A conversation-provoking look at the real world of police work and ways to make it better for all concerned.
A former police officer sociologist examines reform through the lens of three departments and their farsighted leaders.
Gross, the author of Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care?, opens with a description of a traffic stop from his days as a Berkeley police officer. Such stops, trainers tell officer candidates, are dangerous even if for minor infractions: “you might pull over someone with a felony warrant…or a guy with anger issues looking for a fight.” All too often, the suspect is Black or brown, the officer White, and the situation ambiguous. Fortunately, the author’s episode ended without bloodshed. But he wonders if he had undertaken “de-escalation training” and had used a calmer tone, if it might have gone better still. It’s that intention to create calmer encounters that motivates police reform efforts in three communities in California, Colorado, and Georgia, with chiefs who understand that doing better is a mandate that begins at the top. “Not to put too fine a point on it,” Gross writes, “but some cops are assholes,” incapable of reining in aggression. Yet a friendly approach usually defuses potentially explosive situations. Other efforts include hiring more minority officers, who are less likely to use force and to enforce minor infractions, as well as enlisting minority communities to help formulate policies. Revised policies that limit armed response have led to demonstrably lower death rates. In the case of Longmont, Colorado, its chief’s directives “prioritized humaneness and social responsibility.” Gross points out that finding decent officers is a challenge: Not many people want careers in law enforcement, and “risk-averse mayors or city managers” often install leaders who don’t rock the boat—and don’t last long. As Gross shows, more work is needed, but his case studies constitute a step in the right direction.
A conversation-provoking look at the real world of police work and ways to make it better for all concerned.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9781250777522
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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