Law Enforcement and Racial Justice

"A revealing history of covering up the true causes of deaths of BIPOC in custody—from the forensic pathologist whose work changed the course of the George Floyd, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown cases."

Downloadable PDF. A study of gentrification in Minneapolis and St. Paul between 2000 and 2015.

Jean-Michel Basquiat painted 'Defacement' (The Death of Michael Stewart) in 1983 to commemorate the death of a young, black artist who died from injuries sustained while in police custody after being arrested for allegedly tagging a New York City subway station. Published to accompany a focused exhibition of Basquiat's response to anti-black racism and police brutality, this catalogue explores a chapter in the artist's career through both the lens of his identity and the Lower East Side as a nexus of activism in the early 1980s.

"By turns historical, critical, and personal, this book examines the use of art-and love-as a resource amid the recent wave of shootings by American police of innocent black women and men."

"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."

Mumia gives voice to the many people of color who have fallen to police bullets or racist abuse, and offers the post-Ferguson generation advice on how to address police abuse in the United States. This collection of his radio commentaries on the topic features an in-depth essay written especially for this book to examine the history of policing in America, with its origins in the white slave patrols of the antebellum South and an explicit mission to terrorize the country's black population. Applying a personal, historical, and political lens, Mumia provides a righteously angry and calmly principled radical black perspective on how racist violence is tearing our country apart and what must be done to turn things around.

From the back cover: "At the center of contemporary struggles over aggressive policing practices is an assumed association in U.S. culture of blackness with criminality. Rima L. Vesely-Flad examines the religious and philosophical constructs of the black body in U.S. society, examining racialized ideas about purity and pollution as they have developed historically and as they are institutionalized today in racially disproportionate policing and mass incarceration."

Available via APA PsycNet Resources e-book access.
"Discusses alterations in the role of the new media in amplification of (primarily) negative views of policing. It also shows changes in the sources that shaped public opinion in the last 30 years. It later highlights changes in policing and the views of the police and their craft in this same period. Alterations in the police occupational culture and public political activities of police spokespersons were described as well as changes in the role of police and policing in the "high politics" of the city. Lastly changes in police leadership and presentational rhetoric in recent years were pointed out"

Melvin Whitfield Carter Jr. served as an officer in the St. Paul Police Department for twenty-eight years. He is the founder and executive director of Save Our Sons. Full of humor, toughness, hard work, and surprising vulnerability, this book shows the bitter weight of racism and the power of principled resistance.

Provides person accounts from 50 veteran black law enforcement officers from 16 difference law enforcement agencies in the South.
Also available via EBSCOhost online access.