Ghettoside is published by Bodley Head on Thursday, £16.99.
Jill Leovy became crime correspondent of the Los Angeles Times in 2002. For much of the next decade she was on the frontline of the “homicide epidemic” that gripped the southern districts of the city, the poor and mostly black and Hispanic neighbourhoods of Watts and Compton. Many of the murders were a symptom of the ongoing territorial gang violence of the previous two decades. A very high proportion were murders of young black men by other young black men. Most of these murders went unreported even in the LA Times. Some of the policemen that Leovy talked to had a bleakly ironic term for such “black on black” crime: NHI (“no human involved”). Very few of the murder investigations resulted in a conviction.
Leovy sought to change that emphasis, humanise all of the city’s crimes. She persuaded her editors at the LA Times to run an online homicide report in which every murder victim in the city was identified and the circumstances of their death recorded along with as much personal detail as Leovy could provide. In this way, under the banner “a story for every victim”, Leovy documented 1,133 murders in 2004 alone. That homicide rate, mirrored in other cities, was, Leovy discovered at first hand, the story that America did not want to hear, mired as it seemed to be in racial politics.
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Leovy sought to change that emphasis, humanise all of the city’s crimes. She persuaded her editors at the LA Times to run an online homicide report in which every murder victim in the city was identified and the circumstances of their death recorded along with as much personal detail as Leovy could provide. In this way, under the banner “a story for every victim”, Leovy documented 1,133 murders in 2004 alone. That homicide rate, mirrored in other cities, was, Leovy discovered at first hand, the story that America did not want to hear, mired as it seemed to be in racial politics.
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