The central thesis of Ghettoside is;

a vacuum of justice is filled by extralegal violence.

In other words, when the legal system fails to police communities, prosecute violent offenders and prevent violent crime, than violence increases exponentially due to vigilantism.

Ghettoside chronicles the efforts of several homicide detectives working in Los Angeles, in largely African American, low socioeconomic status, high crime neighborhoods located 'south of the 10 freeway'.

The book takes place in the late 1990's and early 2000's during a homicide epidemic referred to by the detectives as 'the monster', in which murder statistics for young African American men equaled those of combatants in the Iraq war.

According to the author Jill Leove (former LA Times reporter embedded with LAPD south central homicide division), contrary to common intuition, the beating heart of the monster, the root problem, was (and still is) under policing.

In the period leading up to 'the monster' thousands of murders went unsolved due to a lack of political will and failure to allocate sufficient policing resources, which lead to an escalating cycle of violence and increasingly violent retribution.

Homeostasis typifies biological as well as social systems. And in this example, lawlessness is its own kind of order.

According to Leove, seeing the carnage is not what the detectives cite as the most difficult part of the job, but rather witnessing the grief of the victims loved ones.

It's not the horror that burns out ghettoside detectives, it's the frustration of working to solve a murder, and having the case fail in trial due to fear on the part of witnesses to testify. Again due to the general lack of protection against intimidation and retribution in an under policed community.

The author makes other important arguments regarding the systemic etiology of the black on black violence epidemic.

Leove explains the differential between the high violence African American communities and the relatively low violence in Hispanic immigrant communities of equivalent socioeconomic status as a matter of integration and economic mobility.

Homicide flares amongst people that are trapped and dependent, not among people that are highly mobile.

Immigrant populations are mobile.

African-American populations are still the most communally segregated. Indices of residential segregation are strong predictors of homicide.

You have to be involved with people in order to want to kill them. You have to share space and compete over important limited resources.

These are only a few of the salient points Leove makes.

The book is really effective at challenging implicit racist assumptions about blackness and crime, and providing reasonable counter arguments that reframe the issue of black on black violence as systemic as opposed to racially intrinsic.

The simple intervention embedded in the thesis of the book is: if you want to reduce violence in black communities, provide them with the same level of policing and justice as white communities.

The real issue is, you have to see the issue for what it is, and then you have to want to reduce it.

Beyond being well argued, the book is very well done. Very compelling. Totally engrossing.

Excellent.