

Law enforcement, likewise, is largely unconcerned by the violence, choosing to believe that in ghettoside violence, there are no real victims, and that violence is just part of black culture. For example, late in the book, a 13-year-old shooting victim who had been wearing an absurdly-outdated orange bandana was described as essentially a hardcore gang member in the news report. The media, for example, rarely reports on shootings in South Central, and even when it does, the reports are strikingly at odds with the real events. She is best known for the non-fiction book Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America, her 2015 New York Times best-seller about homicide in Los Angeles. (The man in the wheelchair who provided key information, for example, had been paralyzed in a seemingly arbitrary shooting.) Leovy presents this topic as one that is simultaneously understood and misunderstood, in that the public and law enforcement are aware of the problem, yet largely uninterested in uncovering the roots of the problem or taking steps to solve it. Ghettoside is a fast-paced narrative of a devastating crime, an intimate portrait of detectives and a community bonded in tragedy, and a surprising new lens into the great subject of murder in America-why it happens and how the plague of killings might yet be stopped. Jill Leovy is an American journalist and nonfiction writer.

The main topic of Ghettoside is the issue of black-on-black violence-homicide in particular, but also the myriad other forms of violence that take place, including, e.g., almocide, a term used to describe shootings and other violence that nearly kill the victim, but do not. In ‘Ghettoside,’ an Indictment of the Criminal Justice System In her new book, reporter Jill Leovy tackles a subject usually ignored by progressives, black-on-black murders, and she explains.
