(Sydney, Australia, 1953) After writing for the Seattle Times for several years, Jill Leovy became chief reporter for the Los Angeles Times in 1993. For six years she was deeply involved with the Los Angeles Police Department, covering homicides registered in south county. Her extraordinary work earned her and a group of five other newspaper reporters the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News in 1998 for her coverage of the North Hollywood shooter case.

When Leovy created the Homicide Report blog in 2007, which records every homicide in Los Angeles County, he found that an average of three people a day are killed, and most die anonymously. Their deaths do not make for big headlines and reports like other more media crimes, which arouse greater interest for the police and the media, such as school shootings. In his book Death in the Ghetto, Leovy thoroughly examines impunity for killings among the African American population, focusing on a real case of homicide in the city of Los Angeles.