Space for All the Dead

For the last year, the Los Angeles Times has included a blog called Homicide Report on its website. It recounts the names and details of every person murdered in LA County. Before crime reporter Jill Leovy convinced her editors to let her start the report, only 10 percent of LA's murders showed up in the paper's print edition.

Leovy noticed the deaths that got literal ink were the unusual ones -- women, babies, celebrities, white people. Young black or Chicano men went unmentioned because they were just too numerous. As she wrote in her summary article that appeared in the February 4 Times, "Thirteen-year-old boys nearly always made the headines of the Times' print edition, but 14-year-olds were a toss-up. Sixteen- and 17-year-olds were more likely to make the cut if they were girls."

As the parent of a 14-year-old, I found that particularly chilling. Almost 1,000 people die by homicide each year in LA county (down from earlier years, believe it or not), but the vast majority never made the paper. When Leovy began asking for details on each death, she sometimes found police press officers who were "surprised to learn that victims' names were public information. No reporter had ever asked" for them before.

"The Web offered what the paper did not: unlimited space," Leovy wrote. "The Homicide Report made no distinction between a celebrity and transient. Each got the same typeface, the same kind of write-up."

In the same way that the New York Times' inclusion of every name of every person who died in the World Trade Center helped to make the victims' lives real, the Homicide Report sheds light on lives that ended in what Leovy called "a pocket epidemic of violent death among black and Latino men, pooling in neglected corners of society."