If it's sadness you're after, we have it right here by the bucketful One 16 year old kid named Devin Davis on May 11 2007 walked round the corner from St Andrews Place onto 80th Street, Los Angeles, and closed his eyes and pointed a gun towards two other black kids. One of the shots hit one of them in the head, an 18 year old named Bryant Tennelle, who was the son of an LA detective, and he died. 
 (Bryant Tennelle) 
 Some time later Devin was questioned and confessed pretty quickly. It turned out that he hadn't realised he'd killed anyone until much later. He thought what he was doing was throwing a few rounds at some rival gangsters, maybe hit one in the arm if the guy was unlucky. He said 
 I ain't never think I'd hurt somebody. I ain't never did want to hurt nobody in this world. I always just wanted to be a person everyone was just cool with. Everybody just liking me! I never did want to ever ever ever ever ever my whole life, never wanted to hurt nobody! 
 Being a person others would be cool with meant not being a punk. Not being a punk meant that if somebody for instance suggested making a few rival Crips bangers run like rabbits, Devon would say yes. 
 I got out of the car, closed my eyes, and I just started doing it, I don't know why! I was scared! I didn't want nobody thinking of me as no bitch or nothing'...I just wanted to have friends! That's all I wanted. I didn't think you had to do all that. 
 From pages 34 and 40: 
 In 1993, black men in their early twenties in Los Angeles County died by homicide at a rate of 368 per 100,000 population, similar to the per capita rate of death for US soldiers deployed to Iraq in the aftermath of the US invasion.... The smallest ghettoside spat seemed to escalate to violence as if, absent law, people were left with no other means of bringing a dispute to a close. Debts and competition over goods and women - especially women - drove many killings. But insults, snitching, drunken antics, and the classic - unwanted party guests - were also common homicide motives. 
 This book comes at you like Jill Leovy has discovered this major ghastly secret at the heart of American life : black on black homicide. Jill doesn't herself believe this is hold the front page news, but her book often reads as if it does. In fact, she knows she hasn't discovered this information (just check out the amazing bibliography at the back) but maybe she thinks she has RE-discovered it. And that has to be a good thing. In the two years which followed the murder of Bryant Tennelle, 546 black men and boys were killed in South Los Angeles. 
 I remember the flurry of great black American movies at the beginning of the 1990s, which all dealt with this very issue, front and centre : Boyz n the Hood, Menace II Society, New Jack City, Jungle Fever. Those movies still ring in my head today, so powerful were they. At the very same time came David Simon's brilliant book Homicide, which, as it's all about Baltimore, was also all about black on black homicide. After which came the all time great tv show Homicide: Life on the Street, 1993 to 1999. 
 There was this one episode which really got to me (well, there were a lot that did). A black woman is in the police station waiting room and another black woman comes in. They get to talking, in fact the first one needs someone to talk to. That morning she found out her son had been killed. The second one is immediately sympathetic, she knows what being a black mother in Baltimore means. But then, little details of the first woman's son emerge, and where and how he was killed, and the atmosphere begins to freeze. The second woman is down at the station because her son has just been arrested for this very murder. 
 And after Homicide came The Wire, so it's not like this is unexamined territory. We kind of know this stuff already. But that's the problem right there. It's become accepted as background radiation, something that happens there and not here, too massive and too disturbing to think about. Jill Leovy's fast, bold and blunt prose takes the whole subject head-on. Again. 
 In many ways this is David Simon's book Part Two. JL was "embedded" with a homicide unit, followed some cases in detail, got to know some of the detectives very well, and here are her findings. You also get the procedural stuff you might get in a Richard Price novel (one of the three biggies, Freedomland, Clockers and Lush Life). And mixed in with that you get the alt.political-history perspective of Mike Davis' City of Quartz (subtitle : Excavating the Future in Los Angeles). All crammed down into 330 exhausting pages. 
 On p 242 she observes that homicide rates amongst equally poor new immigrants from Central America are way, way lower than those for LA blacks. Poverty in itself does not make men shoot each other. But : 
 In the year 2000, decades after the courts struck down restrictive covenants, black people in LA were no more likely to have white neighbours than they had been in 1970. ... Indices of racial segregation are strong homicide predictors. Homicide thrives on intimacy, communal interactions, barter, and a shared sense of private rules. The intimacy part was also why homicide was so stubbornly intraracial. You had to be involved with people to want to kill them. 
 By contrast, America's lonely, atomized upper-middle-class white suburbs were not homicidal. Their highly mobile occupants were not much involved with each other. 
 (In passing : one really surprising thing about Ghettoside was the absence of drugs as a big motivator in violent crime. ) 
 In the last few pages JL reports that homicide rates are now declining (as of 2010/11) but are, of course, still sky-high by comparison with the rest of the population of the USA. 
 Although Jill Leovy's cast of thousands, most of whom come with a pungent three-line pen portrait, and hectic circumstance (who did what to who when and who said it went down way different than that) and how the police departments got reorganised and how thir office stationary budgets were affected and how the careers of her favourite murder cops went is quite exhausting and the reader will feel like they have been through the wringer more than once, I give it up for Ghettoside. It's great stuff.