The first chapter opens with Detective John Skaggs, in many ways the central figure of the book, returning the shoes of homicide victim Dovon Harris, which had been in evidence, to Dovon’s mother, Barbara Pritchett. The author describes Skaggs and Pritchett as making “a strange picture […] the tall white cop and the weeping black woman” (4). Both are archetypes in many ways: Skaggs, the upper middle-class white Republican police officer; Pritchett, the Democrat granddaughter of Louisiana cotton pickers whose family had migrated to Los Angeles in the 1960s. However, “she and Skaggs were kin of a sort […] Americans whose lives, in different ways, had been molded by a bizarre phenomenon: a plague of murders among black men” (5).

Leovy writes that the “black-on-black murder epidemic,” despite the level of violence, is “at best a curiosity to the mainstream” (5). Black men in particular are “6 percent of the country’s population but nearly 40 percent of those murdered” (5). These murders typically go unsolved by apathetic police departments; in Los Angeles, for example, such crimes used to be marked as “No Human Involved” or morbidly, jokingly called “Population control” (5). Across the country, as long as black men were killing each other, law enforcement didn’t seem to care very much.