The journalist Jill Leovy is the most persuasive proponent of the idea that reducing homicide rates is an urgent matter of racial justice. In the mid-aughts, while she was on staff at the Los Angeles Times, the murders of many marginalized people, most of which received scant mention in the newspaper and little notice from anyone but the victims’ families, inspired her to try to write something about every murder that occurred in Los Angeles County in the course of a year. Additional years on that beat brought her into close contact with homicide detectives and the family members of murder victims.

In the 2015 book Ghettoside, she summed up the lessons she learned from years of such reporting. “This is a book about a very simple idea: where the criminal justice system fails to respond vigorously to violent injury and death, homicide becomes endemic,” she wrote. “African Americans have suffered from just such a lack of effective criminal justice, and this, more than anything, is the reason for the nation’s long-standing plague of black homicides.” In her telling, if every murder against a Black man were investigated with energy and rigor, “investigated as if one’s own child were the victim, or as if we, as a society, could not bear to lose these people,” the violence would not be so routine nor the victims so anonymous.

Proponents of abolishing the police believe it to be an inherently oppressive institution. Although Leovy fumed at the ways that over-policing has harmed individuals and whole neighborhoods, she nevertheless discerned, through years of close contact with Black and Latino people who were devastated by murders, something that too many social-justice activists fail to recognize: that under-policing can be devastatingly oppressive to its victims, too.