For young black men, life in Los Angeles County in the past decade was far more dangerous than living in the murder capital of the world.

Some years, the homicide rate for black teens and young black men here was twice that of Honduras — infamous for having more murders per capita than any other country.

But while the homicide rate here has dropped in recent years, residents and leaders in L.A.’s black community say violent death continues to be an accepted fact of life in the community.

And, they say, they have more than 1,800 reminders of that — the black men, women, children and elderly whose murders last decade have gone unpunished.

• DATABASE: Search for homicides by case status, gender, race, ZIP code and date across Los Angeles County

• GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER: Unsolved homicides in Los Angeles County — The entire series

While 70 percent of homicides involving white victims in L.A. County from 2000 through 2010 have been solved, only 49 percent of cases involving black victims have. And it doesn’t matter if the victim was an elderly man, a middle-aged woman or even a child — a much lower percentage of cases involving blacks have been solved than those involving whites.

LaWanda Hawkins, founder of the San Pedro-based Justice for Murdered Children, said she knows why.

To explain, she relays a story of being at the L.A. Marathon with a booth for Justice for Murdered Children. Photos of slain children whose murders have never been solved, mostly black and Latino, hung outside the booth.

“People would look for a minute, see the kids, and shake their heads. But then they would go to the booth next to us, to an organization that adopts out abused pets. And there they would be outraged, saying ‘this has to stop.’ They’d take out their money and donate,” Hawkins said. “You see, people care more about those animals than our murdered children.”

Snitch jacket

The biggest problem, say law enforcement officials, is that witnesses won’t talk, some for good reason.

Detectives say they do care about these cases — a homicide is a homicide and they want to solve it no matter the victim’s race, sex or background. But in some communities, that effort is more complicated than in others.

Over and over again, it’s the standard refrain: someone is shot at a big party, and though there were hundreds of people there, no one saw anything. Everyone was in the bathroom, Detective Frank Salerno said.

“It gets frustrating,” he said.

That is precisely what happened in the case of Laterian Tasby, 17, who was shot and killed at a party in San Pedro Oct. 27, 2007. A popular football and basketball player at San Pedro High, Tasby was known as a peacemaker, not a gang member.

Among the hundreds of people at the party, only one was willing to talk to police, said Tasby’s uncle Armando Villasenor. But one was not enough. Several other people were injured during the fight, but even they won’t say anything.

“It is just disheartening because there were a lot of people there who called themselves Laterian’s friends,” Villasenor said. “And Laterian was trying to protect them, to stop things.”

Villasenor understands personally the challenges detectives face. He started a Facebook page, R.I.P Laterian D. Tasby, and asked people to come forward with information about his nephew’s death. A few people said they had something to share, but once Villasenor responded, they backed away.

“I still remember you. The one who walked up to me after the funeral and told me that your friends knew what happened but were afraid,” he wrote on the Facebook page.

Many of those at the party “have gone on to start families, get married, have children and continue to turn a blind eye to what took place. For those that have kept it in I am at a loss for words,” he wrote on the Facebook page.

And he tells the page’s visitors that, had the situation been switched, Tasby would have spoken up for them.

Los Angeles Councilman Bernard Parks, who was LAPD police chief from 1997 to 2002, says the fact that homicides have declined so significantly is one indication of how hard police are working to solve them. Homicides in the county regularly topped more than 1,100 in the 1990s and early 2000s. Last decade they peaked in 2002, when 1,231 people were murdered but were down to below 700 by 2010, according to a database of all homicides in L.A. County from 2000-2010. Of the 11,244 homicides committed during the 11-year span, 4,861 — or 46 percent — remain unsolved, according to an analysis of the law enforcement data by the Los Angeles News Group.

“If you looked at that 50 percent of cases of black victims that are not solved, and you found that detectives were not showing up at the scene the day of the crime, they were not booking evidence collected at the scene, they were not collecting information from witnesses — then you might have a case that detectives care less about some victims. But I bet you’d find murder books filled with information. Sometimes you just run out of leads. And sometimes you clear cases 20 years down the road,” Parks said.

Fear continues to pervade among witnesses in many black communities. Nobody wants to wear the “snitch jacket” — not in their neighborhoods and certainly not if they end up in jail themselves, Salerno and others said.

It’s a tired story, but a true one, agreed 26-year-old Shea Harrison, a South L.A. student.

Harrison pointed to a now infamous interview rapper Cam’ron had with Anderson Cooper a few years ago. Cam’ron said he would never provide the police any information, even to convict a serial killer living next door, citing his “code of ethics.”

“He caught a lot of heat for saying that, but everybody knows it’s true. It’s still true. You just don’t say it in public,” Harrison said.

‘Totaled out’

For 29-year-old South L.A. resident Dale Avery, the lack of concern from others starts within his own black community.

“Nah, the police don’t care. This is what they expect of us. They just say, ‘Oh they been doing that for years. Something is wrong with them. They don’t care about each other.’ Why should they care? Black people are not respectful of one another. Why should white people, police respect us?” he asked while standing outside his Vermont Boulevard church last Sunday.

Avery, who grew up in Compton in a broken home and in and out of foster care, said “killing was just normal.”

“There was just random acts of violence all the time. Of course I knew people hit,” he said.

Avery has since moved from Compton and, after a failed suicide attempt, he said he has found a path of peace through God. But while he has changed his own life, he is painfully pessimistic about the black community, where he said the violence and despair have not gotten better, even if homicide rates have seen some decline in recent years.

“The damage has been done. You can’t fix it. It’s like a car that’s totaled out. It’s beyond repair,” he said. “We didn’t create this society. We didn’t say: We want lots of gangs, we want lots of prostitution and poverty. All that unfolded through the years of being deprived of our rights. You abuse a dog for years, you don’t feed him, you kick him. Eventually one day that dog is going to snap.”

Such attitudes among young black men is why gang intervention specialist Aquil Basheer says fear of being perceived as a snitch is just one part of the complicated equation that produces a failure of justice in the majority of black homicides.

Police departments should look beyond just external forces of gang pressure not to snitch, and look internally at how the criminal justice system has built inequity, misconceptions and mistrust over decades, said Basheer, executive director of the community organization A Better LA, a nonprofit started by Pete Carroll.

“Over and over again in the criminal justice system, we see that a black life is not valued as much as a white life,” he said.

Such biases may even happen subconsciously, he said. From the onset of an investigation, detectives who for years have heard witnesses refuse to talk, may assume a homicide investigation will follow that course and give up on a case early.

“It’s that self-perpetuating circle,” he said.

From start to finish, the criminal justice system has historically treated blacks differently from whites, Basheer said, from the disproportionate number of black people arrested for petty crimes, to more severe punishments for those petty crimes, to the disproportionate number of black people on death row.

“It has been so apparently clear that there is an imbalance in the system, so that when there is a homicide, nobody wants to participate in that system,” Basheer said. “If law enforcement is not perceived as the solution, people are not going to go to them for anything.”

Meredith Smiedt, executive director of the Center for Policing Equity at UCLA, agrees that research shows that witnesses will not cooperate in an investigation if they don’t feel like there is procedural justice or a sense of fairness in a system.

And it doesn’t matter if the victim is a child or an elderly woman, witnesses aren’t going to cooperate in a system they don’t trust, Basheer and Smiedt said.

“It just tells me how pained these communities are, how tarnished these relationships are. People won’t even talk in those cases,” Basheer said.

But, Smiedt added, that sense of procedural justice can be built in communities.

“It doesn’t come from a one-time meeting, it happens over time through real, honest conversations, from a cultural shift, from training within a police department” that gives not only the community a voice, but also the police officer working with that community a voice, Smiedt said.

She pointed to several growing programs in the Los Angeles Police Department that have already seen success, including one in the Jordan Downs neighborhood of Watts.

“There is a long history of mistrust here between the community and police and they are repairing that,” she said.

But while Basheer recognizes that there are exceptional programs, and officers, in the county, change is going to take a long time.

“We are talking about 40, 50, 60 years of institutionalized racism. It is going to take decades to eradicate that mistrust,” he said.

In the meantime, detectives say they just have to do what the can do overcome the mistrust.

“You just have to keep going back, over and over again, convincing them you care. You go back five, six, seven, eight times,” said Detective Richard Tomlin. “And maybe one time, you get a tidbit of information, and then you get something else. You tell them, think about how his mom feels. A lot of these guys are so jaded. Murder is just a fact of life.”

And it works. Tomlin recalls a 48-year-old hard-core gang member testifying in the case of a 14-year-old kid who was murdered. The witness said it was just an innocent kid, so he felt compelled to say something.

“You have to find that hook,” Tomlin said. “But you need cooperation from the community. If no one gives it to you, there is not much you can do. You get tired of someone telling you no — if you don’t care, I don’t care. It’s just human nature.”