The LA Murder Docket

I knew that Jill Leovy of the LA Times back in 2007 had presented a "riveting" (my word) story about murders in LA County-who and by whom. I.e., not just the full-bore celebrity crime, but the longer and sadder chronicle of ordinary human misfortune. I did not realize she had turned it into a franchise, but here it is: the blog Homicide Report at the Times website. I suppose it is a perverse taste but believe me, some people can't get enough of this stuff (i.e., reading about it),

The latest on the list is, surprisingly, more than two weeks ago, February 7, although there were three that day, including Ronald Barron, 40, whose killing amounts to a particularly pointless waste of life: per the blog, he was a former Crip gang member, working in gang outreach. Evidently he confronted a graffiti tagger in the 5000 block of West Pico Boulevard; the tagger killed him with one bullet to the chest. No, make that two cases of pointless waste.

Numbers: as you might guess the victims are overwhelmingly male, 2,242 to 379 (with seven listed as "unspecified"--several of them fetuses). I assume the assailants are even more overwhelmingly male, though course that would be harder to track because in many cases, the record-keepers have no idea. Among "causes," the vast majority are "unspecified;" next is "walk-up" with 248; then "fight" with 187; "domestic violence" with 165 and "drive-by" with 143.

Looks to me like the same ethnic categorization applies now as then: most killings by raw number among Latinos; most in proportion to population among blacks. An interesting FAQ note points out that LA is not even close to the top of the league tables ini terms of killings per capita, and that killings in LA and elsewhere are way down from what they were in the 80s.

Stuff You Can't Do Without the Internet: All the Murders

Jill Leovy has a riveting story in the LA Times (print edition) about how she covered the murders--all the murders--in LA last year (link). The print version ordinarily covers only about 10 percent:

I wanted readers to see all the killings -- roughly 1,000 violent deaths each year, mostly of young Latinos and, most disproportionately, of young black men. The Web offered what the paper did not: unlimited space.

So the Homicide Report, as it was called, began with the simplest of journalistic missions: exposing a painful, largely unseen problem.The first list of homicide victims, published just over a year ago, contained the names of 17 people. Eight were Latino. Six were black. Two were of Cambodian descent -- killed in a double homicide. None were white. Most were in their 20s. ...

Two or three homicides occurred in the county per day, on average. As the report developed, I filled notebooks with police jargon, scrawling the same details over and over. "Male black adult" or "Male Hispanic" -- accompanied by addresses in Compton, Florence, Hawthorne, Boyle Heights or Watts. ...

Detectives routinely admitted that the names and ages they had recorded for victims were, at best, conjecture: Many victims, including illegal immigrants or career criminals, had lived entirely underground.

Leovy says her bosses moved her on to other things (why, I wonder?). But, she says, "none of the more ambitious stories I'd previously done for the paper seemed quite as effective as simply listing victims, one by one by one."