Jill LeovyRezensionen

This was one of the most affecting books I have read in a while. Two cops trying to make the streets of south LA safer for everybody. One cop pays a very high price. If I didn't know I was reading non-fiction I could swear I was reading Dickens so clear and uncompromising this painting of the underbelly of a city. The stifling courtroom. The painfully slow wheels of justice and the chaos of the hot streets at night.

dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

FRTC

A wrenching look at the pervasive homicide suffered in black neighborhoods LA. Fair and sympathetic, and amazingly dry-eyed considering all the fear and misery involved. Very well-written and researched with extensive footnotes. Goes back and forth between individual people, depicted with great humanity, and overall statistics and trends.

Seek to understand. So which is it? Too many black males in prison for murder or not enough? This author claims the answer to black on black violent crime is to value every life to the point that every murder is investigated and prosecuted. In the short term, this seems like it would put more black men in prison.

Another challenging and necessary perspective, complementing New Jim Crow. The thesis -- that more genuine, successful, committed prosecution of homicides would reduce homicide rates through serious, civil, active valuation of black lives -- develops in stats subservient to lived experiences. Very helpful history and current, personal stories.

Jill Leovy, a L.A. Times reporter on the homicide beat in Los Angeles, describes murders and murder investigations in South L.A. through the story of a one young man, Bryant Tennelle, killed in a random street shooting. Tennelle's death was just one of hundreds in L.A. County that year, most of which were attributed to black-on-black gang violence. Most went unsolved.

One thing which made Tennelle's murder different was the fact that he was the son of a L.A. policeman. That alone must have prompted the police department to put additional effort into solving this crime. Leovy tells the story of the police investigation into Tennelle's murder, how hard it was to crack the case, and how much harder it was to bring the case to trial and get a conviction.

Beyond the specifics of that successful case, Leovy makes it clear just how difficult it is to investigate and solve crime in the inner-city neighborhoods of L.A., in no small part due to the reluctance of the citizens in the area to talk to the police. The author points out how, if the people don't trust the authorities, they don't or won't cooperate. The rules of the inner-city, which the residents all know, is what governs people's behavior. That includes not trusting or talking to the police, and knowing that to do so puts anyone who cooperates with the authorities at risk of gang retribution. People in the city have seen that the ability of the police to protect cooperative witnesses from gang retribution is very poor. Thus, crimes go unsolved more often than not, and people find protection by joining a gang rather than trusting the authorities. It's a vicious cycle. People feel trapped by the realities, police feel frustrated by the circumstances. Leovy talks about breaking this cycle, but as evident by a similar situation of the high number of unsolved murders in Chicago during 2015 - 2016, success in many U.S. communities is still a long way away.

nonfiction (true crime, race, and law&order challenges in "ghettoside" Los Angeles)
really interesting, 13-1/2 hour audiobook that follows homicide detectives through a 2007 case involving the shooting of a policeman's Black son, and explores various issues that complicate relations between Blacks living in South LA and the police responsible for their safety.

Genius. Perhaps the best book ever written about murder, law enforcement and which American's lives we chose to value and those we don't. Joins David Simon's "Homicide" and Bryan Stevenson "Just Mercy" as a rightful classic on our nation's ideas of justice.

Remarkable account of black-on-black violence in Los Angeles, from its early days into the present.

Ghettoside focuses on a few detectives and a few cases, particularly a case of murder of a police detective's son. The detective, Wally Tennelle, working out of RHB (the elite Robbery Homicide division, located downtown), resembles in temperament and work ethic Detective John Skaggs, investigator of Tennelle's son's death.

Skaggs passes up promotional opportunities because he prefers to work the southside, where murders are plentiful and answers are few. Tennelle is similarly inclined but finally accepted the prestigious position downtown for personal reasons.

We follow Skaggs to several different crime scenes and beyond, while he beats the bushes to get answers, and then witnesses who will testify. His relentlessness pays off in high clearance rates of 80% or better, especially compared to the more common "forty-percenters".

How both Skaggs and Tennelle differ from many other detectives and cops on the beat is in their perception of the population they serve. They see the victims, and they see the grief. They see each murder victim as "somebody's child". While many in the media and even in the higher echelons of the LAPD say there are no innocent victims in the southside killings, Skaggs believes they are all victims.

Victims of what? Of ineffective policing. A focus on minor infractions at the expense of major crimes. A focus on what is perceived as prevention as opposed to case clearance. Skaggs believes the police have failed the community. They deserve attention to these murders, relentless attention. When "black-on-black" murders are dismissed as not worth the trouble, the attitude only encourages the lack of self-esteem among young black men and the sense that their lives are worth little. The result is more murders.

Skaggs is a special case but he is not alone. There are others also fighting for real justice but their efforts are rarely rewarded. The detective squads are given few resources, high case loads, and little support from the top.

The book follows Skaggs in particular but also other detectives as they enter a crime scene and then follow through on the investigation. The Tennelle case is taken from beginning to the end, intertwined with stories of other cases and with hard statistics.

What I read is that we can do better. Several detectives already lead the way. It is time for the top brass to listen to them. Although in many ways this is a sobering look at a tragic situation, it also offers a glimmer of hope. Told with passion as well as caution, it is hard to put down.

This was another title where I expected something a bit different from what the author really delivered, but it was well-researched and thoroughly human regardless. In short, this tells the story of black residents of Compton/Watts/South Central LA and their intersections with the LAPD, through the lens of Bryant Tennelle, one of the many young black men that was shot to death between the '90s and '00s. Unknown to the perpetrators, who were committing a more or less random retaliation, Tennelle happened to be the son of an LAPD detective. His and his family's story was told very well, definitely the highlight of the book.

The author is a journalist and during the writing of the book, one of the intrepid ones that took on the herculean task of documenting every homicide in a respective city over many years. That is hugely difficult, and admirable. But it doesn't change the fact that Leovy never lived anywhere in South LA, and that is what I felt was missing from her perspective. She got much of the history of black Angelenos' migrating from Louisiana and Texas right, and I learned new things from that bit, but there needed to be more of an auto-ethnographic lens to tell this story with the nuance it deserves.

Finally, my other gripe is about the treatment of the prime institutional actor in the story: Leovy did "embed" with the LAPD district in South LA, and interviewed multiple of its beat cops, detectives, brass, and alumni. Yet while recounting the enormous amounts of time and money wasted by bureaucracy (phalanxes of cops sent out to patrol nothing in particular after high-profile crimes, phones that remained unconnected for two years) weren't linked to the problems that kept many homicides and other crimes from being solved. She had all of the elements to argue for how LAPD could do better and better support the detectives that earnestly wanted to solve every crime possible, yet these just remained side-by-side, unlinked. Recommended if you enjoy true crime, but it's not the best first-person perspective.

They were the nation’s number one crime victims. They were the people hurt most badly and most often, just 6 percent of the country’s population but nearly 40 percent of those murdered. People talked a lot about crime in America, but they tended to gloss over this aspect—that a plurality of those killed were not women, children, infants, elders, nor victims of workplace or school shootings. Rather, they were legions of America’s black men, many of them unemployed and criminally involved. They were murdered every day, in every city, their bodies stacking up by the thousands, year after year.

This book is a blessing. The amount of research into this book is beyond tantamount; the writer even started a column on day-by-day homicide in the Los Angeles Times website, but this is like..."The Wire" mixed with Nils Christie, the criminologist. It's almost like a detective noir tale that learns you stuff so that you just want more. It's that good.

A late-nineteenth-century Louisiana newspaper editorial said, “If negroes continue to slaughter each other, we will have to conclude that Providence has chosen to exterminate them in this way.” In 1915, a South Carolina official explained the pardon of a black man who had killed another black: “This is a case of one negro killing another—the old familiar song.” In 1930s Mississippi, the anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker examined the workings of criminal justice and concluded that “the attitude of the Whites and of the courts … is one of complaisance toward violence among the Negroes.” Studying Natchez, Mississippi, in the same period, a racially mixed team of social anthropologists observed that “the injury or death of a Negro is not considered by the whites to be a serious matter.” An Alabama sheriff of the era was more concise: “One less nigger,” he said. In 1968, a New York journalist testifying as part of the Kerner Commission’s investigation of riots across the country said that “for decades, little if any law enforcement has prevailed among Negroes in America.… If a black man kills a black man, the law is generally enforced at its minimum.” Carter Spikes, once a member of the black Businessman Gang in South Central Los Angeles, recalled that through the seventies police “didn’t care what black people did to each other. A nigger killing another nigger was no big deal.”

You also get mad. A lot. Just like The Black Panthers, Noam Chomsky and Rage Against The Machine can make you mad. It's really that good.

In the 1920s, a scholar concluded that black death rates from homicide nationwide were about seven times white rates. In the 1930s, Southern observers also noticed startling rates of black violence, and in the 1940s, a Philadelphia study found that black men died from homicide at twelve times the white rate. When the U.S. government began publishing data specific to blacks in 1950, it revealed that same gap nationwide. The black homicide death rate remained as much as ten times higher than the white rate in 1960 and 1970, and has been five to seven times higher for most of the past thirty years. Mysteriously, in modern-day Los Angeles, young black men are murdered two to four times more frequently than young Hispanic men, though blacks and Hispanics live in the same neighborhoods. This stands out because L.A., unlike well-known murder centers such as Detroit, has a relatively small black population, and it is in decline.

Although there are a lot of facts in this book, it's NOT preachy, not at all. It manages to show the daily grind of the detectives working a place where they have to get by, even though the state and the US government doesn't really care about poor areas, about minorities, about other than the rich, white populace of affluent neighbourhoods, and, indeed lineage.

And people fight against this. Hard.

Homicide activist LaWanda Hawkins, whose son was killed, summed up the objection: “ ‘Gang member’ is the new N-word,” she said. Phrases such as “at risk” were worse, rolling victims and perpetrators into one indistinguishable mass. Vicky Lindsay grew so tired of palliating terms that she had a sticker made for her rear windshield: “My son was murdered,” it declared.

This book shows the innards of living inside of a war zone that's not really touched by local, national or international media:

It was hard not to take it personally. Detectives felt they were fighting an invisible war. By then, the notion of a lot of black and Latino drug dealers and gangsters shooting each other down in the ’hood had become normal. It was often not news. “I remember a banner headline in the Los Angeles Times one weekend,” recalled a detective named Paul Mize. “A bomb in Beirut had killed six people. We had nine murders that weekend, and not a one of them made the paper. Not one.” It was aggravating, crazy-making. “You were dealing with problems and people that the majority of society doesn’t want to think about—doesn’t want to deal with their tragedy and grief,” a detective named John Garcia recalled in the early 2000s, talking of his years in the Newton Division and South Bureau. “They are not the ones who have to knock on that front door at two A.M. and say, ‘Your loved one has been killed.’ ”

There are a lot of thoughts on detective work, and how detectives work, in here. One little example:

Finally, the detectives who learned their craft in those years came to know the profound grief of homicide, the most specialized knowledge of all. They knew the way the bereaved struggled to function hour by hour. They knew about good days and bad days. Good detectives said to family members, “I can’t possibly know how you feel.” The best didn’t have to say it. Years of such work endowed practitioners with an almost spiritual understanding of their craft. A detective named Rick Gordon, for example, still working in South Bureau as of this writing, had come to view the moral dimensions of his cases so profoundly that he talked of them in almost religious terms, talked as if their outcomes were predestined. Something put witnesses there, Gordon would say—something bigger than themselves.

I've read a lot of true crime stuff, anthropological studies and criminological theory, but this is one of the best tomes on how racism is truly integrated into capitalist society of today, and how it affects generations. The book even goes into how gangs allow areas of land to culture, or annex, their own states:

Gangs issued informal “passes”—essentially granting waivers that exempted people from the rules that governed everyone else. A star athlete in a gang neighborhood, for example, might be issued a “pass” that exempted him from participation in gang life. Or passes might be extended to people allowed to conduct illegal businesses in rival territories. “Selling without a pass” was an occasional homicide motive.

Anything to make yours feel yours, at least.

The book also goes into how worthless chasing petty crimes are; it causes politicians and higher-up police to think that people think they're being protected, but if you're living in the middle of it, you're not gonna be fooled by cops catching hustlers while the big bosses run scot free:

Coughlin’s methods were guaranteed to look like straight harassment to those on the receiving end. After all, how important was a bag of marijuana in a place where so many people were dying? But Coughlin’s motivation wasn’t to juke stats, boost his department “rating,” or antagonize the neighborhood’s young men. He had seen the Monster, and his conscience demanded that he do something. So he used what discretion he had to compensate for the state’s lack of vigor in response to murder and assault. This practice of using “proxy crimes” to substitute for more difficult and expensive investigations was widespread in American law enforcement. The legal scholar William J. Stuntz singled it out as a particularly damaging trend of recent decades. In California, proxy justice had transformed enforcement of parole and probation into a kind of shadow legal system, sparing the state the trouble of expensive prosecutions. State prisons, already saddled with sick and elderly inmates, were all the more crammed as a result. But in the squad rooms of Southeast station, cops insisted that desperate measures were called for. They would hear the name of a shooter, only to find they couldn’t “put a case” on him because no witnesses would testify. So they would write a narcotics warrant—or catch him dirty. “We can put them in jail for drugs a lot easier than on an assault. No one is going to give us information on an assault,” explained Lou Leiker, who ran the detective table in Southeast in the early aughts. To them, proxy justice represented a principled stand against violence. It was like a personalized imposition of martial law.

[...]

LAPD brass used a vocabulary their underlings did not. They spoke of “victimology,” and of “biasing” and “stacking” resources, of responding “surgically.” Mostly it meant deploying lots of cops to stop and search people and to conduct parole and probation searches.

But there is hope, somewhat:

At this writing, homicides in Los Angeles County have fallen to levels that would have been unimaginable to Skaggs at the turn of the century, when he came to Southeast. By 2010, the year Starks and Davis were tried, homicide death rates for black men ages twenty to twenty-four had fallen to about 158 per 100,000, or less than half their peak in the Big Years, though of course this figure is still twenty or thirty times higher than the national mean. Killings have gone down further since. In the city of Los Angeles, the drop has been especially dramatic. There were 297 homicides in the city in 2011. By 2013, there were 251, a breathtaking decline. But the figures had a similar tilt as in years past: Three high-crime station areas—Southeast, Southwest, and Seventy-seventh—accounted for 109 homicides, or 43 percent of the city’s total. Nearly all the victims in the three divisions were men, more than three quarters of them were black (double the proportion of black people in the area’s population)—and 84 percent of the killings with known suspects were intrarace.

Read this. It's everywhere, and in every person, and all who read this will be affected. The language is strong, the pacing is very well-written, even though there's material on every page basically bustling to be let loose into the public consciousness.

Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy is a history and the study of a murder case in South Los Angeles. Leovy is a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times and the creator of The Homicide Report.

Ghettoside opens with the shooting death of Bryant Tennelle a young black man. Tennelle death seems random as he had no gang affiliations. He was simply at the wrong place at the wrong time. In the city, especially the area south of I-10, hundreds of people are murdered in a typical year. Many are called “ambulance shootings” or “scoop and carry.” The police are notified of the shooting after the ambulance picks up the injured or dead victim. In the other case, the police are notified by the hospital after the victim has been “scooped up” by family or friends and “carried” to the hospital. CSI type crime scene investigations are not needed to show that the victim died from a bullet wound. Witnesses are not rare, but those willing to talk to police are. Much of the violence is black on black and many of the police just look at it as “another dead n*****.”

Leovy makes a strong case indirectly about community. The police that work the notorious South Central and the rest of south LA don’t live there. They live in the suburbs and commute to work. They do not patrol the neighborhoods where they actually live. There is not the sense of protecting their own. There is also racial problems of white cops in a black neighborhood. LA has been experiencing Ferguson, MO for decades. Not all the blame can be given to the officers. They are grossly under funded, under equipped, and told what to do by those not in that neighborhood. Leovy mentions some crime prevention programs prescribed for south LA. One in particularly is to have a patrol car drive around with lights and sirens on. Not responding to a call, but pretending to respond and creating a presence to deter crime.

Leovy includes the history of Los Angeles and the history of the police department and its bureaucracy. She explains the origins of the southern neighborhoods. Ghettoside follows the careers of half a dozen officers who work to make a difference. Among those officers is former Marine, Wally Tennelle. Tennelle is black, married to a Costa Rican national he met on Embassy Duty, and he lives in the neighborhood where he works. Tennelle is one of those rare people who quietly makes a stand and displays an unusual amount of integrity, duty, and humility. His qualities are tested, much like Job, with the murder of his youngest son, Bryant.

I usually do not read crime books, but since Ghettoside is nonfiction I gave it a try. The writing is powerful, moving, and true. The reader will experience realities of living in a world where violence is the norm and the police are seem to be little more than scorekeepers keep track of murders, and solving very few of them. The core of the book is the murder of Bryant Tennelle and the effort to solve his murder. Ghettoside made me think, almost from the start, if Bryant Tennelle was not the son of a police officer would his case have received the attention it got? Wally Tennelle, by all accounts is a very good man, and deserved justice, but don’t the parents and families of the victims deserve justice? With well over half the murders never being solved and paperwork tricks supporting a percentage that high, it is clear that something different needs to be done.

Ghettoside is interesting, and shows the flaws in our system and the general acceptance of those flaws. Many people in South Central LA accept that things will not get better. The system refuses to invest time, money, and manpower into a losing battle and would rather put the effort into keeping nice areas nice. I have one problem with Ghettoside as a work of nonfiction. It falls into the category of narrative nonfiction. It reads like a novel, which is fine, but there is no detailed bibliography or cites of any conversation, action, or police policy. I am pretty sure Leovy did not witness all the events in the book first hand. I have no doubt that she completed some painstaking research in the writing of Ghettoside. Coming from an academic background of political science and history, I was taught to document everything. It is your proof of work and fact. There is no reasonably feasible way to check the facts presented by Leovy. I have no reason to doubt her, but as Ronald Reagan once said, “Trust, but verify.”

This is a story written by a journalist based in Los Angeles. The author documents murder rates, convictions and clearance rates in South Los Angeles, especially around the area of Watts. I really enjoyed reading this book and really admire the officers who worked in this area during the time the author was writing about. A lot of information in the book but very well written. Highly recommend this book.

This was an important story to tell and gave a perspective on the so-called "black on black crime epidemic" I had not considered before - the lack of solving crimes in high density black communities leads to more crime as those left defenseless defend themselves. I read the Advanced Readers copy and it definitely needed some more editing as it tended to be redundant at times and could have used a less circular narrative style. Overall, Ghettoside enhanced my knowledge about policing in poor, black communities. A recommended read.

Jill Leovy, crime reporter for the LA Times, examines why the homicide rates for blacks in America are so much higher than any other ethnic group.

Very well researched. Voice was a bit passive in describing some horrific events. Speaking of whaich, the statistics were frightening about black America in the ghetto. A real shame/crime as to what has happened.

This is a compelling book that stays very insightful about a topic that gets so ideologued without talking about real problems. I felt like the discussion of policing here was measured (I think the 'more policing' sounds uneasy based on the fact many PDs couldn't provide the type of work that Leovy is thinking about - she is coming at it assuming black lives matter) and the central crime the book uses is tragic and well-chosen. Couldn't put it down.

My brother recommended Ghettoside to continue my true crime kick. The author did a lot of research & I appreciate that. Unfortunately, I found myself wandering off at times due to the narration. The voice was too soft & relaxing. I don't normally react that way to nonfiction. I probably should have read the hard copy in this instance. My gut is to state Incarnation Nations by Baz Dreisinger was better but that was more of a global description where Ghettoside is US domestic focusing on Los Angeles, CA. Even that assessment is unfair because my experience came down to the narration. I still recommend it for the real world experience of what is happening in our country & to support our law enforcement officials.

Putting names to the murdered young black men in LA she tells the story of one, a cop's son, and gives us more vignettes of others around the same time as his. She also takes us into the detectives' lives who are handed these murders and how they solve them.

I liked this book. While there was a lot of statistics and history of what lead up to the high murder rates of young black men, she puts names to them. They are not statistics only. She shows what the detectives do and how invested they are to find their killers. There were times I cried as she talks about the Tennelle family and tells of funerals and the fears many of the young men have of not living to be 21.

Though a few years old, it is still timely. Well worth the read.

This work of narrative journalism explores the complex issues contributing to the homicide rate in Los Angeles, focusing on the black-on-black homicide rate in South Central LA. The book is informed and inspired by Leovy’s experiences reporting on homicide for The Los Angeles Times, during which time she was an embedded reporter in the Seventy-seventh Division of the Los Angeles Police Department for two extended periods of time. The investigation into the murder of eighteen-year-old Bryant Tennelle, the son of a cop who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, provides the backbone for the narrative, which includes the perspectives of homicide detectives, victims, victims’ families, and the accused/convicted, and reveals the humanity behind the high homicide rate and the considerable effort required to investigate and prosecute homicide cases in the area known as Ghettoside. Insightful, gripping, and searing in its implications, this book combines compelling personal stories with thoughtful sociological analysis of homicide in the inner city. Issues explored will be familiar to fans of the HBO series The Wire, and this book will be of interest to readers of The New Jim Crow and true crime.

Rachel H. / Marathon County Public Library
Find this book in our library catalog.

This book is important because it attempts to tackle the much too marginalized topic of black-on-black murder. Levoy looks at possible causes, and what works and doesn't in regards to how to end the violence. Levoy doesn't just give us numbers. She gives us human faces forever affected by the violence.

The book focuses on two murders in L.A. Using these two threads, Levoy fleshes out the problem, and gives names to the nameless and stories to the forgotten. At one point, Levoy uses up several pages to name victims shot and killed within a very small time frame. These were regular days. Most of these people were just doing regular things. But just like that, they are gone forever. I think the fact that Levoy manages to breathe humanity and life into many of these victims that have all been but thrown into the trash bin of history, makes this a must read. It is all quite sad.

This book as a whole is a solid journalistic piece. There are some narrative bits to it to spice up the story, but for the most part it's just good old fashion journalism. Along the way, Levoy introduces the reader to some of the men and women on the front lines that attempt to solve many of these crimes, and how in turn their lives are forever changed. In the course of this, one realizes that there are many courageous, caring, dedicated individuals doing police work. Some of these stories may get lost with the recent police brutality cases.

What I did take from this book is that many of the major players involved in these tragedies, from the police, to the community at large, play a role in keeping this monster alive. Some officials believe there aren't any true victims (just gang-bangers killing gang-bangers), and the community at large is reluctant to turn in the perpetrators of these crimes for fear of retribution. The culmination of all of that, plus public apathy in general, and distrust of the police by members of the communities hardest hit, has fostered the brutal environment we see in many of the poor, desolute areas of inner cities today.

Read this book. It's an important book to start understanding a very relevant, but sadly, under-reported problem in America.

In which Los Angeles Times reporter Jill Leovy embeds herself with the Homicide Squad in South Central LA and this book is the culmination of her time spent there. Although focused on one particular homicide - the seemingly random shooting of Bryant Tennelle, who at worst was wearing the "wrong hat" - the book is really about the epidemic of homicide in areas like Watts and how and why this homicide is massively and disproportionately young black male on young black male.

Leovy does a very good job at humanising the LA Police, and exploring some of the reasons why so many of these cases go unresolved or unprosecuted, when in the words of one of the witnesses to the Tennelle killing, everyone knows! Everyone knows! Part of this must be a subconscious belief that young black lives are less important, but there are other reasons too. Leovy explains very clearly why its so difficult to get witnesses to come forward or testify, why a grieving parent can't really ask her friends or neighbours to testify in case they put their own children''s lives at risk, why so many gang members would like to leave "the life" but can't find a way to do it and how trapped into repeating the same cycle so many young people are.

The Tennelle case gets more focus because his father is a serving Homicide Detective. And in the end, its not difficult to solve; the difficult part is getting a conviction, and its only due to the courage of one witness, a young prostitute, that the case gets to court at all. If there is any note of hope at all in this book, it is how she seems to be on a path to a more stable lifestyle when the book closes.

Leovy is very good on the internal migration of African American people from the South that led to the creation of the LA communities and doggedly gives witness to many lost lives that are not part of the main narrative of the book. You can see why families were prepared to trust her. I was less impressed by the cod psychology of the motivations of homicide, which might have been better left to a sociologist than a crime reporter

Its an important and worthwhile, if depressing, piece of work

Not only is the a true crime page turner, it also makes a powerful argument for how Black on Black homicide developed and how it can be cured. Essentially it comes down to a long history of law enforcement either ignoring Black homicides or spending very little effort trying to solve them and bring the perpetrators to justice. So, although Black communities have long been heavily and aggressively policed, the emphasis has been on the more petty crimes to the neglect of doing much about homicides. Following the work of some of the dedicated, yest understaffed and underfunded, detectives in South LA as they make a difference in those communities. An inspiring, yet also exasperating, read, well worth the time spent. We could do better for these communities if there was more of a will to do so.

The Serial generation gets a book about not just one murder but a generation of murders and a group of detectives determined to solve them.

insightful, stirs up questions, terrifying at the same time.