Ghettoside

I am a huge fan of mystery novels written by Michael Connelly featuring the detective Harry Bosch, so I was delighted to read Jill Leovy’s account of real-life homicide detectives in Los Angeles working under very difficult circumstances to provide a measure of justice to otherwise ignored crime victims and their families.

The book does a wonderful job of documenting the craft of good police work and shows how poorly functioning formal legal systems – a legacy of Jim Crow – negatively impacts Black communities.

As the fictional detective Harry Bosch likes to say, “everyone counts or no one counts.”… show more.

I am a huge fan of mystery novels written by Michael Connelly featuring the detective Harry Bosch.

I was delighted to read Jill Leovy’s account of real-life homicide detectives in Los Angeles working under very difficult circumstances to provide a measure of justice to otherwise ignored crime victims and their families.

The book does a wonderful job of documenting the craft of good police work and shows how poorly functioning formal legal systems – a legacy of Jim Crow – negatively impacts Black communities. As the fictional detective Harry Bosch likes to say, “everyone counts or no one counts.”

Leovy’s… show more.

Leovy takes a deep dive into Los Angeles, my adoptive hometown, and argues that much of the violence and mistrust of authority rocking our poorest Black neighborhoods is not – as is commonly assumed – the result of excessive law enforcement but rather the opposite. On the streets of South LA, the police are often glaringly absent, and as a result the worst crimes go unsolved, if they are investigated at all, and any semblance of community policing or trust-building becomes impossible. Leovy finds the most wrenching of narrative vehicles to drive her point home – an LAPD homicide… show more.