If that was the case, then it should’ve held true in Latino communities as well. So, at first, that seemed to undercut my argument that low clearance rates in homicide investigations are responsible for high black murder rates. But they would also say, “We need more protection than we’re getting.” But many black people in ghettos say they want more policing. JL: If you talk to people in the black urban underclass, they’ll tell you, “Why don’t they go find the killers? They never catch the guys who did it.” The national conversation is about over policing. You’re saying that black homicide flourishes because killers operate with impunity-that it’s easy to kill a black man in America and get away with it. … When I suggested to one scholar that he should do more on black-on-black violence, he said, “Why not put a sign on my back saying, ‘Kick me’?”ĭS:People harp on the problem of over policing. There are a few scholars working on it, and they don’t have much cushioning around them.

There are armies of doctorate students working on it, and everyone has a paper and a theme. On the education beat, you throw a paperclip and hit a think tank. The Alexander approach is powerful not because we’re empathizing with characters, but because we’re convinced that her arguments about the causes of injustice are undeniable. Her approach is numbers-based all context, little story. The second school is associated, most recently, with the law professor Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow. Simon reclines with his subjects on dirty mattresses as they shoot up again and again. Each character is rendered at length, their dramas, delusions, and failures patiently laid out. The first is represented by David Simon, creator of HBO’s “The Wire,” who, in his pre-television days, covered the crime beat for the Baltimore Sun and wrote books about homicide detectives and drug dealers that often involved him hanging out in a police precinct or a crack-infested neighborhood for a year or so. Ghetto reportage-gritty depictions of crime and struggle in the city-has come to be dominated by two schools of journalism.

Ghettoside by Jill Leovy