A veteran crime reporter explains how police under- and overpolice black Americans

Final Call

Nine years ago, Barbara Pritchett-Hughes lost her 16-year-old son, Dovon Harris, to gun violence in the streets of Los Angeles. And a little more than a month ago, she lost her surviving son, 30-year-old DeAndre Hughes, to the same kind of horrific gun violence.

The loss of her first son opens Ghettoside, the incredible 2015 book by journalist Jill Leovy, who won the PEN Center USA’s award for research nonfiction this week. It is a book that leans heavily on the neglect black communities face when it comes to these murders — the kind of neglect that creates the circumstances in which a mother has to bury two of her sons.

The loss of multiple family members, Leovy told me over the phone on Wednesday, isn’t a rare occurrence in violence-torn minority communities.

“It makes you view the numbers in a different way. The concentration is quite startling,” Leovy said. “I’ve talked to lots of people who have lost two sons, some people who have lost three sons. I did a story way back in the mid-aughts about a random block in Compton, where for other reasons I went up and down the streets to interview people, and it turned out every house had lost somebody.”

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But it’s impossible to overstate the impact these kinds of losses have on mothers like Pritchett-Hughes. “If your child is murdered, you are in some sense maimed,” Leovy said. “You go on in life, but you are a different shape than you used to be.”

This is the tragedy at the heart of Leovy’s book: While America’s violent crime rate has plummeted by roughly half since the 1990s, shootings and homicides in many black communities remain astonishingly common. Although black people make up roughly 13 percent of the US population, they made up more than half of homicide victims in 2014 across the country, according to FBI statistics.

While this epidemic may seem like it should be the top priority of the criminal justice system, Leovy demonstrates in Ghettoside that it is not. She points to, for example, homicide clearance rates, which measure how many murders are solved by police.

In New York City, for instance, 86 percent of 2013 homicides involving a white victim were solved, compared to 45 percent of those involving a black victim, according to an analysis by the New York Daily News. And David Kennedy, a criminologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told Mother Jones that in minority communities, clearance rates for murders and nonfatal shootings can get “pathetically low. They can easily fall down to single digits.”

“Explicitly confronting the reality of how murder happens in America,” Leovy writes in Ghettoside, “is the first step toward deciding that it is not acceptable, and that for too long black men have lived inadequately protected by the laws of their own country.”

For Leovy, this is the grand flaw in the criminal justice system today: While the system is well-known, particularly in black communities, for its excessive harshness against black people for drug crimes and other low-level offenses, the system is often absent when people, particularly black Americans, most require it. [MORE]