'Senseless' violence Making sense of murder

This article, based on an ethnographic study conducted over a three-year period in an impoverished, predominately African American and Latino neighborhood in the northeastern US, describes how a drug gang narrative was created by the police and prosecutors to explain a series of unsolved murders. The narrative that the authorities constructed retroactively tied these unrelated crimes together by connecting them to neighborhood drug dealers whom they construed as a gang. Through this narrative, the authorities were able to prosecute all the cases in sequence and deploy a series of defendants and witnesses to win convictions - even in cases where they had little evidence. Murders like these are typically described by law enforcement agencies and the media as 'senseless' acts of 'random violence'. When examined with ethnographic detail, however, these acts of murder turn out to have motives that community members understand but have nothing to do with gang activity.