An important, sometimes-groundbreaking account of police gone wild.
Huffington Post senior investigative reporter Balko combines a searing exposé focusing on a specific kind of police brutality with a contextual history of police violence from the Roman Empire through today.
The contemporary brutality forming the centerpiece of the exposé derives from Special Weapons and Tactics units—SWAT teams. At Reason magazine and, before that, at the Cato Institute, Balko was a pioneer at tracking the excessive violence of SWAT teams, especially in the context of raids on private homes suspected of harboring violators of drug laws. With SWAT teams often serving as the front line in the so-called "war on drugs," abuses have been occurring with alarming frequency since the 1960s. Balko takes pains to state that police officers face daily danger and that most of them serve honorably. However, he writes, those who volunteer for SWAT teams or are chosen by police chiefs and sheriffs frequently harbor a cowboy mentality inappropriate when raiding homes unannounced with high-velocity weapons at the ready. Balko provides copious examples of SWAT teams raiding the wrong addresses or finding nothing but decriminalized marijuana inside. Meanwhile, injuries and sometimes deaths occur, and community trust in the police is shattered. And it can happen anywhere: The author opens with an egregiously conducted SWAT raid in Columbia, Mo., a small city with few violent drug offenders. Some of the historical sections are slow going—the book is organized chronologically, which means little compelling information arrives before page 50—and the book sometimes loses focus as Balko overreaches in terms of police department operations, which are only loosely related to SWAT team conduct. Nonetheless, the vast amount of evidence is certain to give pause to even the most ardent supporters of law enforcement agencies.
An important, sometimes-groundbreaking account of police gone wild.Pub Date: July 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61039-211-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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