Ghettoside

Starred review from September 15, 2014
This absorbing first book from journalist Leovy traces the investigation and prosecution of a 2007 murder in South Los Angeles, registering along the way a powerful argument about race and our criminal justice system. Eighteen-year-old Bryant Tennelle was “just another black man down.” His shooting death inspired neither press attention nor vigorous police action—until, that is, his case was handed to Police Detective John Skaggs, the central figure in Leovy’s narrative. By following the relentless Skaggs, fleshing out all his quirks, and rendering the perpetrators, survivors, and witnesses of the murder vividly, Leovy spins a good yarn and illustrates how, by her lights, black-on-black homicide should be dealt with (but too seldom is). The state fails “to catch and punish even a bare majority of murderers” in urban black enclaves, and the result is “street justice”—informal legal systems, replete with their own laws and codes and punishments. Gang violence, in Leovy’s account, is thus not a cause of lawlessness; rather, it is “a whole system of interactions determined by the absence of law.” Like most ghettoside cases, the Tennelle case was eminently solvable—merely awaiting a determined investigator to whom the lives of black men were valuable, their murders something to be answered for. Readers may come for Leovy’s detective story; they will stay for her lucid social critique.

April 27, 2015
Lowman brings her considerable talent for taking on male voices to the audio edition of acclaimed journalist Levoy’s examination of violent crime in urban America. Levoy’s narrative centers on the work of a core group of dedicated homicide detectives on the streets of South Los Angeles and their relationships with victims, suspects, and the wider community. Lowman shines in her portrayals of John Skaggs, a white officer who takes great pains to transcend his conservative suburban image, and Wally Tennelle, a black officer whose decision to live inside the neighborhood he polices comes into serious question when his own teenage son Bryant is shot to death. Lowman also brings her gift for characterization to the rendering of Jessica Midkiff, a young prostitute struggling to rehabilitate herself who happens to be the principal witness to the murder of Tennelle’s son. The palpable tension of a no-holds-barred interrogation comes to life in impressive detail, and Lowman never misses a beat. A Random/Spiegel & Grau hardcover.

Starred review from January 1, 2015

Urban murders tend to be reported as lump sums, statistics with the descriptor "gang-related" attached. A homicide connected to a gang lets those watching the nightly news relax a little by assuming that the victim was involved in nefarious activities and is perhaps partly to blame for his death. Reporter Leovy started the Los Angeles Times' Homicide Report blog to combat the inattention paid to the victims from poor, predominantly African American neighborhoods in South Central L.A. Here, the author digs deeply into the story of one particular murder, exploring the long history of racism, discrimination, and poverty that created both the shockingly high murder rate for young black men and the indifferent response to those crimes. Like the best narrative nonfiction, the book burrows into both heart and brain, resulting in the reader reeling for the families left behind and more suspicious of news reports that paint slain teenagers as brutal career criminals. VERDICT An important book for anyone interested in crime in America. Academics and casual viewers of police procedurals alike will find this a worthwhile read. [See Prepub Alert, 7/28/14.]--Kate Sheehan, C.H. Booth Lib., Newtown, CT

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2014
Leovy, a Los Angeles Times reporter and editor, offers an unsettling view of the plague of black homicides in the U.S., focusing on Los Angeles County. According to Leovy, blacks represent just 6-percent of the overall population but are the number-one murder-victim population in the U.S., accounting for 40-percent of those murdered. And their killers are largely other black men and boys. These facts underlie Leovy's major theme, which is that the plague of black homicides results from the systemic failure of the legal institutions, from police through courts, to effectively catch and punish killers, making, as she says, black lives cheap. The emotional core of Leovy's argument comes from her letting readers in on the struggles of two exemplary LAPD cops, one white, one black, both of whose lives stand in stark contrast to much of LAPD culture, and one of whom suffers a grievous loss to violence himself. This work of narrative nonfiction provides stunningly up-close details but suffers the flaw of its genre in not giving sources.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

February 15, 2014

Los Angeles Times reporter/editor Leovy was part of a six-member team that won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News, so she'll have the skills to detail the investigation of a young black man's murder in Los Angeles in spring 2007. First, though, she embedded herself with the homicide division of the South Bureau in Los Angeles.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2014
Los Angeles Times reporter and editor Leovy looks at the thinly veiled racist origins of violence in South Central LA.In her debut, the author journeys where most fear to tread: the perennially mean streets of South Central LA, where she uses the senseless murder of a policeman's progeny as a jumping-off point to investigate broader issues of why, even as violent crime as a whole in America continues to drop, that urban area sees so many of its people dying by tragically violent means. Leovy's big-picture thesis is that whether you're talking about the "rough justice" of vigilante revenge killings in Ghana, Northern Ireland or South Central LA, the one underlying cause is the same: a vacuum left by a legal system that fails to serve everyone equally. Leovy posits that the gang violence in LA is the result of the local police simply not doing their jobs. On a microcosmic level, the author follows the lives of two LAPD officers, John Skaggs and Wally Tennelle, the former investigating the murder of the latter's son. Tennelle's decision to buck the trend among LA cops and live within the city limits furthered his career as a police officer but had deadly consequences for his son. Intertwined with Leovy's swiftly paced true-crime narrative involving Skaggs' methodical tracking down of Tennelle's killer is some probing sociological research into how blacks in LA got the short end of the socioeconomic straw: Hispanics may have been treated unfairly in the jobs they worked, but as Leovy points out, African-Americans were, even as far back as the 1920s, often excluded from even the lowest-skilled jobs in the city. Unfortunately, however deftly the author interweaves the more personal angle of officers Skaggs and Tennelle with broader sociological "root cause" investigations, there is little to suggest that real change will arrive soon in South Central LA. A sobering and informative look at the realities of criminality in the inner city.

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