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How the police in Minneapolis used electoral politics to accrue power and avoid accountability.

The 2020 murder of George Floyd made Minneapolis synonymous with unjust policing and the pain and outrage left in its wake. The city became ground zero for police reform in the United States—even though liberal politicians in Minnesota had promised, and delivered, police reforms for decades. Centered on professionalization, these changes inadvertently exacerbated injustice. Better training and higher standards broadened the influence of the police, who then claimed expertise in public safety. They deployed it to bargain for governmental support, even when they treated residents unfairly. Though Black, Indigenous, and gay residents resisted, the political power amassed by the police rendered real change almost impossible.

In A Police State, historian and fourth-generation Minneapolis resident Michael J. Lansing chronicles how the police became a political force in one of the nation’s most liberal cities. Lansing shows how, in the years after World War II, public safety policies that appealed to voters in the overwhelmingly white city protected and expanded police discretion. As union members, administrators, and citizens, officers shaped these policies to shield themselves and their violent actions from scrutiny. They campaigned for better wages, secured legal safeguards, resisted race-neutral policing, and elected one of their own to the mayor’s office. Ultimately, they used democratic institutions to cultivate and sustain a police state that protected white people and harmed people of color. Lansing uncovers this dysfunctional relationship between a city and its cops while illuminating a larger American story about reform, resistance, and democracy.

A significant exploration of policing politics, this book helps us understand the history that led to George Floyd’s murder—and insists that the future of community safety depends on reenvisioning the role of police in our society.

In the 1990s and 2000s, Camden, NJ, across the river from Philadelphia, was perennially designated one of America’s most dangerous cities. The functionally bankrupt city dissolved the Camden Police Department (CPD) and created the Camden County Police Department (CCPD) in 2013, refocusing its priorities and officer performance standards to engage with the community and build trust. The change was significant, with notable drops in violent crime and murder. However, concerns about the use of force and other aggressive practices continued.

In Chasing Change in Camden, John Shjarback investigates how Camden’s police department re-formed and questions whether it can serve as a model for other cities. He analyzes successful policies—from innovative police training to advancements in technology—and evidence-based policing strategies. 

Shjarback explains how the changes were implemented and then adjusted in response to community backlash. Chasing Change in Camden concludes with a discussion of threats to the reform and accountability efforts in both the CCPD and American policing more broadly. Ultimately, Camden’s case study offers valuable lessons for cities seeking effective police reform.

In How to Lose the Hounds Celeste Winston explores marronage—the practice of flight from and placemaking beyond slavery—as a guide to police abolition. She examines historically Black maroon communities in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, that have been subjected to violent excesses of police power from slavery until the present day. Tracing the long and ongoing historical geography of Black freedom struggles in the face of anti-Black police violence in these communities, Winston shows how marronage provides critical lessons for reimagining public safety and community well-being. These freedom struggles take place in what Winston calls maroon geographies—sites of flight from slavery and the spaces of freedom produced in multigenerational Black communities. Maroon geographies constitute part of a Black placemaking tradition that asserts life-affirming forms of community. Winston contends that maroon geographies operate as a central method of Black flight, holding ground, and constructing places of freedom in ways that imagine and plan a world beyond policing.

An on-the-ground study of junior police academies—contentious school-police partnerships that provide educational resources, career opportunities, and hope for social mobility.
 
Some might see police officers as benevolent sources of protection, but in many communities, they are often perceived as a threat due to a legacy of violent interactions and arrests for arbitrary offenses. How, then, do police sustain their presence in places where people might distrust them? In Kid Cops, sociologist Mai Thai offers one answer: junior police academies, high school programs in which police officers provide courses, mentorship, and job training to students in communities with high rates of juvenile delinquency and poverty. These school-police partnerships have expanded rapidly in the United States over the last few decades, largely in response to political unrest and police violence in the 1990s. Programs vary in their offerings, but they generally aim to ease tensions between communities and law enforcement, while also providing needed resources in neighborhoods where education and job opportunities are scarce.

Kid Cops draws on years of observations and interviews with educators, police officers, and, of course, kids. The junior police programs at each high school may have different emphases, but their common goal is for students to graduate from high school and enter college or the workforce. A second goal of the program is to cultivate a positive image of the police. Ultimately, however, Thai finds that these programs tighten the relationship between marginalized youth, schools, and the criminal justice system and strain the students’ relationships with their peers, families, and each other. These programs also distract residents from systemic issues of policing and suppress opportunities for meaningful change.

Written in an accessible tone that balances the seriousness of inequality with the playfulness of the study’s youth, Kid Cops moves beyond the narrative of detentions, suspensions, and arrests to tell a less conventional story about police in schools. It asks, does good, friendly policing exist—especially if it continues to tether low-income communities of color to the criminal justice system? 
 

During the years between the Civil War and World War II, police in New York City struggled with how to control a diverse metropolis. In Police and the Empire City Matthew Guariglia tells the history of the New York Police Department to show how its origins were built upon and inseparably entwined with the history of race, ethnicity, and whiteness in the United States. Guariglia explores the New York City Police Department through its periods of experimentation and violence as police experts imported tactics from the US occupation of the Philippines and Cuba, devised modern bureaucratic techniques to better suppress Black communities, and infiltrated supposedly unknowable immigrant neighborhoods. Innovations ranging from recruiting Chinese, Italian, and German police to form “ethnic squads” to the use of deportation and federal immigration restrictions to control local crime—even the introduction of fingerprinting—were motivated by attempts to govern a multiracial city. Campaigns to remake the police department created an urban landscape where power, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, crime, and bodies collided and provided a foundation for the supposedly color-blind, technocratic, federally backed, and surveillance-based policing of today.

In the second half of 2020 and continuing into 2021, protests against racial injustice spread across the United States after the death of George Floyd while in the custody of Minneapolis Police Department officers. Members of the press covered these demonstrations, documenting what transpired and conveying the important messages involved. In so doing, the news media held law enforcement accountable through critical reporting on the actions of the police, with police officers responding in part by intimidating journalists in the field using force and arrest—this in the name of keeping the peace and protecting the public from further harm.
 
What transpired during this troubled time cast a bright light on the contemporary relationship between the press and police in the United States. The relationship between these two fundamental institutions is, however, a long and complicated one, dating back to colonial British North America. In the mid-19th century, (1830s–1850s) both the press and the police began to take their modern forms, and since then have continued to develop, routinely interacting with each other as journalists and police officers often found themselves responding to the same crimes and events. At times, members of both institutions managed to co-exist or even cooperate and made efforts to help one another, while at other times they butted heads to the point of conflict, the professional boundaries between journalists and police officers seemingly blurred.
 
As both the press and the police have fallen under deep scrutiny in more modern times, the present moment marks what is, perhaps, an opportune time to focus on the political, economic, social, and technological problems they face. In “Pressing the Police and Policing the Press,” Scott Memmel offers the first book-length study of the history and legal landscape of the press-police relationship. Each chapter focuses on interactions between the press and the police during a particular era, introducing relevant societal context and how both institutions evolved and responded to that context. Memmel concludes his study with recommendations on how, going forward, the press and the police might work together to tackle some of the similar issues they face and better serve the public.
 

A revelatory look at how the NYPD has resisted change through strategic and selective community engagement.
 
The past few years have seen Americans express passionate demands for police transformation. But even as discussion of no-knock warrants, chokeholds, and body cameras has exploded, any changes to police procedures have only led to the same outcomes. Despite calls for increased accountability, police departments have successfully stonewalled change.  
 
In The Policing Machine, Tony Cheng reveals the stages of that resistance, offering a close look at the deep engagement strategies that NYPD precincts have developed with only subsets of the community in order to counter any truly meaningful, democratic oversight. Cheng spent nearly two years in an unprecedented effort to understand the who and how of police-community relationship building in New York City, documenting the many ways the police strategically distributed power and privilege within the community to increase their own public legitimacy without sacrificing their organizational independence. By setting up community councils that are conveniently run by police allies, handing out favors to local churches that will promote the police to their parishioners, and offering additional support to institutions friendly to the police, the NYPD, like police departments all over the country, cultivates political capital through a strategic politics that involves distributing public resources, offering regulatory leniency, and deploying coercive force. The fundamental challenge with police-community relationships, Cheng shows, is not to build them. It is that they already exist and are motivated by a machinery designed to stymie reform.
 

This Is Not For You tells the story of activist and photographer Richard Brown, a Black Portlander who has spent decades working to bridge the divide between police and the Black community. His memoir brings readers with him into the streets with fellow activists, into squad cars with the rank-and-file, and to regular meetings with mayors and police chiefs. There are very few people doing the kind of work Richard Brown has done. And that, as he sees it, is a big problem.

The book finds Brown approaching his eightieth birthday and reflecting on his life. As he recalls his childhood in 1940s Harlem, his radicalization in the newly desegregated Air Force, and his decades of activism in one of America’s whitest cities, he questions how much longer he’ll do this work, and he wonders who, if anyone, will take his place.

This is a book about how and why to become an engaged, activist citizen, and how activists can stay grounded, no matter how deeply they immerse themselves in the work. It also offers an intimate, firsthand look at policing: what policing is and could be, how civilians can have a say, and how police can and should be responsive to and inclusive of civilian voices. This Is Not For You speaks on every page about being Black in America: about Black pride; Black history, art, and culture; and the experience of resisting white supremacy. It also stands as a much-needed counternarrative to Portlandia, telling a different story about the city and who has shaped it.

Over fifty percent of royalties earned on this book will be donated to organizations working on behalf of Black Portlanders.