Just finished reading "Ghettoside" by Jill Leovy, a longtime homicide reporter for the LA Times. Ghettoside tells the story of a young Black man gunned down by gang members in South Central LA. Statistically speaking, this happens all the time and nobody (save for the victim's families and community members) bats an eye. But, this time, the homicide victim is the son of a high-ranking police officer who lives in the 77th district, an area south of the 10 freeway that is divided up amongst warring Crip sets.
Leovy does a great job of zooming into the years long investigation into this murder; she shows that homicide investigations are really stalled because police do not have the resources to really do their due diligence. In fact she argues that the justice system fails Black families in two ways. One is familiar: Black Americans are subject to a widening dragnet of police surveillance. The other is less familiar, but rings true: "Black Americans suffer from too little application of the law...It is at once oppressive and inadequate" (9).
Leovy's book is dazzling in parts and represents the best of a new generation of true crime reporting. She brings the average reader into the difficult work that homicide detectives do, amidst budget cuts, police politics, and other factors that redirect their energies away from the nuts-and-bolts of tedious investigative work.
But, the thing that I missed in this book was a real deep development of the characters. Unlike some of the best "new journalism" (i.e. Truman Capote, Norman Mailer), which reads like a novel, Ghettoside reads like long-form newspaper journalism. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but there is an observable distance in Leovy's vantage point. She does a great job collecting facts and vignettes about people, but the characters never really came to life for me. Her portrayal of John Skaggs--the lead investigator on this case--and Wally Tennelle--the father of the victim--are exceptions. She does a wonderful job bringing their characters to life, but the others almost appear like props in the background. This made me think that there's a challenge that nonfiction writers face when they try to humanize their characters. How do you do this if the book is about a process and not necessarily the people?
In all fairness, though, Leovy has written a book that I would gladly assign in a Sociology class about police, homicide, or racial inequality. Ghettoside is accessible and includes just enough analysis to make it a great teaching companion for undergrads.
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