We love murder. 
 Let me clarify that statement. We love murder as entertainment when the victim is some poor innocent blonde woman that our hero detectives avenge with a little help from the geeks in the crime lab, and the whole thing is wrapped up in an hour. Or about 45 minutes with commercials if it's on network television. 
 This book is non-fiction so it certainly doesn't have the appeal of a tidy TV solution, and it digs into the whole sociology of a community where murder is common and the police as an institution seems more interested in easy drug busts and flashy anti-gang units even as it cuts the overtime of it's already understaffed homicide units. 
 So that takes a lot of the fun out of murder. 
 One of those homicides was Bryant Tennelle, a young man who got shot for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In a cruel twist, Bryant was the son of a LAPD detective who was one of the rare cops to live where he policed. Part of the book follows the efforts of another relentless detective named John Skaggs to solve the case. 
 Reporter Jill Leovy spent years covering and researching homicides in LA, and she doesn't just tell us the story of that one murder. The elephant in the room regarding murder in America is that the majority of it is made up of black men killing black men. She tackles the issues head on, and offers reasons and possible solutions to it. 
 What history shows is that in areas where a poor community feels repressed and vulnerable, when major crimes go unpunished while the citizens feel harassed by the force failing to protect them, it breeds murder. In LA the police resources were dedicated mainly to crime prevention, not crime investigation and homicide clearance rates had fallen to abysmal levels. Leovy's findings show that this has created the worst kind of Catch-22 situation where the emphasis on the wrong kind of policing has the black citizens feeling harassed even as they think the cops don't care about solving murders so they don't cooperate. The cops get frustrated by the lack of cooperation and put even less effort into solving black murders. Rinse and repeat. 
 The good news is that Leovy actually thinks the situation could be greatly improved if the cops put more resources into catching killers. She uses Skaggs' investigation of Tennelle's death to show how a seemingly random shooting can be solved. Not with any kind of Sherlock Holmes deduction or CSI labs, but by simply showing up, listening, and giving a damn about all the people involved like the victim's family and witnesses. Per her final chapter the situation has improved in south LA which she credits to better police policies and social programs. 
 Comparisons to David Simon's Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets are inevitable and fair because Leovy does cover a lot of the same ground as far as following around detectives and showing what actual police work is like. It also hits a lot of the same themes that Simon's The Wire did about institutions presenting a good face rather than doing meaningful work. This plays on more of the sociological angles than Simon's works, but it lacks his style and humor so I still think Homicide is a better read. Leovy also puts John Skaggs on a pedestal which gets to be a little tiresome after a while. However, it's still an important book that takes a hard look at a very real problem.