A vivid, well-written, vitally important book.
Most of the nation's approximately 18,000 police departments receive scathing criticism from one of their own: an author who began as a San Diego beat cop in 1966 and rose to become a police chief in Seattle.
Stamper follows up his first book (Breaking Rank: A Top Cop's Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing, 2005) with a more contemporary—and more critical—account. He concludes that police departments as currently structured—akin to military units with force as a dominant characteristic—must be rebuilt. The author recognizes that almost every police agency includes a majority of uniformed officers and plainclothes detectives who place polite, effective service above brute force. However, he maintains, the rogue cops, although a minority, too often exercise undue influence, infecting everybody with their negative attitudes toward minority and mentally ill citizens, who deserve respect rather than stigmatizing. Stamper offers evidence that the problems transcend a small number of bad apples; he says the barrel is rotten and must be replaced. One solution must come from outside the police agencies: an end to the so-called war on drugs, which has spawned so much violence, both directed at and initiated by the police. Stamper would like to see legislatures and courts treat narcotics such as crack cocaine and heroin the same way alcohol is treated currently, as a public health matter leading to criminal charges only when drinkers harm other people. The remainder of Stamper's suggested solutions involve reconstituting agencies to replace the military command structure and mentality with a social services structure emphasizing nonviolent problem-solving over force. Ideally, Stamper would increase the number of female police street officers and commanders, believing they make more empathetic, less violent cops. The author does not shy away from specific incidents of unarmed citizens killed by police; he explains, for example, why Michael Brown should never have died in Ferguson, Missouri.
A vivid, well-written, vitally important book.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-56858-540-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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