It's being fought mostly in the tough, minority neighborhoods of Los Angeles County, where three people are killed each day on average — more than a thousand a year.
Leovy is the creator of The Homicide Report, a blogging project by the Los Angeles Times in which she is attempting to record every homicide in Los Angeles County over the course of a year. She has covered over 700 to date.
'The Homicide Report' creator Jill Leovy
Because it is often the only public acknowledgement of the event, the blog has become a memorial for murder victims, with family members and friends posting responses adjacent to many of the entries, providing updates on children or expressing the pain of being left alone.
Most of the reports are just a sentence or two long, but they are filled with heartbreak, like the death of Michael Presley, 19, buried in the same grave as his father, who was also murdered years earlier.
Or the story of twin brothers Noel and Joel Velazco, both shot to death only a few feet from each other, but six years apart.
"After this pain, we can lose nothing more," Velazco's mother told Leovy.
Beyond the emotions of the victims' families, the Homicide Report illustrates the enormous toll violent crime has taken on the county's minority populations. "Murder stalks minorities," was a recent headline in Leovy's blog.
"If you really want to be serious about the homicide rate," she says, "you need to look at who these numbers represent."
The national homicide rate is roughly six deaths per 100,000 people. For adult Latino males in Los Angeles County it's 52 deaths per 100,000. For adult black males it's an eye opening 176 deaths per 100,000. The highest incidence of murder is in the poor neighborhoods southeast of downtown Los Angeles.
Remembering D'Angello Mizell
D'Angello Mizell was killed last November at the age of 36, after being shot three times. A member of a Crips gang set, he had been in and out of jail since he was a teenager.
His mother, Althea Mizell, is still mourning, even though he once rejected her, saying, "The Crips are my mom."
Althea Mizell with a photo of her son, D'Angello
On a visit to Mizell's home, Leovy asks what she remembers of her son's last moments. Mizell begins to cry. "I saw my son's brains hanging out his head.... They executed my child.... They didn't have to do that to him."
Even as she recalls his death, Mizell concedes that her son was no angel. "My hair is snow white," she says, picking at the strands of her hair. "He gave me a head full of white hair."
Because of D'Angello Mizell's criminal history, his murder probably will never be solved. The mistakes of his life would have rendered him nearly invisible in death to all but his mother, if not for Leovy's work.
Leovy says American society has become selective about who can be called a victim. Often, she says, the term is ascribed only to the innocent or virtuous.
"For me, it's about just making sure his name is written down," Leovy tells the grieving mother.
"I just don't want him to be forgotten," says Mizell. "I don't want anybody to think he didn't matter. Because he did."
Making sense of violence
Leovy's desire to chronicle the effects of violence spring from 9/11, when she was sent to New York to cover the terrorist attacks. Violence, she says, isolates the people it happens to.
"We don't tell the truth" about violence, she says. "It's very difficult to be truthful about."
Leovy searches the streets for makeshift memorials that often signify a homicide has occurred nearby.
Her singular pursuit of that truth regularly takes her where many fear to tread. She spends a lot of time driving the gang-ridden streets of the Newton neighborhood in South Los Angeles. Half a dozen notebooks and extra pens are lashed with rubber bands to her car's sun visors.
On a recent reporting trip Leovy scanned the curbsides, looking for the makeshift shrines of photographs, candles and flowers often erected by family and friends over the spot where a loved one was murdered.
Spotting a shrine, she rushes out of the car. Soon she has located the wife, daughters, and brother of Isaias Vasquez, a migrant worker killed in a drive-by shooting.
Leovy speaks to the family in Spanish and gathers what facts she can. The wife hands her a small card from the memorial service. It has his photo on it. Leovy studies the picture carefully before returning it to the widow.
Leovy returns to her car and, with a wireless connection, updates the Homicide Report with news of Vasquez's death and a few details of his life: a hard worker, a good husband and father. "A happy person," she quotes his brother as saying.
It's not much, but it's something — a few sentences about a man whose very existence might otherwise go unnoticed in Los Angeles County's ongoing invisible war.
-Producer: Robert Padavick
-Video editor: Steve Nielson
-Camera: Kevin Sites, Didrik Johnck
-Additional photographs in video report courtesy the Associated Press
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