On the Shelf at CCBC Libraries
I Got a Monster by
The explosive true story of America's most corrupt police unit, the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), which terrorized the city of Baltimore for half a decade. When Baltimore police sergeant Wayne Jenkins said he had a monster, he meant he had found a big-time drug dealer--one that he wanted to rob. This is the story of Jenkins and the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), a super group of dirty detectives who exploited some of America's greatest problems: guns, drugs, toxic masculinity, and hypersegregation. In the upside-down world of the GTTF, cops were robbers and drug dealers were the perfect victims, because no one believed them. When the federal government finally arrested the GTTF for robbery and racketeering in 2017, the stories of victims began to come out, revealing a vast criminal enterprise operating within the Baltimore Police Department. Cops planted heroin to cover up a fatal crash that resulted from a botched robbery. They stole hundreds of thousands of dollars, faked video evidence, and forged a letter trying to break up the marriage of one of their victims to keep his wife from paying a lawyer. And a homicide detective was killed the day before he was scheduled to testify against the crooked cops. I Got a Monster is the shocking history of the rise and fall of the most corrupt cops in America from Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg.
Call Number: HV7936.C85 W66 2020
Hands up, Don't Shoot by
Understanding the explosive protests over police killings and the legacy of racism 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 protestors 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 protestors 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. Hands Up, Don't Shoot is a remarkably current, on-the-ground assessment of the powerful, protestor-driven movement around race, justice, and policing in America.
Call Number: HV8141 .C56 2019
Excessive Use of Force by
The vast majority of the law enforcement officers in this country perform their very difficult jobs with respect for their communities and in compliance with the law. Even so, there have been incidents in which this was not the case. Police brutality and misconduct has been under the microscope for the last several years, and Loretta Prater brings these issues to light through research reports and numerous examples of cases, including the personal case of her son. On January 2, 2004, Leslie Vaughn Prater, Loretta Prater's unarmed son, was a homicide victim in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His death resulted from an altercation with four police officers. Excessive Use of Force: One Mother's Struggle Against Police Brutality and Misconduct is the account of an African American family's personal experience with police brutality and misconduct, the behind the scene dynamics, as well as the personal emotional trauma experienced by victims' families. While written from the perspective of a mother, Prater brings a good balance of personal and outside information. She allows the reader to see inside her story but successfully includes secondary analysis of research and related stories of others who have experienced similar situations resulting from police officer misconduct. Excessive Use of Force engages the reader in this serious and important topic of police brutality and misconduct.
Call Number: HV8141 .C72 2018
Policing Black Bodies by
From Trayvon Martin to Freddie Gray, the stories of police violence against Black people are too often in the news. In Policing Black Bodies Angela J. Hattery and Earl Smith make a compelling case that the policing of Black bodies goes far beyond these individual stories of brutality. They connect the regulation of African American people in many settings, including the public education system and the criminal justice system, into a powerful narrative about the myriad ways Black bodies are policed. 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.
Call Number: HV9950 .H395 2018
Black and Blue by
The recent killings in Dallas, Baton Rouge, Ferguson, and elsewhere are just the latest examples of the longstanding rift between law enforcement and people of color. In this revealing journey to the heart of a growing crisis, CBS News Justice and Homeland Security Correspondent Jeff Pegues provides unbiased facts, statistics, and perspectives from both sides of the community-police divide. Pegues has rare access to top law enforcement officials throughout the country, including FBI Director James Comey and police chiefs in major cities. He has also interviewed police union leaders, community activists, and others at the heart of this crisis--people on both sides who are trying to push American law enforcement in a new direction. How do police officers perceive the people of color who live in high-crime areas? How are they viewed by the communities that they police? Pegues explores these questions and more through interviews not only with police chiefs, but also officers on the ground, both black and white. In addition, he goes to the front lines of the debate as crime spikes in some of the nation's major cities. What he found will surprise you as police give a candid look at how their jobs have changed and become more dangerous. Turning to possible solutions, the author summarizes the best recommendations from police chiefs, politicians, and activists. Readers will not only be informed but learn what they can do about tensions with police in their communities.
Call Number: HV8141 .P34 2017
We Own This City by
The astonishing true story of "one of the most startling police corruption scandals in a generation" (The New York Times), from the Pulitzer Prize-nominated reporter who exposed a gang of criminal cops and their yearslong plunder of an American city "A work of journalism that not only chronicles the rise and fall of a corrupt police unit but can stand as the inevitable coda to the half-century of disaster that is the American drug war."--David Simon, author of Homicide, co-author of The Corner, and creator of The Wire Baltimore, 2015. Riots are erupting across the city as citizens demand justice for Freddie Gray, a twenty-five-year-old Black man who has died under suspicious circumstances while in police custody. Drug and violent crime are surging, and Baltimore will reach its highest murder count in more than two decades: 342 homicides in a single year, in a city of just 600,000 people. Facing pressure from the mayor's office--as well as a federal investigation of the department over Gray's death--Baltimore police commanders turn to a rank-and-file hero, Sergeant Wayne Jenkins, and his elite plainclothes unit, the Gun Trace Task Force, to help get guns and drugs off the street. But behind these new efforts, a criminal conspiracy of unprecedented scale was unfolding within the police department. Entrusted with fixing the city's drug and gun crisis, Jenkins chose to exploit it instead. With other members of the empowered Gun Trace Task Force, Jenkins stole from Baltimore's citizens--skimming from drug busts, pocketing thousands in cash found in private homes, and planting fake evidence to throw Internal Affairs off their scent. Their brazen crime spree would go unchecked for years. The result was countless wrongful convictions, the death of an innocent civilian, and the mysterious death of one cop who was shot in the head, killed just a day before he was scheduled to testify against the unit. In this urgent book, award-winning investigative journalist Justin Fenton distills hundreds of interviews, thousands of court documents, and countless hours of video footage to present the definitive account of the entire scandal. The result is an astounding, riveting feat of reportage about a rogue police unit, the city they held hostage, and the ongoing struggle between American law enforcement and the communities they are charged to serve.
Call Number: E98.C67 N47 2021
NAACP Legal Defense Fund President
Online From CCBC Libraries
Police Brutality and White Supremacy by
An NBA veteran offers engaging interviews and reflections that explore police brutality, white supremacy, and the struggle for racial justice in America. "Thomas's interviews demand careful reading by all who want to expose racism, hold police accountable, and create an American society that practices social justice." --Library Journal, a Best Book of the Year in Political Science/Civil Rights "The book is filled with thought-provoking interviews and commentary on police brutality, white supremacy, and the lack of racial equality in the United States. Thomas interviewed victims of police brutality and their family members to convey what they actually went through and allow them to share what they experienced directly." --Bullets Forever "My family and I are extremely grateful for the support and love from my brother in the movement, Etan Thomas." --Emerald Garner, daughter of Eric Garner "I'm extremely grateful to Etan for continuing to shine a light on how police violence has harmed families across the nation. Our stories matter." --Dr. Tiffany Crutcher, twin sister of Terence Crutcher ETAN THOMAS, an eleven-year NBA veteran and lifelong advocate for social justice, weaves together his personal experiences with police violence and white supremacy with multiple interviews of family members of victims of police brutality like exonerated Central Park Five survivor Raymond Santana and Rodney King's daughter Lora Dene King; as well as activist athletes and other public figures such as Steph Curry, Chuck D, Isiah Thomas, Sue Bird, Jake Tapper, Jemele Hill, Stan Van Gundy, Kyle Korver, Mark Cuban, Rick Strom, and many more. Thomas speaks with retired police officers about their efforts to change policing, and white allies about their experiences with privilege and their ability to influence other white people. Thomas also examines the history of racism, white supremacy, and the prevalence of both in the current moment. He looks at the origins of white supremacy in the US, dating back to the country's inception, and explores how it was interwoven into Christianity--interviewing leading voices both in and outside of the church. Finally, with prominent voices in the media and education, Thomas discusses the continued cultivation of these injustices in American society. Police Brutality and White Supremacy demands accountability and justice for those responsible for and impacted by police violence and terror. It offers practical solutions to work against the promotion of white supremacy in law enforcement, Christianity, early education, and across the public sphere. Featuring original interviews with: Steph Curry, Chuck D, Yamiche Alcindor, Isiah Thomas, Jemele Hill, Craig Hodges, Stan Van Gundy, Mark Cuban, Jake Tapper, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, Sue Bird, Kyle Korver, Rick Strom, Cenk Uygur, Tim Wise, Chris Broussard, Breanna Stewart, Rex Chapman, Stephen Jackson, Kori Mccoy, Lora Dene King, Chikesia Clemons, Raymond Santana, Alissa Findley, Amber and Ashley Carr, Michelle and Ashley Monterrosa, Chairman Fred Hampton Jr., Abiodun Oyewole, Marc Lamont Hill, Officer Carlton Berkley, Pastor John K. Jenkins Sr., Officer Joe Ested, Captain Sonia Pruitt, and Bishop Talbert Swan.
Publication Date: 2022- Excessive Use of Force by
The vast majority of the law enforcement officers in this country perform their very difficult jobs with respect for their communities and in compliance with the law. Even so, there have been incidents in which this was not the case. Police brutality and misconduct has been under the microscope for the last several years, and Loretta Prater brings these issues to light through research reports and numerous examples of cases, including the personal case of her son. On January 2, 2004, Leslie Vaughn Prater, Loretta Prater's unarmed son, was a homicide victim in Chattanooga, Tennessee. His death resulted from an altercation with four police officers. Excessive Use of Force: One Mother's Struggle Against Police Brutality and Misconduct is the account of an African American family's personal experience with police brutality and misconduct, the behind the scene dynamics, as well as the personal emotional trauma experienced by victims' families. While written from the perspective of a mother, Prater brings a good balance of personal and outside information. She allows the reader to see inside her story but successfully includes secondary analysis of research and related stories of others who have experienced similar situations resulting from police officer misconduct. Excessive Use of Force engages the reader in this serious and important topic of police brutality and misconduct.
Publication Date: 2018
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