Ghettoside

As Skaggs continued to prepare for the Tennelle trial, he was forced to multitask—something he hated doing—in order to set up his office in the new Olympic Division. The ground covered by Olympic was relatively low-crime by the time the division was actually opening, the area having gentrified through the migration of wealthy Koreans, but prior to the change the region had been “a savagely violent place” due to “a kind of sectarian war in exile among Central American immigrants” (239). Yet, the tale of the region more broadly supports the idea that “poverty does not necessarily engender homicide”; even after gentrification, poverty rates remained relatively high, yet crime rates plummeted (239). The aforementioned proxy war aside, Leovy notes that:

recent immigrants tend to have lower homicide rates than resident Hispanics and their descendants […] because homicide flares among people who are trapped and economically interdependent, not among people who are highly mobile (239).

Immigrants are by definition mobile; but, further, Leovy argues that racism does not affect them in the same way, as Hispanic workers, for example, “were treated badly in jobs that black people couldn’t get in the first place” (240). America’s history of segregation further engenders intra-racial violence: “Homicide thrives on intimacy, communal interactions, barter, and a shared sense of private rules” (241).