SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
In the State of the Union address this week, President Obama noted that crime in America is down.
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PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Surely we can agree that it's a good thing that for the first time in 40 years, the crime rate and the incarceration rate have come down together.
SIMON: But Jill Leovy, an award-winning reporter for the Los Angeles Times, cites another statistic in a new book - about 40 percent of those Americans who are murdered each year are African-American males. And in the city of Los Angeles, where she covers crime, police have arrested a suspect in those killings less than 40 percent of the time over the last 30 years, mounting to what she calls impunity for the murder of black men. And her new book, "Ghettoside: A True Story Of Murder In America," uses the story of a single murder to trace the loss of life, the blight of lives and the failures of police and courts. Jill Leovy joins us from NPR West in Culver City, California. Thanks so much for being with us.
JILL LEOVY: Thank you.
SIMON: I want to begin by asking you about this young man, Bryant Tennelle, one night, 2007. He's 18, carrying a root beer, pushing his bicycle. What happened?
LEOVY: A car pulls up around the corner. A young black man jumps out of the car, raises his gun and shoots. Bryant is struck in the head and falls on the lawn.
SIMON: And his father is an LA police detective.
LEOVY: His father is a homicide detective in RHD, which is the elite homicide unit in the LAPD.
SIMON: Did this ultimately change the investigation or in fact did it become a bigger investigation because of this?
LEOVY: You know, the LAPD I think sensibly treated this case as any case, but there were some twists and turns when it went unsolved for a couple months. Frustrations mounted in the department. It was an extremely emotional case, as you might imagine, for all of Tennelle's colleagues. Eventually, the case is transferred from one detective to another. The lieutenant in charge asks around and says, who really do we have? Who really knows the street? Who really solves cases? And they come up with the name of John Skaggs, who had been quietly toiling in backwater in the Watts station house solving these kinds of crimes. He has expended great effort doing thankless work on cases that no one in the city noticed at all.
SIMON: What are some of the problems police have in getting witnesses to talk?
LEOVY: Well, everybody's terrified. I've had people clutch my clothes and beg me to not even write that there was anybody at the scene. I'm not even describing them. They just don't want anyone to know that there was somebody at the scene.
SIMON: I mean, let's be blunt about this. These are - you're talking about Americans who are as reluctant to talk about a crime that occurred in front of them as - an uneasy analogy here - somebody in Syria might be reluctant to talk about what Bashar al-Assad did because they're afraid they'll get harmed. But in this case, it's by a gang.
LEOVY: Well, listen. In the big years in LA, in the early '90s, young black men in their early 20s - who, by the way, are a disproportionate group among homicide witnesses because this is the milieu they're in - had a rate of death from homicide that was higher than those of American troops in Iraq in about 2005. So people talk about a war zone. It was higher than a combat death rate. They are terrified. They have concrete reason to be terrified. And then the justice system comes along and asks them to put themselves in possibly even more danger. What would you do?
SIMON: I was moved - and I don't know if that's a funny word or might be exactly the word I mean - to read about older gang members who say, I want to get out of this. This is no way to live.
LEOVY: It's very, very hard to pull yourself out. I had - when I did the homicide report, which is the blog I did of homicides, I had at least three young men that year who were killed for refusing to join their local gang. They took a moral stand, and they said, I won't join. I don't want to be a criminal. And they got killed for it.
SIMON: So are police departments short of resources to put into trying to solve these crimes or do they choose not to invest a lot of resources?
LEOVY: You know, I see the problem as lying outside police departments far more than inside police departments. It's easy to blame the police, but we have the police we deserve. We have the police we've asked to have. There is tremendous emphasis on prevention: We want to know about crime before it's going to happen; we want to target it and saturate areas with police officers. All this kind of fuzzy thinking that, on the street, doesn't feel like justice to the people who live in these neighborhoods. It translates to a system that falls short on catching killers, prosecuting them for the most serious crimes.
SIMON: I want to bring this back to Bryant Tennelle, and I also don't want to give away the end of the book. But Bryant Tennelle was gunned down by people who, as it turned out, weren't looking for him at all.
LEOVY: You know, the sheriff's homicide detectives - actually I have a term for this; it's so common - they call it profiling murder. And so what's happening is gang members will get in a car. They will go to the rival neighborhood to send a message, and they will just look for the easiest, most likely victim they can find - and probably going to be a young black man. And if he fits the part, that's good enough - and an astonishing number of victims. I did a count in 2008 of 300-some LA homicides of the gang-related homicides, and I think something like 40 percent of the victims were this sort of victim - noncombatant, not directly party to the quarrel that instigated the homicide, but ended up dead nonetheless.
SIMON: Jill Leovy of the Los Angeles Times. Her new book is "Ghettoside: A True Story Of Murder In America." Thanks so much for being with us.
LEOVY: Thank you.