" It was an evil thing, as the pastor had said. The Monster arose from what was meanest and most vicious in human nature. But the dark swath of misery it cut across generations of black Americans was a shadow thrown on the wall, a shape magnified many times the size of its source because of a refusal to see the black homicide problem for what it was: a problem of human suffering caused by the absence of a state monopoly on violence.

The Monster's source was not general perversity of mind in the population that suffered. It was a weak legal apparatus that had long failed to place black injuries and the loss of black lives at the heart of its response when mobilizing the law, first in the South and later in segregated cities. The cases didn't get solved, and year after year, assaults piled one upon another, black men got shot up and killed, no one answered for it and no one really cared much. "

― , Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America