A fiercely argued case that the police can’t be trusted to police themselves—and that such policing is essential.
A searching history of the central problems of policing in America, focused on one once-notorious department.
It didn’t take the killing of George Floyd to convince minority communities that in most places in America, the police are the enemy. This was especially true of Oakland, California, with a large Black and Latine population brutalized by a White-led police force. Down the chain of command, write Polk Award–winning journalists Winston and BondGraham in this deeply reported book, were the “Riders,” who practiced vigilante justice in the streets, beating and torturing suspected drug dealers and other lawbreakers. As the narrative unfolds, one brave young rookie risks his career and life to expose these criminals with badges. The Oakland police were hardly alone. “If they are allowed to do so—or encouraged, as they so often are—police will frequently subject a society’s poor and racially oppressed to violence, surveillance, and harassment, all in the name of maintaining social order,” write the authors. Thankfully, the whistleblowing led to hard-won reforms. For one thing, the criminal cops were prosecuted in 2002. One disappeared, probably deep inside Mexico, and has never been found, while the others were fired. (One became a military contractor in Iraq, and another joined a distant police force.) Meanwhile, the Oakland Police Department became something of a ward of the state, overseen by the federal court. While still not quite a model, OPD has changed markedly. Its records are transparent, its officers no longer terrorize the community, the N-word is no longer uttered by contemptuous cops, and, even under criticism, OPD “never attempted to punish the city’s residents with a de-policing backlash.” The wholly timely—if surely controversial—lesson that the authors draw, in a time of reform, is that all police departments require at least some outside, civilian monitoring.
A fiercely argued case that the police can’t be trusted to police themselves—and that such policing is essential.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-98216-859-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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