The murder of black men and boys is topic of latest FYI Book Club selection

Kansas City is all too familiar with “the plague” — the preponderance of murders of black men and boys by other black men and boys — that Jill Leovy details in her book “Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America.”

The homicide rate in Kansas City this year is almost on pace with 2015, when the final count spiked to a seven-year high of 110. In nearly two-thirds of those cases, last year’s and this year’s, the victims were male and black, police records show. And 62 percent of the suspects were black males.

Yet, black males make up just 13 percent of the city’s overall population.

“It’s sort of what we find around the country,” says Leovy, a longtime reporter and editor for The Los Angeles Times. “You’re part of the fabric of this problem.”

“Ghettoside” presents Los Angeles as a microcosm, portraying the personal suffering and societal cost of a numbing roll of black-on-black murders in the city’s South Central neighborhoods. The problem is compounded by the multitude of homicides that go unsolved — Leovy and a Times colleague calculated a staggering average of more than 40 per square mile from the late 1980s to early 2000s — suggesting to prospective killers and the wider community that blacks are expendable.

“The cases didn’t get solved,” Leovy writes in the book, “and year after year, assaults piled upon one another, black men got shot up and killed, no one answered for it, and no one really cared much.”

She makes it very personal, weaving in the backstories of both victims and their families and the cops called in to investigate. Murder in these neighborhoods is unrelenting. One mother in “Ghettoside” has lost a husband, a son and an uncle. Another woman, a witness in two homicide cases, is frightened by the prospect of retaliation. She finds support from a friend, who herself is working through the pain of a murdered child.

Leovy offers an antidote to the torment: careful, conscientious investigative work by police, embodied by a veteran Los Angeles homicide detective named John Skaggs. A tall, blond surfer type, the son of a Long Beach homicide detective and nephew of an L.A. Police Department deputy chief, he’s not necessarily smarter than everybody else. Skaggs simply works very, very hard, knocking on doors, returning time and again to reluctant witnesses, intent on tying up every conceivable loose end. Lost lives matters to him.

He is handed the case at the center of “Ghettoside,” the fatal shooting in May 2007 of 18-year-old Bryant Tennelle. Tennelle was by all accounts a sweet kid with a promising future, the son of a respected LAPD detective who had refused to move his family from troubled South Los Angeles because he felt residents deserved cops committed to living there. The motive for the murder is uncertain to this day.

Skaggs leads a no-stone-unturned investigation that results in the arrest of two young men, ages 25 and 16 and both black. Both eventually were convicted of first-degree murder and now are serving sentences of life in prison without parole.

The case is instructive, or should be, Leovy says. It’s “impossible to imagine that the thousands of young men who died … during Skaggs’ career would have done so had their killers anticipated a ‘John Skaggs Special’ in every case,” she writes.

That dogged, enforce-the-law approach rubs somewhat against today’s concerns about police overzealousness, born of recent events in Ferguson, Mo.; Staten Island, N.Y.; and Baltimore. But Leovy, who reported and wrote “Ghettoside” before those racially charged episodes, points to an American legal system that has failed for too long to properly respond to violence against blacks — first in the South and then in segregated cities nationwide — and thus invited more violence.

“Skaggs is persistent and focused and, as I say at the end, unequivocal. He sees the worth of this mission of solving homicide cases, and he doesn’t really question it,” Leovy says in an interview.

“That alone is something we need to think about in designing policy and systems throughout homicide. This area of law enforcement, catching people who kill other people, need not have a lot of equivocation about it. Maybe punishment has more questions. But simply catching people need not involve a lot of equivocation.”

By 2010, when Bryant Tennelle’s killers went to trial, the homicide rate for black males age 20 to 24 had fallen dramatically in Los Angeles County, though it still was 20 to 30 times the national rate and blacks still were disproportionately victimized. Now, Leovy says, the rate is rising again — not just in L.A. but also in a number of other cities across the nation. “That’s the way it tends to happen. The whole country moves together,” she says.

Kansas City is no exception. Its overall homicide count declined to a more than four-decade low in 2014, when the total was 81, and turned back upward in 2015. Black males bore the brunt of the increase, accounting for 70 of last year’s 110 victims. Their murder rate — 111 per 100,000 people, using the latest U.S. census estimates — was 11 times higher than the rate for everybody else in the city (just under 10 per 100,000).

As of the middle of this week, 14 of the city’s 21 homicide victims in 2016 were black males.

Kansas City police haven’t broken down the number of known black-on-black homicides. But the department’s chief spokesman, Capt. Tye Grant, says, “It’s safe to say most of them fall into that category. A high percentage of them.”

In “Ghettoside” — its title drawn from a gang member’s nickname for his neighborhood in Watts — the statistics are telling but secondary. There is a very human toll that Leovy chronicles from accompanying police to crime scenes, talking to people on the street and sitting in on court proceedings. She interviewed anguished family members. She attended funerals. For awhile, she attempted to cover every murder in Los Angeles County in a Times blog, The Homicide Report. She wanted to communicate the horror, she says.

She continued researching the book until 2012. “When you’re involved in a project like this, it has you. You don’t have it,” Leovy says. “It doesn’t let go of you.”

Now 49, her role at the newspaper has changed. She’s acting editor for obituaries. Married to a fellow Times editor and the mother of a young son, she acknowledges the difficulty of witnessing so much trauma, sadness and outright despair but plays down any toll it might have taken on her. “Nothing happened to me,” Leovy says.

Still, “I’m very, very sad about certain things that I saw,” she says. “There are a lot of things that aren’t in ‘Ghettoside’ that are so much worse than what I put in and remain in my mind. I had a father tell me that it was his fault his son had died because he was a poor man. He was ‘down low’ or something, is how he put it, and hadn’t been able to move out of the neighborhood. If he had been more of a man, he told me, a better man, he thought maybe his son wouldn’t have been shot. Stuff like that.

“It can be very depressing.”

This story was originally published April 1, 2016 at 11:49 AM.