Ghettoside

Detective John Skaggs pulled up to Barbara Pritchett's house in Watts carrying a pair of shoes. They belonged to her son, Dovon Harris, who had been shot in the head and would never wake up. The shoes had been sitting in evidence for months. Skaggs was returning them now, after the case was closed.

The two of them made a strange picture—the tall white cop and the weeping black woman. Skaggs was an upper middle-class Republican from Long Beach. Pritchett was a Democrat, the granddaughter of Louisiana cotton pickers whose family had migrated west in the 1960s. On paper, they had almost nothing in common. But standing there on her porch, they shared something deeper. They were both Americans whose lives had been shaped by a bizarre phenomenon: a plague of murders among black men.

Pritchett had lost her youngest child. Skaggs had spent his career trying to solve cases just like Dovon's. Their strange kinship was forged by violence that most of America barely noticed.

The book you're about to hear is built around a simple idea. Where the criminal justice system fails to respond vigorously to violent injury and death, homicide becomes endemic. This is not complicated. It is not mysterious. It is cause and effect.

Black Americans have not benefited from what sociologists call a state monopoly on violence—the government's exclusive right to exercise legitimate force. The rest of America takes this protection for granted. When you call the police, you expect them to come. When someone is murdered, you expect an investigation. But for black communities, particularly in places like South Central Los Angeles, this basic expectation has been denied for generations.

The result is lawlessness. And lawlessness breeds more violence.

Consider the numbers. Black men make up 6 percent of the country's population but nearly 40 percent of those murdered. In modern-day Los Angeles, young black men are killed two to four times more frequently than young Hispanic men, even though they live in the same neighborhoods. These murders typically go unsolved. Police departments have historically treated them as unimportant. In Los Angeles, such crimes were once marked with the chilling shorthand "NHI"—No Human Involved. Prosecutors downtown joked that they were "population control."

John Skaggs stood in direct opposition to this inheritance. He was a detective who worked what his colleagues called "ghettoside"—the area south of Interstate 10, where the city's poorest and most violent neighborhoods sat. Most cops saw this as a dead-end assignment. Advancement meant moving downtown to elite units or administrative roles. Working south of the Ten meant forgoing promotions and dealing with depressing problems that poor black people had.

But Skaggs saw it differently. For him, ghettoside was the place to be. It was where real work got done.

He believed something that most people in law enforcement did not. He believed that the lack of solved cases was itself a root cause of violence. When killers are not caught, when witnesses see that the system does nothing, the message is clear: black lives do not matter. And when that message sinks in, violence becomes a rational response. People police themselves. They settle scores privately. They form gangs for protection. They kill because they know they can get away with it.

This is not about inherent criminality. It is not about cultural pathology. It is about what happens when the law abandons a community.

The story that unfolds in this book centers on one murder: the killing of Bryant Tennelle. Bryant was the son of an LAPD detective, which meant his case got attention that most ghettoside murders never received. But the investigation that followed revealed something important. It showed that the system could work when people bothered to make it work. It showed that solving these cases was not mysterious or impossible. It just required effort—sustained, relentless, expensive effort that the system had always been unwilling to provide.

Skaggs was the kind of detective who provided that effort. He was meticulous, tireless, obsessive. He never called in sick. He stayed in perfect physical condition. He planned his days down to the minute, eating his lunch standing up rather than wasting time at restaurants. He treated every murder as if it mattered, even the ones that everyone else had written off.

The opening scene with Barbara Pritchett captures something essential about this book. Here was a white cop from a conservative background, standing on the porch of a black woman whose family had been ground down by systemic racism. They should have been on opposite sides of every divide in American life. But they were bound together by something stronger than politics or race. They were bound by loss, by grief, by the desperate need for justice in a place where justice had been denied for so long.

Pritchett had reason to be skeptical of the police. Like many black residents of Watts, she had experienced the department's indifference firsthand. The cops who patrolled her neighborhood were often dismissive, sometimes hostile. They did not seem to care when black men died. But Skaggs was different. He showed up. He listened. He solved her son's case. And in doing so, he earned something precious: her trust.

This trust was not given freely. It had to be earned case by case, family by family. Skaggs understood that his job was not just about catching killers. It was about selling the legal system to people who had every reason to distrust it. It was about convincing them that the law could work for them, not just against them.

The book argues that this is the only way to break the cycle of violence. Harsher punishments do not deter crime. What deters crime is the swift and certain application of justice. When people know that murder will be investigated, that killers will be caught, that the state will respond—then the calculus changes. The shadow legal system loses its power. The gang loses its authority. The cycle breaks.

But this requires resources. It requires commitment. It requires a willingness to treat every murder as if it matters, not just the ones that make the news.

The story of Bryant Tennelle's murder and the work of detectives like Skaggs illustrates this thesis in vivid detail. It shows what is possible when the system does its job. And it raises an uncomfortable question: if this case could be solved with the right effort, why are so many others left unsolved?

Why does the plague continue?