'Ghettoside' asks tough questions about crime
Do black lives really matter? Since grand juries in Ferguson, Mo., and New York City failed to indict white police officers in the deaths of unarmed young black men, wave upon wave of protests along with the accompanying T-shirts, hashtags and social media posts insist that they do.
Still, one wonders.
Los Angeles Times reporter Jill Leovy's penetrating and heartbreaking report from the front lines of 21st-century urban crime arrives at this seemingly auspicious moment in our ongoing racial dialogue. Ghettoside points out how relatively little America has cared even as recently as the last decade about the value of young black men's lives, especially in the nation's inner cities.
Among the stunning statistics: African Americans make up only 12% of the country's population, yet account for nearly half of its homicide victims. But to the nation as a whole, Leovy writes, "the raw agony visited upon thousands of ordinary people was mostly invisible. The consequences were only superficially discussed, the costs seldom tallied."
Leovy, for one, tallied those costs, creating for her newspaper "The Homicide Project" blog, in which she paid equally close attention to the 845 murders committed in L.A. during 2007. Among those cases were those taking place in the city's predominantly working-class African-American region south of Interstate 10 where there was so much black-on-black crime that local authorities established an informal, commonly accepted shorthand description of such murders as "NHI," meaning "No Human Involved."
Ghettoside's primary focus is on a squad of homicide detectives who believed otherwise. Leovy embedded herself with their division, located in South Central L.A., "the weakest outpost of the criminal justice system." Their collective determination to solve hundreds of murders of children, teens and adults often surprise jaded residents who have convinced themselves, not without reason, that no one else in the city, or the nation, cares about them.
John Skaggs, one of the book's main protagonists, cares. A pale-haired, pale-faced veteran LAPD detective who resembled nothing so much as an aging "surfer dude" from his native Long Beach, Skaggs was, as Leovy writes, "ghettoside all the way" in his commitment to solving as many South Central murders as came across his desk. Skaggs and his fellow detectives win some, lose others.
Leovy is thorough and measured in accounting for a cross-section of street shootings and in detailing the often-frustrating process of gathering evidence, finding witnesses who aren't afraid of retribution from street gangs and other criminals — and reassuring victims' skeptical families.
One family belongs to one of the division's own: Detective Wally Tennelle, whose 18-year-old son, Bryant, is gunned down not far from their South Central-area home in May 2007. Skaggs leads the investigation and Leovy presents a riveting close-up view of how a master of his craft works at maximum intensity, especially during a painstaking, yet effective interrogation of a key suspect.
As the murder trial nears its conclusion a couple years later, the prosecutor can barely contain his anticipation in saying, "A seven-year-old could have tried this case!" His implication, and that of Ghettoside, is that if the same diligence were brought to other black victims whose parents weren't cops, there would be far more justice – and, perhaps, far fewer homicides.
Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America
By Jill Leovy
Spiegel & Grau, 384 pp.
4 stars out of four