Accountability & Reform

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The Gone, But Not Forgotten event aims to unite Black women and encourage them to raise their voices. "I want us to learn how to protect each other," organizers said.

Learn about the #SayHerName Campaign which uplifts the Black women, girls, and femmes lost to police violence.

INCITE! is a network of radical feminists of color organizing to end state violence and violence in our homes and communities.

"Using his own experience of being brutally beaten by police officers in East L.A. as a frame, in this memoir the author reflects on the long history of violence against people of color in the United States. Rodriguez weaves his personal story with historical and current events about violence and the Latino/Indigenous struggle to resist state oppression"--

"This collection of reports and essays explores police violence against Black, Brown, Indigenous and other marginalized communities, miscarriages of justice, and failures of token accountability and reform measures. It also makes a compelling and provocative argument against calling the police. Contributions cover a broad range of issues including the killing by police of Black men and women, police violence against Latino and Indigenous communities, law enforcement treatment of pregnant people and those with mental illness, and the impact of racist police violence on parenting, as well as specific stories such as a Detroit police conspiracy to slap murder convictions on young Black men using police informants, and the failure of Chicago's much-touted Independent Police Review Authority, the body supposedly responsible for investigating police misconduct."--

With his colleagues at the People's Law Office (PLO), Taylor has argued landmark civil rights cases that have exposed corruption and cover-ups within the Chicago Police Department (CPD) and throughout the city's corrupt political machine. He takes the reader from the 1969 murders of Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and Panther Mark Clark--and the historic thirteen years of litigation that followed--through the dogged pursuit of commander Jon Burge, the leader of a torture ring within the CPD that used barbaric methods, including electric shock, to elicit false confessions from suspects. Joining forces with community activists, torture survivors and their families, other lawyers, and local reporters, Taylor and the PLO gathered evidence from multiple cases to bring suit against the CPD officers and the City of Chicago. As the struggle expanded beyond the torture scandal to the ultimately successful campaign to end the death penalty in Illinois, and obtained reparations for many of the torture survivors, it set human rights precedents that have since been adopted across the United States. --From publisher description.

Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner, shares the tragedies she's faced, recalls her son's life and death, and recounts her newfound role as an activist in the fight for racial equality. -- Adapted from book jacket.;The video of Eric Garner suffering--and dying from--an illegal chokehold at the hands of New York City police officers on Staten Island went viral. Carr, Garner's mother, recalls her son's life and death and recounts her newfound role as an activist in the fight for racial equality. In a world where young black men and women now automatically document police interactions with their cell phones--for fear of brutality and even death--she speaks for those who no longer can.--Adapted from jacket.

A behind-the-scenes account of the #blacklivesmatter movement shares insights into the young men and women behind it, citing the racially charged controversies that have motivated members and the economic, political, and personal histories that inform its purpose.;"A deeply reported book that brings alive the quest for justice in the deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Freddie Gray, offering both unparalleled insight into the reality of police violence in America and an intimate, moving portrait of those working to end it. Conducting hundreds of interviews over the course of more than one year of reporting on the ground, Washington Post writer Wesley Lowery traveled from Ferguson, Missouri, to Cleveland, Ohio; Charleston, South Carolina; and Baltimore, Maryland, and then back to Ferguson to uncover life inside the most heavily policed, if otherwise neglected, corners of America today. In an effort to grasp the magnitude of the response to Michael Brown's death and understand the scale of the problem police violence represents, Lowery speaks to Brown's family and the families of other victims as well as local activists. By posing the question "What does the loss of any one life mean to the rest of the nation?" Lowery examines the cumulative effect of decades of racially biased policing in segregated neighborhoods with failing schools, crumbling infrastructure, and too few jobs. Studded with moments of joy, and tragedy, They Can't Kill us All offers a historically informed look at the standoff between the police and those they are sworn to protect, showing that civil unrest is just one tool of resistance in the broader struggle for justice. As Lowery brings vividly to life, the protests against police killings are also about the black community's long history on the receiving end of perceived and actual acts of injustice and discrimination. They Can't Kill us All grapples with a persistent if largely unexamined aspect of the otherwise transformative presidency of Barack Obama: the failure to deliver tangible security and opportunity to those Americans most in need of both."--Jacket.

"When Michael Orlandus Darrion Brown was born, he was adored and doted on by his aunts, uncles, grandparents, his father, and most of all by his sixteen-year-old mother, who nicknamed him Mike Mike. Lezley McSpadden never imagined that her son's name would inspire the resounding chants of protestors in Ferguson, Missouri. In Tell the truth & shame the devil, McSpadden picks up the pieces of the tragedy that shook her life and the country to its core, and reveals the unforgettable story of her life, her son, and their truth."--Dustjacket.

"We are better than this" has been the rallying cry since Donald Trump was elected. But as New York Times-bestselling author Mychal Denzel Smith shows, Americans are too comfortable imagining our greatness. We like to believe in the rightness of our path and the inevitability of choosing our better angels. But historically, we've only come close to living up to the ideals we profess after we've been dragged, kicking and screaming, toward justice. Growth only happens when we confront our deceptions and our own complicity in them. In Stakes Is High, Smith exposes the contradictions at the heart of American life - between patriotism and justice, between freedom and inequality, incarceration, police violence. In a series of incisive essays, Smith holds us to account individually and as a nation. He examines his own shortcomings, grapples with the anxiety of feeling stuck, and looks in new directions for the tools to build a just America. He questions whether Martin Luther King, Jr. can ever really be the hero we need in our time, untangles the persistent cultural power of Bill Cosby, and weighs the value of police and prison abolition. Stakes Is High establishes Mychal Denzel Smith as a voice to be heeded as we prepare for the fight ahead"--

"If you're a robber, how do you choose your victims? As a police officer, how afraid are you of the young man you're about to arrest? As a judge, do you think the suspect in front of you will show up in court if released from pretrial detention? As a juror, does the defendant seem guilty to you? Your answers may depend on the stereotypes you hold, and the stereotypes you believe others hold. In this provocative, pioneering book, economists Brendan O'Flaherty and Rajiv Sethi explore how stereotypes can shape the ways crimes unfold and how they contaminate the justice system through far more insidious, pervasive, and surprising paths than we have previously imagined. Crime and punishment occur under extreme uncertainty. Offenders, victims, police officers, judges, and jurors make high-stakes decisions with limited information, under severe time pressure. With compelling stories and extensive data on how people act as they try to commit, prevent, or punish crimes, O'Flaherty and Sethi reveal the extent to which we rely on stereotypes as shortcuts in our decision making. Sometimes it's simple: Robbers tend to target those they stereotype as being more compliant. Other interactions display a complex and sometimes tragic interplay of assumptions: 'If he thinks I'm dangerous, he might shoot. I'll shoot first.' Shadows of Doubt shows how deeply stereotypes are implicated in the most controversial criminal justice issues of our time, and how a clearer understanding of their effects can guide us toward a more just society."--

Relates the history of American police forces from the constables and sheriffs of the past to the modern-day SWAT teams and riot squads that blur the line between police officers and soldiers.;The last days of colonialism taught America's revolutionaries that soldiers in the streets bring conflict and tyranny. As a result, our country has generally worked to keep the military out of law enforcement. But according to investigative reporter Radley Balko, over the last several decades, America's cops have increasingly come to resemble ground troops. The consequences have been dire: the home is no longer a place of sanctuary, the Fourth Amendment has been gutted, and police today have been conditioned to see the citizens they serve as an other-an enemy. Today's armored-up policemen are a far cry from the constables of early America. The unrest of the 1960s brought about the invention of the SWAT unit-which in turn led to the debut of military tactics in the ranks of police officers. Nixon's War on Drugs, Reagan's War on Poverty, Clinton's COPS program, the post-9/11 security state under Bush and Obama: by degrees, each of these innovations expanded and empowered police forces, always at the expense of civil liberties. And these are just four among a slew of reckless programs. In Rise of the Warrior Cop, Balko shows how politicians' ill-considered policies and relentless declarations of war against vague enemies like crime, drugs, and terror have blurred the distinction between cop and soldier. His fascinating, frightening narrative shows how over a generation, a creeping battlefield mentality has isolated and alienated American police officers and put them on a collision course with the values of a free society. - Publisher.

"When Trayvon Martin took his last walk down a Florida street on a cool February evening in 2012, he was just another American teenager, heading home with candy and a soda, talking on the phone with a friend, and dreaming of the future. By the end of the night he was dead--gunned down by a neighborhood watchman. Within weeks his name would be on the lips of a President and the movement for justice in his case would spread all over the country. Today his name is still evoked -- in the media, by artists like Beyonce and Frank Ocean in their work, and by presidential candidates--and his iconic photo, a boy in a hoodie, gazing at the camera, has been seen all over the world. But who was Trayvon Martin before he became, in death, an icon? And how did one black child's death on a dark street in a small Florida suburb become the match that lit a movement? Rest in Power, told through the alternating narratives of his parents, will for the first time answer those questions from the most intimate sources. The book will take us beyond the news cycle, controversies, and familiar images to give their deeper account: The story of the beautiful and complex child they lost, the grief and confusion that followed, the cruel unresponsiveness of the police and the hostility of the legal system, and how these two humble, hardworking parents, powered by love for their lost son, made his life matter, even in death."--Provided by publisher.

An urgent look at the relationship between guns, the police, and race The United States is steeped in guns, gun violence--and gun debates. As arguments rage on, one issue has largely been overlooked--Americans who support gun control turn to the police as enforcers of their preferred policies, but the police themselves disproportionately support gun rights over gun control. Yet who do the police believe should get gun access? When do they pursue aggressive enforcement of gun laws? And what part does race play in all of this? Policing the Second Amendment unravels the complex relationship between the police, gun violence, and race. Rethinking the terms of the gun debate, Jennifer Carlson shows how the politics of guns cannot be understood--or changed--without considering how the racial politics of crime affect police attitudes about guns. Drawing on local and national newspapers, interviews with close to eighty police chiefs, and a rare look at gun licensing processes, Carlson explores the ways police talk about guns, and how firearms are regulated in different parts of the country. Examining how organizations such as the National Rifle Association have influenced police perspectives, she describes a troubling paradox of guns today--while color-blind laws grant civilians unprecedented rights to own, carry, and use guns, people of color face an all-too-visible system of gun criminalization. This racialized framework--undergirding who is "a good guy with a gun" versus "a bad guy with a gun"--informs and justifies how police understand and pursue public safety. Policing the Second Amendment demonstrates that the terrain of gun politics must be reevaluated if there is to be any hope of mitigating further tragedies.

"Policing Black Bodies goes beyond chronicling isolated incidents of injustice to look at the broader systems of inequality in our society--how they're structured, how they harm Black people, and how we can work for positive change. The book discusses the school-to-prison pipeline, mass incarceration and the prison boom, the unique ways Black women and trans people are treated, wrongful convictions and the challenges of exoneration, and more. Each chapter of the book opens with a true story, explains the history and current state of the issue, and looks toward how we can work for change. The book calls attention to the ways class, race, and gender contribute to injustice, as well as the perils of colorblind racism--that by pretending not to see race we actually strengthen, rather than dismantle, racist social structures. Policing Black Bodies is a powerful call to acknowledge injustice and work for change."--Publisher's description.

Policing and police practices have changed dramatically since the 9/11 terrorist attacks and those changes have accelerated since the summer of 2014 and the death of Michael Brown at the hands of then-police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. Since the November 2016 election of Donald Trump as president, many law enforcement practitioners, policy makers, and those concerned with issues of social justice have had concerns that there would be seismic shifts in policing priorities and practices at the federal, state, county, and local and tribal levels that will have significant implications for constitutional rights and civil liberties protections, particularly for people of color. Perilous Policing: Criminal Justice in Marginalized Communities provides a much-needed interrogatory to law enforcement practices and policies as they continue to evolve during this era of uncertainty and anxiety. Key topics include the police and marginalized populations, the use of technology to surveil individuals and groups, the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement and the erosion of the police narrative, the use of force (particularly deadly force) against people of color, the role of the police in immigration enforcement, the "war on cops," and police militarization. Thomas Nolan's critique of current practice and his preliminary conclusions as to how to navigate contemporary policing away from the pitfalls of discredited and counterproductive practices will be of interest to advanced undergraduates and graduate students in Policing, Criminology, Justice Studies, and Criminal Justice programs, as well as to researchers, law enforcement professionals, and police policy makers.

"In the United States today, a young black man has a sixteen times greater chance of dying from violence than his white counterpart. Violence takes more years of life from black men than cancer, stroke, and diabetes combined. Even black women are more affected by violence than white men, despite its usual gender patterns. These disparities translate into starkly divergent experiences of life and death for whites and blacks in the United States. Yet aside from occasional flare-ups of violence that periodically hit the headlines, the problem has largely receded into the background of public discussion and has nearly disappeared as a target of public policy. The country has been understandably outraged by the recent spate of police shootings of black Americans. But as acclaimed criminologist Elliott Currie points out, the far more widespread problem of "everyday" violent death and injury in black communities has received much less sustained attention or concern. Yet both kinds of violence reflect the same underlying condition: the continuing marginality and structural disadvantage of many black communities in America today. Our unwillingness to confront those conditions helps to perpetuate a level of preventable trauma and needless suffering that has no counterpart anywhere in the developed world. Compelling and accessible, drawing on a rich array of both classic and contemporary research, A Peculiar Indifference describes the dimensions and consequences of this enduring emergency, explores its causes, and offers an urgent plea for long-overdue social action to end it"--

Let's begin with the basics: violence is an inherent part of policing. The police represent the most direct means by which the state imposes its will on the citizenry. They are armed, trained, and authorized to use force. Like the possibility of arrest, the threat of violence is implicit in every police encounter. Violence, as well as the law, is what they represent. Using media reports alone, the Cato Institute's last annual study listed nearly seven thousand victims of police "misconduct" in the United States. But such stories of police brutality only scratch the surface of a national epidemic. Every year, tens of thousands are framed, blackmailed, beaten, sexually assaulted, or killed by cops. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on civil judgments and settlements annually. Individual lives, families, and communities are destroyed. In this extensively revised and updated edition of his seminal study of policing in the United States, Kristian Williams shows that police brutality isn't an anomaly, but is built into the very meaning of law enforcement in the United States. From antebellum slave patrols to today's unarmed youth being gunned down in the streets, "peace keepers" have always used force to shape behavior, repress dissent, and defend the powerful.Our Enemies in Blue is a well-researched page-turner that both makes historical sense of this legalized social pathology and maps out possible alternatives. Kristian Williams is the author of several books, includingAmerican Methods: Torture and the Logic of Domination. He co-editedLife During Wartime: Resisting Counterinsurgency, and lives in Portland, Oregon.

There is a reason why people claim great respect for officers of the law: the job, by description, is hard--if not deadly. It takes a certain kind of person to accept the consequences of the job-- seeing the very worst situations, on a regular basis, and knowing that one's life is on the line every hour of every day. Working in law enforcement is emotionally and psychologically draining. It affects these public servants both on and off the job. Said plainly, shaking an officers' hand when you see them or posting a sign in the front yard that reads "Support the Badge" is lip service. Even going as far as to donate money to a crowdsourcing fundraising site does little to support the long-term professional development needs of officers. These are surface level signs of solidarity, and do little in terms of showing respect for the job and those who do it. For those who want to do more, this text provides reasons and a rationale for doing better by these public servants. Showing respect does not mean that one agrees with whatever another person or institution claims to be the "right" way. Showing respect and admiration means that we charge individuals to live up to their fullest potentials and integrate innovation wherever possible. In the case of policing in the era of Black Lives Matters, policing as usual simply is not an option any longer. It is disrespectful, to both the officers and those who are being policed, to rest on the laurels of past policing tactics. As we enter a time period in which police interactions are recorded (dash cams or body cams, for example) and new populations are being targeted (Latinx people), there is much to learn about what is working and what is not.

Chicana culture/politics. On March 23, 1979, journalist Roberto Rodriguez was taking photographs of Rasa cruising on Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles. Among the scenes he was recording was the senseless beating of an innocent and defenseless man by members of the sheriff's department. These officers then turned on Rodriguez, confiscated his camera and film and beat him so badly that he spent three days in the Los Angeles County Hospital. He was charged with assault with a deadly weapon and assault and battery on a peace officer. This work details Rodriguez's struggle to come to terms with the traumatic experience and to bring a civil suit against the officers involved. Combining material written before and after the trial, "Justice: A Question of Race" is an indictment of a society that sanctions police brutality against minorities and a testament to human courage and perseverance in the pursuit of justice.

"On July 17, 2014, a forty-three-year-old black man named Eric Garner died on a Staten Island sidewalk after a police officer put him in what has been described as an illegal chokehold during an arrest for selling bootleg cigarettes. The final moments of Garner's life were captured on video and seen by millions. His agonized last words, 'I can't breathe,' became a rallying cry for the nascent Black Lives Matter protest movement. A grand jury ultimately declined to indict the officer who wrestled Garner to the pavement. Matt Taibbi's deeply reported retelling of these events liberates Eric Garner from the abstractions of newspaper accounts and lets us see the man in full--with all his flaws and contradictions intact. A husband and father with a complicated personal history, Garner was neither villain nor victim, but a fiercely proud individual determined to do the best he could for his family, bedeviled by bad luck, and ultimately subdued by forces beyond his control. In America, no miscarriage of justice exists in isolation, of course, and in I Can't Breathe Taibbi also examines the conditions that made this tragedy possible. Featuring vivid vignettes of life on the street and inside our Kafkaesque court system, Taibbi's kaleidoscopic account illuminates issues around policing, mass incarceration, the underground economy, and racial disparity in law enforcement. No one emerges unsullied, from the conservative district attorney who half-heartedly prosecutes the case to the progressive mayor caught between the demands of outraged activists and the foot-dragging of recalcitrant police officials. A masterly narrative of urban America and a scathing indictment of the perverse incentives built into our penal system, I Can't Breathe drills down into the particulars of one case to confront us with the human cost of our broken approach to dispensing criminal justice"--Book jacket.

This ethnographic study, which includes participant observation research and in-depth interviews with police officers in a major California city and a large East Coast city, explores how police officers use their discretionary time on the job--and the consequences. Providing highly textured insights into police discretion, the authors show that America's "tough on crime" approach to justice has too often proved to be a smoke screen for controlling people deemed undesirable, rather than a genuinely effective strategy for reducing crime.

Following the high-profile deaths of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland, both cities erupted in protest over the unjustified homicides of unarmed black males at the hands of police officers. These local tragedies--and the protests surrounding them--assumed national significance, igniting fierce debate about the fairness and efficacy of the American criminal justice system. Yet, outside the gaze of mainstream attention, how do local residents and protesters in Ferguson and Baltimore understand their own experiences with race, place, and policing? In Hands Up, Don't Shoot, Jennifer Cobbina draws on in-depth interviews with nearly two hundred residents of Ferguson and Baltimore, conducted within two months of the deaths of Brown and Gray. She examines how protesters in both cities understood their experiences with the police, how those experiences influenced their perceptions of policing, what galvanized Black Lives Matter as a social movement, and how policing tactics during demonstrations influenced subsequent mobilization decisions among protesters. Ultimately, she humanizes people's deep and abiding anger, underscoring how a movement emerged to denounce both racial biases by police and the broader economic and social system that has stacked the deck against young black civilians.

"When Freddie Gray was arrested for possessing an 'illegal knife' in April 2015, he was, by eyewitness accounts that video evidence later confirmed, treated 'roughly' as police loaded him into a vehicle. By the end of his trip in the police van, Gray was in a coma he would never recover from. In the wake of a long history of police abuse in Baltimore, this killing felt like a final straw--it led to a week of protests and then five days described alternately as a riot or an uprising that set the entire city on edge, and caught the nation's attention. Wes Moore is one of Baltimore's most famous sons--a Rhodes Scholar, bestselling author, decorated combat veteran, White House fellow, and current President of the Robin Hood Foundation. While attending Gray's funeral, he saw every strata of the city come together: grieving mothers; members of the city's wealthy elite; activists; and the long-suffering citizens of Baltimore--all looking to comfort each other, but also looking for answers Knowing that when they left the church, these factions would spread out to their own corners, but that the answers they were all looking for could only be found in the city as a whole, Moore--along with Pulitzer-winning coauthor Erica Green--tells the story of the Baltimore uprising. Through both his own observations, and through the eyes of other Baltimoreans: Partee, a conflicted black captain of the Baltimore Police Department; Jenny, a young white public defender who's drawn into the violent center of the uprising herself; Tawanda, a young black woman who'd spent a lonely year protesting the killing of her own brother by police; and John DeAngelo, scion of the city's most powerful family and owner of the Baltimore Orioles, who has to make choices of conscience he'd never before confronted. Each shifting point of view contributes to an engrossing, cacophonous account of one of the most consequential moments in our recent history--but also an essential cri de coeur about the deeper causes of the violence and the small seeds of hope planted in its aftermath"--;Baltimore When Freddie Gray was arrested for possessing an 'illegal knife' in April 2015, he was, by eyewitness accounts that video evidence later confirmed, treated 'roughly' as police loaded him into a vehicle. By the end of his trip in the police van, Gray was in a coma he would never recover from. This killing led to a week of protests and then five days described alternately as a riot or an uprising that set the entire city on edge, and caught the nation's attention. Moore attended Gray's funeral, and saw every strata of the city come together, all looking to comfort each other, but also looking for answers. Through shifting points of view, Moore and Green create an engrossing account of the deep causes of the violence-- and the small seeds of hope planted in its aftermath. -- adapted from jacket

"On July 23, 1967, the eyes of the nation fixed on Detroit as thousands took to the streets to vent their frustrations with white racism, police brutality, and vanishing job prospects in the place that gave rise to the American Dream. For mainstream observers, the "riot" brought about the ruin of a once-great city, and then in 2013, the city's municipal bankruptcy served as a bailout that paved the way for Detroit to finally be rebuilt. Challenging this prevailing view, Scott Kurashige portrays the past half-century as a long "rebellion" the underlying tensions of which continue to haunt the city and the U.S. nation-state. Michigan's scandal-ridden emergency-management regime represents the most concerted effort to quell this rebellion by disenfranchising the majority black citizenry and neutralizing the power of unions. The corporate architects of Detroit's restructuring have championed the creation of a "business-friendly" city where billionaire developers are subsidized to privatize and gentrify downtown while working-class residents are squeezed out by rampant housing evictions, school closures, water shutoffs, toxic pollution, and militarized policing. From the grassroots, however, Detroit has emerged as an international model for survival, resistance, and solidarity through the creation of urban farms, freedom schools, and self-governing communities. A quintessential American story of tragedy and hope, The Fifty-Year Rebellion forces us to look in the mirror and ask, Are we succumbing to authoritarian plutocracy, or can we create a new society rooted in social justice and participatory democracy?"--Provided by publisher.

In almost every highly publicized case of police using deadly force and killing unarmed individuals, the person killed was an African American male. These incidents have caused dramatic erosion in public confidence in the justice system and America's promise of equal treatment under the law. Minority communities lack confidence in our judicial system. First, we must recognize our own biases. We all have them. No one is exempt. The biggest challenge, however, is to figure out what we do once we recognize them. For those working in the justice system, from police to prosecutors and judges, and yes, even public defenders, the consequences have broad, far-reaching, and sometimes even fatal consequences.

More timely now than ever, Deadly Force is a powerful indictment of police misconduct, a reminder of this issues long, tortured history and of how far we still have to go. From the host of MSNBCs The Last Word with Lawrence ODonnell, the riveting story of a 1975 police shooting of an unarmed black man in Boston - one of the first to draw national headlines - and the dramatic investigation and court case that followed.

"From an award-winning historian, a groundbreaking portrait of pervasive exploitation and radical resistance in America, told through the turbulent history of St. Louis. From Lewis and Clark's 1804 expedition to the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, American history has been made in St. Louis. And as Walter Johnson shows in this searing book, the city exemplifies how imperialism, racism, and capitalism have persistently entwined to corrupt the nation's past. St. Louis was a staging post for Indian removal and imperial expansion, and its wealth grew on the backs of its poor black residents, from slavery through redlining and urban renewal. But it was once also America's most radical city, home to anti-capitalist immigrants, the Civil War's first general emancipation, and the nation's first general strike -- a legacy of resistance that endures. A blistering history of a city's rise and decline, The Broken Heart of America will forever change how we think about the United States."--

Both significant and timely, Blackhood Against the Police Power addresses the punishment of "race" and the disavowal of sexual violence central to the contemporary "post-racial" culture of politics. Here the author asserts that the post-racial presents an antiblack animus that should be read as desiring the end of blackness and the black liberation movement's singular ethical claims. The book redefines policing as a sociohistorical process of implementing antiblackness and, in so doing, redefines racism as an act of sexual violence that produces the punishment of race. It smartly critiques the way leading antiracist discourse is frequently complicit with antiblackness and recalls the original 1960s conception of black studies as a corrective to the deficiencies in today's critical discourse on race and sex. The book explores these lines of inquiry to pinpoint how the history of racial slavery wraps itself in a new discourse of disavowal. In this way, Blackhood Against the Police Power responds to a range of texts, policies, practices, and representations complicit with the police power--from the Fourth Amendment and the movements to curtail stop-and-frisk policing and mass incarceration to popular culture treatments of blackness to the leading academic discourses on race and sex politics.