Ghetto reportage—gritty depictions of crime and struggle in the city—has come to be dominated by two schools of journalism. The first is represented by David Simon, creator of HBO’s “The Wire,” who, in his pre-television days, covered the crime beat for the Baltimore Sun and wrote books about homicide detectives and drug dealers that often involved him hanging out in a police precinct or a crack-infested neighborhood for a year or so. Each character is rendered at length, their dramas, delusions, and failures patiently laid out. Simon reclines with his subjects on dirty mattresses as they shoot up again and again.

The second school is associated, most recently, with the law professor Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow. Her approach is numbers-based; all context, little story. More criminology, than true-crime. The Alexander approach is powerful not because we’re empathizing with characters, but because we’re convinced that her arguments about the causes of injustice are undeniable.

Ghettoside, a new book by Los Angeles Times reporter Jill Leovy, falls somewhere between Simon and Alexander. In this non-fiction murder mystery, Leovy’s central message is simple, contrarian, and extremely convincing: The plague of “black-on-black” homicide is the result of under policing. What’s troubling our criminal justice system, she argues, is not preventive policing techniques (e.g., stop and frisk), but rather an abominably low solve rate for black homicides. When the son of a black detective is murdered senselessly in South L.A., a relentless white detective is brought in to solve the case, and Leovy gets a riveting story in which to package her theme.

Below, Leovy discusses what it was like to spend a decade immersed in incredibly dark material.

Dan Slater: When you started out on the crime-reporting beat, did you see yourself doing a book on homicide?