Ian Thomson

Life in the LA ghetto was nasty, brutish and short — until one brave detective took on the gangs

Jill Leovy, author of Ghettoside, embedded herself for two years with the only effective police section on LA’s killing streets

Los Angeles ghetto life — thrashed, twisted and black — is not a world that most Americans care to visit. Black Angelinos can be — and for a period in the 1980s and early 1990s, were — murdered for a trifle. The slightest act of ‘disrespect’ may call for a tit-for-tat killing, where an entire family is rubbed out to avenge a perceived affront.

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