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Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by [Jill Leovy]

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Jill Leovy

Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America Kindle Edition

by Jill Leovy (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, USA TODAY, AND CHICAGO TRIBUNE • A masterly work of literary journalism about a senseless murder, a relentless detective, and the great plague of homicide in America

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • The Boston Globe • The Economist • The Globe and Mail • BookPage • Kirkus Reviews

On a warm spring evening in South Los Angeles, a young man is shot and killed on a sidewalk minutes away from his home, one of the thousands of black Americans murdered that year. His assailant runs down the street, jumps into an SUV, and vanishes, hoping to join the scores of killers in American cities who are never arrested for their crimes.

But as soon as the case is assigned to Detective John Skaggs, the odds shift.

Here is the kaleidoscopic story of the quintessential, but mostly ignored, American murder—a “ghettoside” killing, one young black man slaying another—and a brilliant and driven cadre of detectives whose creed is to pursue justice for forgotten victims at all costs. 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 why murder happens in our cities—and how the epidemic of killings might yet be stopped.

Praise for Ghettoside

“A serious and kaleidoscopic achievement . . . [Jill Leovy is] a crisp writer with a crisp mind and the ability to boil entire skies of information into hard journalistic rain.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Masterful . . . gritty reporting that matches the police work behind it.”—Los Angeles Times

“Moving and engrossing.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Penetrating and heartbreaking . . . Ghettoside points out how relatively little America has cared even as recently as the last decade about the value of young black men’s lives.”—USA Today

“Functions both as a snappy police procedural and—more significantly—as a searing indictment of legal neglect . . . Leovy’s powerful testimony demands respectful attention.”—The Boston Globe

Print length

357 pages
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Publisher

One World
Publication date

January 27, 2015
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“A serious and kaleidoscopic achievement . . . [Jill Leovy is] a crisp writer with a crisp mind and the ability to boil entire skies of information into hard journalistic rain.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“Masterful . . . gritty reporting that matches the police work behind it.”—Los Angeles Times

“Moving and engrossing.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Penetrating and heartbreaking . . . Ghettoside points out how relatively little America has cared even as recently as the last decade about the value of young black men’s lives.”—USA Today

“Functions both as a snappy police procedural and—more significantly—as a searing indictment of legal neglect . . . Leovy’s powerful testimony demands respectful attention.”—The Boston Globe

“Ghettoside is fantastic. It does what the best narrative nonfiction does: It transcends its subject by taking one person’s journey and making it all our journeys. That’s what makes this not just a gritty, heart-wrenching, and telling book, but an important one. From the patrol cop to the president, everyone needs to read this book.”—Michael Connelly

“Ghettoside is remarkable: a deep anatomy of lawlessness.”—Atul Gawande, author of Being Mortal

“[Leovy writes] with grace and artistry, and controlled—but bone-deep—outrage in her new book. . . . Ghettoside, if there’s any justice, will be the most important book about urban violence in a generation.”—David M. Kennedy, The Washington Post

“Riveting . . . This timely book could not be more important.”—Associated Press

“Told with the chilling detail and gripping pace of a prime-time drama.”—The Economist

“Leovy’s relentless reporting has produced a book packed with valuable, hard-won insights—and it serves as a crucial, 366-page reminder that ‘black lives matter.’ ”—The New York Times Book Review

“A compelling analysis of the factors behind the epidemic of black-on-black homicide, and the beginnings of a policy prescription for tackling it . . . an important book, which deserves a wide audience.”—Hari Kunzru, The Guardian

“Ghettoside has many successes: its complicated portrait of the LAPD, the humanity it lends to the families of murder victims, and its ability to engage readers from a historical and current-day context (the sundry facts Leovy provides throughout the book never overwhelm).”—Jason Parham, Gawker

“A brave book . . . It is not often that I pick up a work of non-fiction and picture the movie unfolding before my eyes. . . . [Ghettoside] offers a calm dissection of America’s oldest epidemic. . . . [Leovy’s] knowledge makes for lapidary prose that crackles with insight. It is also deeply humane.”—Financial Times

“First-rate stuff.”—Newsweek

About the Author

Jill Leovy is an award-winning reporter for the Los Angeles Times. She lives in Los Angeles with her family. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

A Killing

It was a warm Friday evening in Los Angeles, about a month before Dovon Harris was murdered.

Sea breezes rattle the dry palm trees in this part of town. It was about 6:15 p.m., a time when homeowners turn on sprinklers, filling the air with a watery hiss. The springtime sun had not yet set; it hovered about 30 degrees above the horizon, a white dime-sized disk in a blinding sky.

Two young black men walked down West Eightieth Street at the western edge of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Seventy-seventh Street precinct area, a few miles away from where Dovon Harris lived. One was tall with light brown skin, the other shorter, slight and dark.

The shorter of the two young men, Walter Lee Bridges, was in his late teens. He was wiry and fit. His neck was tattooed and his face wore the mournful, jumpy look common to young men in South Central who have known danger. His low walk and light build suggested he could move like lightning if he had to.

His companion, wearing a baseball cap and pushing a bicycle, appeared more relaxed, more oblivious. Bryant Tennelle was eighteen years old. He was tall and slim, with a smooth caramel complexion and what was called “good hair,” smooth and wavy. His eyes tilted down a little at the corners, giving his face a gentle puppy look. The two young men were neighbors who whiled away hours together tinkering with bicycles.

They were strolling on the south side of Eightieth. Bryant carried in one hand an unopened A&W root beer he had just bought. Thirties-era Spanish-style houses—updated with vinyl windows—lined the street, set back a few feet from the sidewalk. Each had a tiny lawn mowed so short it seemed to blend with the pavement. Buses roared by on Western Avenue. Crows squawked and planes whistled overhead as they descended into Los Angeles International Airport, so close you could read the logos on their tails. Groups of teenagers loitered at each end of the street. An elegant magnolia loomed near the end of the block, and across the street hunched a thick overgrown Modesto ash.

The ash tree stood in front of a tidy corner house. Behind that house, in the backyard on the other side of the fence, a man named Calvin Abbot was cleaning out a tile cutter. He had just retiled his mother’s bathroom.

Walter and Bryant were taking their time walking down Eightieth, chatting, their long shadows stretching behind them. They walked in sunshine, though dusk engulfed the other side of the street. Three friends emerged from a house at the end of the block behind them and called out a greeting. Walter stopped and turned to yell something back. Bryant kept walking toward the ash. A black Chevrolet Suburban pulled up to the curb around the corner, on the cross street, St. Andrews. A door opened and a young man jumped out. He pulled on gloves, ran a few steps, and halted under the tree, holding a gloved hand straight out gripping a firearm. Pap. Pap-pap.

Walter reacted instantly. He saw the muzzle flashes, saw the gunman—white T-shirt, dark complexion, gloves—even as he sprinted. Calvin Abbot, toiling with his tile cutter behind the fence, couldn’t see the shooter. But he heard the blasts and dropped instinctively. Abbot, forty, had grown up a black man in South Central and had the same battle-ready reflexes as Walter. He lay flat on the ground as gunfire boomed in his ears.

Bryant’s reflexes were slower. Or perhaps it was because he was looking straight into the setting sun. To him, the gunman was a dark silhouette. Bryant staggered, then reeled and fell on a patch of lawn overhung by a bird-of-paradise bush. Silence. Abbot drew himself to his feet, crept to the fence, and peeked over.

The shooter stood a few feet away, next to the ash tree on the other side of the fence.

He was still holding the gun. Abbot watched as he walked a few paces, then broke into a run: there must be a getaway car nearby. Abbot made a brave decision: he followed the shooter, watched him jump back into the Suburban, and tried to read the license plate as it sped away. He turned and saw Bryant lying on the grass.

Teenagers were converging from three directions. One young man dropped to his knees next to Bryant. Joshua Henry was a close friend. He took Bryant’s hand and gripped it. With relief, he felt Bryant squeeze back. “I’m tired, I’m tired,” Bryant told him. He wanted to sleep. Josh could see only a little blood on his head. Just a graze, he thought. Then Bryant turned his head. A quarter of his skull had been ripped away.

Josh stared at the wound. Only then did his eyes register Bryant’s cap, lying on the ground nearby, full of blood and tissue. He heard his own voice chattering cheerfully to Bryant, telling him he would be okay.

Standing over them, Abbot was pleading with a 911 dispatcher on the phone, straining to keep the details straight as his eyes took in the scene. “Eightieth and Saint Andrews!” He took a breath and muttered hoarsely: “Oh my god.”

Abbot put away the phone. He turned Bryant over. He administered CPR. All around him, teenagers were screaming. Someone thrust a towel at him. Abbot tried to blot it against Bryant’s shattered head, wondering what he was supposed to do. Bryant vomited. His mouth was filled with blood. Abbot, too, found himself staring at the brain matter—flecks of gray and yellow. Yellow? With one part of his mind Abbot recorded his own bewilderment: Why was it yellow? With another part, he fought to stay calm.

One thought kept crowding out the others: Please don’t let this kid die.

“Ambulance shooting.”

Officer Greg De la Rosa, P-3, LAPD Seventy-seventh Street Division, was cruising around Fifty-fourth Street at the north end of the station area when his radio buzzed.

“Ambulance shooting” was the generic way most South L.A. murders and attempted murders came to the attention of police over their radios. In the three station areas that encompassed most of South Los Angeles—the Seventy-seventh Street Division, Southwest Division, and Southeast Division—such calls, at least in this year, came more than once a day, on average.

The location of the shooting was almost thirty blocks south from where he was. De la Rosa went “Code 3,” lights flashing, down Western Avenue, and got there first. It was warm, and still light.

He took in the scene. A chrome BMX bike down on the sidewalk. A baseball cap. A victim on the lawn. Male black. Late teens. Medium complexion. De la Rosa was on autopilot, filling out the police report in his head. He had been called to so many shootings just like this one. So many “male black,” he could barely distinguish one from another. De la Rosa pondered the bike, cap, and victim, arranged in a straight line on the sidewalk and grass. The young man must have dropped the bike and run for the shelter of a porch, De la Rosa thought. A few more steps and he would have made it.

De la Rosa had grown up in an English-speaking family of Mexican descent in mostly Hispanic Panorama City, a rough patch of the San Fernando Valley, and was Los Angeles to the core: his great-grandfather had been evicted from Chavez Ravine when they built Dodger Stadium. He was also an Army veteran. He was still unprepared for what he found when he was assigned to the Seventy-seventh a dozen years before. The station area lay between Watts and Inglewood and spanned the heart of what many locals still called South Central, though the name was officially changed to South Los Angeles in 2003 to erase its supposed stigma. But people on the streets didn’t use the new name much, nor the polite new city designations for its various sections—“Vermont Knolls,” for instance. Instead, people said “eastside” and “westside” to denote the old race-restrictive covenant boundary along Main Street, and retained South Central for the whole. Florence and Normandie, the intersection where the 1992 riots broke out, was in the Seventy-seventh Street Division, near where De la Rosa now stood.

Over time, De la Rosa had grown used to the texture of life here, but it still baffled him. In Seventy-seventh, everyone seemed to be related somehow. Rumors traveled at lightning speed. Sometimes it seemed that you couldn’t slap handcuffs on anyone in the division without their relatives instantly pouring out of their houses, hollering at the police. De la Rosa’s old home of Panorama City was also poor, but it didn’t have the same homicide problem, the same resentment of police. He found that he avoided talking to outsiders about his job. He didn’t want to waste his breath on people who didn’t know what Seventy-seventh was like and wouldn’t understand even if he tried to explain it.

The tasks he walked through that evening were so familiar they were almost muscle memory: Secure the perimeter. Secure witnesses. Hold the scene for detectives. Get out the field interview cards. And get ready: onlookers would soon swarm them, asking questions.

De la Rosa remembered these “ambulance shootings” only if something exceptional occurred. Like the time he had been called to Florence and Broadway, right in front of Louisiana Fried Chicken. The victim, an older black man, had a small hole in his skin, the kind that often hides severe internal bleeding. “Get the fuck away from me!” the wounded man had snarled. De la Rosa tried to help him anyway. The man fought. In the end, De la Rosa and his fellow officers tackled him, four cops piling on, a team takedown of a possibly mortally wounded shooting victim. Even in the midst of the chaos, De la Rosa registered the absurdity, the black humor, so typical of life in the Seventy-seventh.

Black humor helped. But it still got to him—the attitude of black residents down here. They were shooting each other but still seemed to think the police were the problem. “Po-Po,” they sneered. Once, De la Rosa had to stand guard over the body of a black man until paramedics arrived. An angry crowd closed in on him, accusing him of disrespecting the murdered man’s body. Some of them tried to drag the corpse away. The police used an official term for this occasional hazard: “lynching.” Some felt uncomfortable saying it. They associated the word with the noose, not the mobs that once yanked people from police to kill or rescue them. De la Rosa held back the crowd. “You don’t care because he’s a black man!” someone yelled. De la Rosa was stunned. Why did they think race was a part of this? Sometimes, in Seventy-seventh, De la Rosa had the sense that he was no longer in America. As if he had pulled off the freeway into another world.

That May night unfolded in the midst of an unexceptional period of violence in the traditionally black neighborhoods of South Los Angeles County. All across the ten square miles that stretched from Slauson Avenue to the north end of Long Beach, black men were shot and stabbed every few days.

About a month before Bryant Tennelle was shot on May 11, 2007, Fabian Cooper, twenty-one, was shot to death leaving a party in Athens. With him was his neighbor and lifelong friend Salvador Arredondo, nineteen, a young Hispanic man, who was also killed.

A week later, on April 15, twenty-two-year-old Mark Webster walked out of a biker club on Fifty-fourth Street near Second Avenue and was shot by someone who opened fire from a distance. It seems unlikely that the attacker knew who he was.

That same night, some black men caught up with Marquise Alexander, also twenty-two, at a Shell gas station at the nearby intersection of Crenshaw and Slauson avenues and shot him dead. Four days later, on April 19, forty-one-year-old Maurice Hill was hanging out in his usual spot in front of a liquor store at Sixty-fourth and Vermont Avenue at about 10:30 p.m. when a black gunman killed him; Hill, who had lived in the area all his life, spent most of his time sitting in a grassy median on Vermont Avenue drinking beer. The same day Hill died, Isaac Tobias, twenty-three, succumbed to his wounds at St. Francis Hospital in Lynwood, where he lingered for several days after being shot during an argument with two other black men near 120th Street and Willowbrook Avenue.

Three days later, in North Long Beach, Eric Mandeville, twenty, was shot and killed while walking outside, almost certainly targeted by black gang members because he was young, black, male, and looked like one of their rivals. Mandeville was a McDonald’s employee, clean-cut and well liked, a former foster child who had overcome a difficult childhood. Hours after his death, Alfred Henderson, forty-seven, was killed nearby. The next day, on April 23, eighteen-year-old Kenneth Frison died at California Hospital after lingering on life support for three weeks. He had been shot in the head at the corner of Ninety-fourth Street and Gramercy on April 1. Four days after Frison’s death, Wilbert Jackson, sixteen, was sprayed by a lethal volley of bullets from a passing car as he stood in front of a fish store on Figueroa Avenue south of Fifty-first Street. Early the next day, April 28, thirty-four-year-old Robert Hunter was attending the funeral at Missionary Baptist Church on Adams Boulevard for his cousin—Isaac Tobias, the young murder victim mentioned above. An argument broke out at the church; Hunter was shot dead and two other mourners were wounded. Later that same day, Ralph Hope, twenty-eight, was shot and killed in Inglewood. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Amazon.com Review

An Amazon Best Book of the Month for February 2015: There’s a statistic that surfaces early in Jill Leovy’s fundamentally important book Ghettoside that should catch your attention: black men compose about 6% of the country’s population, yet they are the victim in nearly 40% of homicides. And who’s killing those black men? The answer is most often other black men. Leovy, a writer for the Los Angeles Times, explores the culture of black violence, specifically in South Central LA, describing a world that seems to exist hermetically sealed off from the rest of the city. With nearly zero mobility and little policing, the people of South Central are left to fend for themselves—further amplifying the devastating drumbeat of gangs and violence. Leovy builds her book around one family’s story: Wally Tennelle, an LA cop, has refused to move his wife and kids out of his Watts neighborhood. Then his youngest son is murdered (unlike most murders in the area, this one was covered by the local media). Through the gathering of evidence, the roundup of suspects, and the trial that ultimately comes to be—all spearheaded by John Skaggs, a very dedicated and capable LA homicide detective—Leovy makes the argument that what places like South Central need is more policing, not less. They need more attention—not debate, finger pointing, and inaction. – Chris Schluep

--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0062OCN4E
Publisher ‏ : ‎ One World; Reprint edition (January 27, 2015)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 27, 2015
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1943 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 357 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #291,592 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #46 in Urban Sociology
- #167 in Violence in Society (Kindle Store)
- #206 in Criminology (Kindle Store)

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Mal Warwick

Why don't black lives matter to so many police? Here's why

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 9, 2015

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In this timely and important book, veteran Los Angeles Times homicide reporter Jill Leovy drills down to the political and cultural realities that explain what she calls “a plague of murders among black men . . . [who represent] just 6 percent of the country’s population but nearly 40 percent of those murdered.” With a focus on police-community relations, Leovy powerfully makes the case that black lives matter by examining the work of an extraordinarily dedicated and effective (white) Los Angeles police detective in solving the brutal murder of the teenage son of another accomplished L.A. cop (mixed-race but self-identified as black).

Relating in great detail the circumstances leading up to one murder in 2007, and the steps taken by the detectives assigned to the case all the way through to its conclusion, Leovy manages to imbue Ghettoside with the tension and urgency of a thriller.

This book is certain to be controversial in criminal justice circles. Taking her cues from the brilliant homicide detectives she features in the book, Leovy denounces the “stop-and-frisk” tactics so favored by New York police and the proactive, “fix-broken-windows” brand of policing. She (and her subjects) insist that approach places the emphasis in law enforcement precisely where it shouldn’t be, intruding in the community without providing a meaningful benefit and slighting the intensive, time-consuming job of investigating — and closing — the most serious crimes. Ghettoside reveals numerous ways in which serious detective work is given lower priority, even scorned, by senior officers in the LAPD. It’s not a pretty picture.

To be clear, Leovy doesn’t advocate less active policing. On the contrary, she makes the point that “prevention” is ineffective and squanders scarce resources. What our inner cities need is more policing, not less — but policing focused on investigating serious crime and locking up the perpetrators. Only then can the police and politicians expect that members of the community will trust the system.

Why is black-on-black murder so prevalent? Leovy explains: “The smallest ghettoside spat seemed to escalate to violence, as if absent law, people were left with no other means of bringing the dispute to a close. Debts and competition over goods and women — especially women — drove many killings. But insults, snitching, drunken antics, and the classic — uninvited party guests — also were common homicide motives.”

The key phrase here is absent law. “Eighteenth-century rates [of homicide] among settlers on the wild edge of the American colonies were almost exactly those of South Central blacks in the twenty-first century.” But what about the common perception that gangs are at the root of crime in the ghetto? “Fundamentally,” Leovy contends, “gangs are a consequence of lawlessness, not a cause. . . Without law, people use violence collectively to settle scores and right wrongs, and commonly refer to violence as their own law. Wherever law is absent or underdeveloped — wherever it is shabby, ineffective, or disputed — some form of self-policing or communal justice usually emerges.”

Black-on-black murder isn’t just tens of times more prevalent than homicide among other ethnic groups — it’s also far less likely for the killers to be caught. Almost always, “everybody knows” is the lament in Watts and other heavily African-American ghettos in Southside L.A. and other cities. This phenomenon, the refusal of eyewitnesses to offer evidence, is the excuse typically used by police for failing to solve crime. As Leovy shows, however, a truly persistent detective can only be slowed down by the prohibition against snitching, not stopped. The best police detectives in Southside L.A. clear upwards of eighty percent of their cases, while the overall clearance average is on the order of forty percent.

The clear though unstated takeaway from Ghettoside is that lack of empathy on the part of most police officers is at least one of the roots of the problem. It’s difficult not to wonder why police academies, like medical schools increasingly today, don’t offer intensive training in empathy. (Certainly, police applicants should also be screened for the potential for empathy in the first place.) A cop who is sensitive to the human dimensions of crime cannot fail to rush to the side of a dying murder victim, if only to ask who did it. But every one in a group of beat cops sent to such a scene in one real-world example in Ghettoside neglected to do so. Instead, they devoted themselves to pushing back bystanders, doubtless including eyewitnesses to the crime. That’s lack of empathy. This is how the overwhelming majority of African-American inner-city residents conclude that, to the police, black lives don’t matter.

There may be no one who knows more about murder in Southside Los Angeles than Jill Leovy. She displays both the deep understanding of one who is intimately familiar with the reality as well as the breadth of historical insight that comes with reading the work of pioneering criminologists. For nine years, beginning at the turn of the century, she covered the topic for her paper. In 2007, she launched “The Homicide Report” online, a searchable database of details about all murders committed in L.A. County.

For anyone who wants to understand the problems of urban America, Ghettoside is essential reading.

6 people found this helpful

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Gripping and Important Read

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 9, 2019

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No point burying the lede: "Ghettoside" knocked me out. The book was so meticulously researched, the details so exacting (yet never extraneous), they revealed the author's myriad gifts of storytelling. There are only a few nonfiction books each year as comprehensive as "Ghettoside." Often I found myself wondering, "How does the author know all this?" I don't think I'm giving anything away, but in the afterward Leovy answers my question, explaining her reporting strategy, which was to embed with police precincts, go out on calls, and interview participants over a multi-year period. I would think the true challenge with this type of book is to wrestle the huge amount of source material into a coherent narrative, which Leovy handles masterfully. To summarize, the author focuses on homicide in the South Central part of L.A. during a period when it was much more prevalent (1990s) than it is today. She describes murders in an excruciating way, never pulling punches. But "Ghettoside" isn't simply a catalog of murders. It focuses on the efforts of the homicide detectives to solve these crimes. Everyone is described in a way that keeps him or her from becoming a stereotype. We learn that the investigators are dedicated and self-sacrificing. Some of their biggest challenges are a lack of support from the L.A. Police Department and a lack of cooperation from witnesses to the crimes, who very understandably fear for their own lives for being "snitches." One of the detectives' own children is murdered, victim of a gang dispute, and the resulting investigation and trial make for riveting, if gut-wrenching, reading. What I appreciated so much about "Ghettoside" is that Leovy gave a quick bit of historical context at the beginning and then launched into the narrative, never editorializing. At the very end of the book she gives her opinions about what fueled the crime, and her conclusions are as refreshingly well thought-out as the rest of the book. The author doesn't lean on the pat answers of gangs and drugs. While these elements contribute to the violence, Leovy gives the reader a much more nuanced explanation, showing how ethnically similar groups living in close quarters throughout the world, with limited access to financial mobility, have resorted to similar types of violence. Essentially they take the law into their own hands to settle disputes. Leovy turned all of my preconceptions about South Central, mainly based on Hollywood movies, on their head. She gives so much life to the survivors, the witnesses, and the detectives. They all have the same motives as the rest of us: to live in safety. It is only a small subset within a small subset that commits the homicides. Even within this subset of young black males are many who want to escape the life but don't know how. What was so appalling about the circumstances described in the book was how little media attention the deaths received but also how little help the detectives received when they were just trying to do their job. I'm a white guy from the Midwest with no connection to murder in LA, but I devoured "Ghettoside" and would recommend it to anyone with an interest in true crime or life in America today.

24 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

C. L. Weekes

A must read book for social history / police policy

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 28, 2015

Verified Purchase

I was listening to Radio 4 book of the week. This was on the play list and the 30 minutes I heard sounded interesting. I missed the rest as do shift work. So I ordered this book on line, it arrived quickly. The book tells the story of high number of young black men murders in America, specifically in Los Angeles. This story is interweaved with stories of american policing policy over the years and uses detectives characters to show individual police attitudes to the local communities their serve and coping strategies when dealing local communities and gathering evidence in attempt to solve murder cases. It's a tough book to read but opened my eyes shows, it shows the less glamorous parts that not shown regular cop shows. I will definitely read it again. It's useful for sociology, politics, history students or anyone interested social history.

mr M Bedford

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on August 12, 2015

Verified Purchase

Excellent

M. McGrath

A must for fans of David Simon

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 21, 2015

Verified Purchase

Superb nonfiction novel will appeal to fans of David Simon

alan g

Gritty

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on April 4, 2016

Verified Purchase

I found Ghettoside to be an amazing realtime look into gangs and gang related killings. It comes as no real surprise the grim statistics of black on black killings, in fact anyone who is unaware of this problem would shock me more.
How to correct this, to reduce the incidents and the overall gang mentality is a long term issue. It does though have to start at street level. What's the real driving force here, money and money from drugs. Reduce and/or stop that, well perhaps stopping it is an insurmountable task!
Overall a very interesting read, a little long at times but a gripping insight into gang life in. L.A.

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L. Arnold

A must read for illumination about racial violence and murder in America

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on March 6, 2015

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Extremely well written, reads like a thriller, I read it cover to cover. It is research, relays the facts comprehensively yet the stories are woven into a tale which I could not get enough of.The background and characters were so real,portrayed warts and all. I saw these crimes and the people involved in a different light after reading this book, and can say this puts a human face on something inhuman. Race riots, police conduct, victim-reactions, hard working detectives and historical context, are all dealt with here. Brilliant work.

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Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America Kindle Edition

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