Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America

by Jill Leovy

Take a bunch of teenage boys from the whitest, safest suburb in America and plunk them down in a place where their friends are murdered and they are constantly attacked and threatened. Signal that no one cares, and fail to solve murders. Limit their options for escape. Then see what happens.

The spectacle of Rick Gordon, one of the city’s most effective investigators, compelled to play the role of blue scarecrow at the very moment when his craft mattered most was a microcosm of how police had long functioned in the United States: preoccupied with control and prevention, obsessed with nuisance crime, and lax when it came to answering for black lives.