a couple days after she – the perpetrators clearly saw her at the scene, woke up in the middle of the night, and they’re banging hard on her windows, bunch of guys walking slowly around the house banging, banging on each window for a long time. And they didn’t hurt her, but that’s terrifying. And it’s very clear what that’s saying. What that’s saying is, think about what we will do to you.
So there’s a lot of things that are below the radar of police, a lot of signaling and intimidation that’s going on all the time, and then there are occasional assaults and very, very occasional killings of witnesses.
Source Article from http://www.dailystormer.com/reporter-jill-leovy-lapd-should-arrest-more-black-male-murderers/
Views: 0
Posted in 
