A Job I Would Not Want

Reporter Jill Leovy of the Los Angeles Times has been covering every single murder in Los Angeles county as part of a project to document every victim for one year. Tough assignment, right? You have no idea:

She has covered more than 700 so far.

Jill Leovy's war isn't thousands of miles away. In fact, without traffic, she can drive from her office to the front lines in about ten minutes.

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.

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.

Her reporting can be found at The Homicide Report. The report caught my eye, but there is a statistic in it that should come as a real shock to everyone - except, I suppose, to folks like Leovy who are paying attention.

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.

That is appalling.