★★★★ Killing The Future: The Theft Of Black Lives, by Nicholas Powers

Framed by snippets from an interview with Danette Chavis, who lost her son Gregory to gun violence in the Bronx in 2004 (because police wouldn’t allow him into the hospital), this essay serves as something of an overview of the book as a whole. The author dabbles in statistics but doesn’t bore the reader with numbers; the appeal here is more to our collective humanity, to the overbearing weight of history and ongoing trauma in the Black community of the United States.

“But every day another person of color is shot by police, and the holes left inside families are where loved ones used to breathe. The cops not only steal the lives of our children; they steal the lives of everyone who loved them. A part of us freezes in place, goes numb.”

—Nicholas Powers

★★★ Ring Of Snitches: How Detroit Police Slapped False Murder Convictions On Young Black Men, by Aaron Miguel Cantú

This author describes the well-known process of using “jailhouse snitches” to provide testimony against suspects, and how prosecutors in Detroit often used the same few men to convict dozens of others — many of whom remain behind bars today. It’s something about which I have some small personal knowledge. As a (untrained and not formally educated) small town court reporter, I covered many felony court cases over several years, some of which relied on jailhouse snitches. At the time I took most things at face value in the court system (and of course I often relied on prosecutors and police as sources for stories, so I had to maintain something of a working relationship with them), so I never questioned the practice. In at least one case, the only thing connecting the suspect to the crime was the testimony of a fellow prisoner, who may or may not have been offered favors or a reduced sentence.

★★★★ Amid Shootings, Chicago Police Department Upholds Culture Of Impunity, by Sarah Macaraeg and Alison Flowers

Given the space allotted, this was a fairly thorough report on the past fifteen years of Chicago PD’s habit of failing to take action against killer cops and of sometimes rewarding them with promotions, medals, raises, and overtime. The cynic in me says, “Well, this is Chicago, after all.” We’ve been told all our lives how corrupt and violent the Chicago PD is, so new “revelations” don’t feel like surprises.

★★★★ Beyond Homan Square: U.S. History Is Steeped In Torture, by Adam Hudson

Hudson makes the point that blockbuster headlines about Chicago’s Homan Square torture facility miss the context that torture is a long-accepted practice in the U.S., both in military and police circles, rather than some new and scandalous innovation. When Americans were shocked by revelations about Guantanamo Bay and mostly missed the Homan Square news, we have been misled into thinking these are aberrations.

★★★★ ‘Never Again A World Without Us’: The Many Tentacles Of State Violence Against Black-Brown Indigenous Communities, by Roberto Rodriguez

Rodrigquez focuses on law enforcement violence against “Brown” people, migrants from Latin America, U.S. citizens of Latino descent, and others that don’ get quite the same volume in the national news media as the police killings of African Americans. He mentioned several incredibly newsworthy historical events about which I’m sadly not very familiar, including: the Zoot Suit Riots (1943), Bloody Christmas (1951), and the police terrorism against the National Chicano Moratorium march in 1970 — not to mention some more recent cases I have heard of, like when a U.S. Border Patrol repeatedly shot a Mexican teen in the back, killing him, and then walked free of all charges. Though most of the essay is aimed at law enforcement officials, elected leaders, and the federal government, he also notes: “The mass media must also be confronted: Silencing and invisibilization also take place as a result of where the lens is focused or where the microphones are placed.” (The essay, with only occasional differences, is available online here.)

★★ Killing Africa, by William C. Anderson

This one seemed more scatterbrained to me, like it had interesting and worthwhile points to make but was never organized or fully fleshed out. Anderson tried to show that the world as a whole has been at Africa’s throat for centuries, exploiting, colonizing, profiteering, abusing, and that this is part and parcel with anti-black racism outside of Africa. But I don’t like he ever made these points successfully; it was more skipping around and putting a series of statements in no particular order.

★★★★★ Say Her Name: What It Means To Center Black Women’s Experiences Of Police Violence, by Andrea J. Ritchie

Using a smart mix of anecdotes, statistics, and citations, Ritchie shows how women of color suffer differently than men from police violence. While men are arrested at disproportionately higher rates than women (for both whites and non-whites), women’s experiences differ in kind: they’re far more likely to endure sexual assault, degrading cavity searches, and absence in media reports of police violence.

“Challenging police violence requires a challenge to the institutional structure itself, which is deeply rooted in policing the boundaries of race, gender, sexuality, poverty and nation. Going forward, our charge is not only to protest the killings, demand policy changes and call for accountability but also to nurture values and structures that will truly produce safety for all of us.”

—Andrea J. Ritchie

★★ Your Pregnancy May Subject You To Even More Law Enforcement Violence, by Victoria Law

This was the weakest chapter so far, in my opinion. Relying entirely on a handful of anecdotes, it attempts to make the point that being pregnant when encountering law enforcement makes things worse. However, to me, the selected anecdotes didn’t support that point; they each involved very little violence (relative to any of the other chapters herein) and in each case the women had seemingly committed the crimes of which they were accused. Perhaps the best point made here, though hazily, is how absurd it is when the state offers far more protection to fetuses than to the women who carry them.

★★★ Black Parenting Matters: Raising Children In A World Of Police Terror, by Eisa Nefertari Ulen

I suppose I was hoping for more from this one, perhaps advice for parents of Black children, or at least an in-depth look at the school-to-prison pipeline that most often affects children of color. Instead it was one parent’s musings about her own son and the world she sees him growing up in. In its own way, it was beautiful; it just didn’t seem to fit in this anthology.

★★★ Big Dreams And Bold Steps Toward A Police-Free Future, by Rachel Herzing

This essay didn’t live up to its title, offering several solid ideas for reforming policing in the United States, all of them incremental and none of them obviously resulting in a “police-free future”. To start, it didn’t address why anyone would want a future entirely free of police (which is a necessary place to start, given that even victims of police violence sometimes still want some form of policing to exist). Few of the proposed improvements were fleshed out or explained. One thing the essay did do well was point out that some of the reform ideas from the past either turned out to be ineffectual/pointless (like civilian review boards) or resulted in even more harmful policing (broken windows policies, specialized police units, comprehensive data collection).

★★★★ We Charge Genocide: The Emergence Of A Movement, by Asha Rosa, Monica Trinidad, and Page May

Another short one, this essay is a brief retelling of the origins of We Charge Genocide, a Chicago-based group attempting to restructure policing in that city. The name comes from the 1951 paper presented to the United Nations and subsequently either ignored or attacked by the press in the U.S. It was interesting and informative, but lacking any concrete ideas or proposals.

★★ Heeding The Call: Black Women Fighting For Black Lives That Matter, by Thandisizwe Chimurenga

This was really just a series of quotations from various women leaders in the Black Lives Matter movement, with a few transitionary statements between them.

★★★★ Our History And Our Dreams: Building Black And Native Solidarity, by Kelly Hayes

Hayes reviews the differences and similarities between movements that center Black people and movements that center Native people, how the two varied categories have sometimes helped one another and sometimes been suspicious or resentful of the other. She includes historical information dating back to some Natives owning slaves and some Black regiments being used to “win the West” against Native peoples, but also shows how the various groups are more likely to work together today.

One line that struck me from this essay was “the intentional maintenance of poverty”.

★★★★ A New Year’s Resolution: Don’t Call The Police, by Mike Ludwig

Like many people in the past several years, I have already made this change in my life. Ludwig briefly discusses reasons why people tend to call the police, and why it almost always isn’t necessary. Further, if Black people or other marginalized minorities are involved it can be downright dangerous. If you haven’t thought about it, I think it’s worth at least consideration: before calling the police, ask yourself if the situation is worth putting lives in danger?

“It forces us to consider whom we feel potentially threatened by and why, and how we are defining ‘safety’.”

—Mike Ludwig

★★★ Community Groups Work To Provide Emergency Medical Alternatives, Separate From Police, by Candice Bernd

Given that many violent police contacts with the public begin with non-crime-related 911 calls (medical issues, mental health crises, etc.), this essay offers insight into the possibility of alternative medical emergency responses that don’t involve sending armed police to the scene.

★★★ Building Community Safely: Practical Steps Toward Liberatory Transformation, by Ejeris Dixon

Dixon describes a few practical steps toward reducing policing in communities. They include relationship building, small bold experiments (like the Safe OUTside The System Collective), and learning and practicing skills like deescalation and community organizing.