The Grim Sleeper: He Punished Black Women for Being Drug Addicts
Lonnie Franklin killed dozens in the name of “cleaning up the streets”.
It is hard enough to be a part of a minority that is discriminated against and has been left behind in matters of economic and social development. If you add to this some rampant crime targeted at your kind, and constant neglect from the police because your lives apparently don’t matter enough to be taken seriously, what can you then do to be noticed and get the justice you deserve?
This is exactly the situation black women found themselves in living in the unsafe neighborhoods of South Los Angeles. Los Angeles has always been known for its high crime rates, which have come down steadily over the years but still remains a high number.
But in the years spanning the crimes referred to in this story, between 1985 to 2007, the crime rates, especially the homicide rates in the South Los Angeles neighborhoods in question, were rather high.
The 1980s and the Strawberry Murders
In the mid-1980s the Los Angeles Police Department saw an increasing number of cases of murders of black women who were chronic drug users and street sex workers. These murders mostly involved killing by stabbing or strangling…
