“This is a book about a very simple idea: where the criminal justice system fails to respond vigorously to violent injury and death, homicide becomes endemic.”

With these words, Jill Leovy launches into her thought-provoking, must-read book, “Ghettoside.”

“Ghettoside” describes the persistence and prevalence of black homicide, using the 2007 murder of Bryant Tennelle as a jumping-off point. Ms. Leovy is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times as well as a blogger for “The Homicide Report.” In spare but well-chosen words, she paints Los Angeles’ Watts neighborhood in all its beauty and violence.

Ms. Leovy builds her observations around the story of Bryant Tennelle, the son of black Los Angeles homicide detective Wallace Tennelle and his Costa Rican wife, Yadira. The elder Tennelle is a rare detective, so committed to his craft that he insisted his family live in the high-crime 77th Division of Southeast L.A.

Two of the three Tennelle children went to college and moved on to professional careers. But one, Bryant, was good with his hands and struggled with his classes in school. After high school he went into hourly jobs. He had energy and discipline and enjoyed working. But not having a white-collar profession meant he began mingling more with the neighborhood young people. Bryant Tennelle was murdered when youths from one group tried to wreak revenge on another group that loosely included Bryant’s friends.

The author adeptly shows how murder affects families, causing an agony that intensifies with time and echoes through the generations. Ms. Leovy’s opening scene describes how homicide detective John Skaggs brings the shoes of a murder victim to the victim’s mother, Barbara Pritchett:

“With great care, Pritchett perched the shoebox on the arm of a vinyl armchair by the door and slowly lifted one shoe. It was worn, black, dusted with red Watts dirt. It was not quite big enough to be a man’s shoe, not small enough to be a child’s. She leaned against the wall, pressed the open top of the shoe against her mouth and nose, and inhaled its scent with a long, deep breath. Then she closed her eyes and wept.

“... Skaggs watched her slide down the wall in slow motion, her face still pressed into the shoe. She landed with a thump on the green carpet. One of her orange slippers came off. On the TV across the room, the Fox 11 morning anchors pattered brightly over the sound of her sobs.”

Scenes such as this show Ms. Leovy’s skills at observation and reporting. They also point to the underlying issues she is trying to address.

Working homicide is not a glamorous job in the Los Angeles police department. Turnover is high and resources scarce. Many detectives become inured to the violence and go through the motions of investigation. But Skaggs is one who does not. White, blue-eyed, the son of a homicide detective and raised primarily by his divorced mother, Skaggs was extremely competitive from a young age. “To John Skaggs, the nation’s collective shrug toward homicide was incomprehensible,” Ms. Leovy writes.

Mr. Skaggs is ruthless, canny, tireless, possessed of an incredible memory and endlessly organized. Ms. Leovy sees the homicide detective’s methods as the solution to the problem of black homicide. To be fair, his success comes at a personal cost. Working homicide means keeping the hours of one’s witnesses, who are often prostitutes, drug addicts or other people on the margins of life. Bringing witnesses to court often means getting involved with their lives, which are filled with poor choices and bad behavior.

In Mr. Skaggs’ case, these sacrifices pay off. The prostitute he needs to testify against Bryant Tennelle’s killers goes back to school, takes up with a decent man and ... testifies well in court. But to get to that point, Mr. Skaggs had to take on the woman as almost an additional child, a “nightmare child.”

Mr. Skaggs pursues every homicide investigation with the relentlessness most people reserve for special cases. If he has compassion for murderers, he does not let it stop him from seeking their arrest and conviction. “If all these cases were investigated like Tennelle … there’d be no unsolved cases,” one defense attorney remarks.

Ms. Leovy describes gangs as being much less formidable than police, prosecutors and politicians say. In her telling, gangs are groups of ordinary people, their nicknames more like playground taunts and their brags of getting rich on the black market belied by the wads of dollar bills in their shoes when their bodies come to the morgue.

The author makes clear that black people, in spite of negative feelings toward police, infinitely prefer formal justice to that of the street. In some unintentionally funny cases, drug dealers will call 911 and demand police action: “My dope got ripped off! I want you to book him for robbery!”

“Ghettoside” is a cogent, compelling account of black homicide in this country and well worth reading.

Laura Malt Schneiderman: lschneiderman@post-gazette.com

First Published: April 5, 2015, 4:00 a.m.