June Thomas of Slate reviews Jill Leovy’s “Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America.”
Anyone who keeps up with the news knows that the version of police work we see on TV procedurals is not entirely accurate. But I had no idea how divorced from reality most cop shows are until I read Jill Leovy’s “Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America,” published in January by Spiegel & Grau.
Leovy, a reporter at the Los Angeles Times, starts with a shocking statistic: Black men make up just 6 percent of the nation’s population but nearly 40 percent of murder victims.
To understand the reasons for this disparity, Leovy followed a team of detectives as they investigate the murder of one young black man, shot as he was walking down the street with a friend. Bryant Tennelle was the son of an LAPD detective, but as with every other victim, the barriers to solving his murder were plentiful, including witnesses too afraid to testify, a scandalous lack of resources for homicide detectives in high-crime neighborhoods, and police bureaucracy that takes the best investigators off the streets.
At the beginning of the book, Leovy likens our criminal justice system to a “schoolyard bully” that “harasses people on small pretexts but is exposed as a coward before murder. It hauls masses of black men through its machinery but fails to protect them from bodily injury and death. It is at once oppressive and inadequate.”
Her amazing reporting and measured but vivid prose gradually establish the undisputable truth of that statement.
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