Crime and police brutality are old stories in Los Angeles. According to Eternity Street, violence was always abnormally common in the City of Angels. Even as a remote outpost of Mexico with a few hundred residents, the number of murders per capita was startlingly high. The author, a Yale University history professor, also gathers many facts that complicate popular conceptions of America’s past, including the Chicano lynch mob that stormed the jail to hang a white murderer who received a stay of execution when a Mexican killer did not. The vigilante committees of early L.A. were pictures of participatory democracy with decisions made by voice vote. Eternity Street is a mordantly written reminder that the good old days weren’t so great.
