Ghettoside by Jill Leovy

Ghettoside is a heartbreaking look at the issues of race, violence and law enforcement. There is much in this book that is enlightening, bun in a disheartened, disappointing way. Many parts left me somewhere between outraged, saddened and flat out disappointed that we, as a society cannot do better.  As well as the fact that we've made so little ground in addressing the issue of murder in our cities' poorest neighborhoods.

Jill Leovy has spent her career covering the “plague” of murder (particularly black on black murder) for the Los Angeles Times.  She spent years embedded in the beleaguered 77^th Street Division in South Central, Los Angeles. Covering homicide after homicide which received little to no coverage in local or national news she embarked on tracing the epidemic of murder in the poorest parts of Los Angeles County.   

The plot primarily follows the tragic story of Bryant Tennelle, an 18 year old gunned down simply walking down the streets of his neighborhood, pushing his bicycle.  Tennelle was the son of a well-respected LAPD Officer.  You could say Bryant was killed because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, or that he was killed because he was wearing the wrong colored hat. Solving this messy case fell to Detective John Skaggs, who was tenacious about tracking down leads. 

In a post-Ferguson, post Trayvon Martin era it may be easy to criticize police handling of cases in high crime areas are somewhere between ambivalence and outright disgust.  But this book shows you the day to day life of a detective in our highest risk communities.   How personally many of the officers take criticism that they don't care about the community, that they don't care about black lives, that they don't care about the victims. Leovy shows time after time that there are many officers who do care, and they work as best they can to solve insurmountable problems.

This work is a page-turning combination of a true crime story and sociology/social commentary. Underneath it all is a tidal wave of devastating loss and grief of big city homicide.

Recommended by Monica Shine

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