Blue
The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
From award-winning investigative journalist and author Joe Domanick, Blue explores the history of police culture and reform in the United States and the systems that enable racially motivated police brutality.
Beginning with the 1992 Los Angeles Riots and ending with the tumultuous police controversies swirling around both Ferguson, Missouri, and New York City in 2014, Domanick’s fast-paced book is filled with political intrigue, cultural and racial conflict, hard-boiled characters like intransient, warrior minded cops like LAPD chief Daryl Gates and America’s most famous police reformer, William J. Bratton. As the Los Angeles Times put it, Blue “weaves a compelling, fact-filled tale of a turbulent city in transition and a police department that often seems impervious to civilian control.”
As the story unfolds, Domanick seamlessly injects and analyzes police policies and actions, while discussing police accountability and legitimacy, effective crime-reduction based on real, long-term community policing, and what is necessary for a new stage of progressive police reform to take place. As Kirkus Reviews summed up in a starred review: “This is a well-executed, large-scale urban narrative, sprawling, engrossing, and highly relevant to the ongoing controversies about policing post-Ferguson.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Racial conflict, urban violence, and big-city politics tangle in this intricate, incisive study of reform in the Los Angeles Police Department. Investigative journalist Domanick (Cruel Justice: Three Strikes and the Politics of Crime in America's Golden State) starts with a lengthy account of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, sparked by anger in black and Latino neighborhoods over the beating of Rodney King and the police brutality it symbolized. He follows two decades of efforts to reform the LAPD's harsh, racially biased, militarized policing style while coping with gang crime in minority communities. This task was impeded by obstructionist brass and the Rampart scandal, which revealed that officers routinely beat and shot unarmed suspects, concocted false arrests, and resold stolen drugs. Domanick recounts this sprawling, complex story well, showing events through the eyes of a varied cast of police officials, street cops, civil rights leaders, and "gang interventionists" whom he credits with helping lower the temperature and body counts of gang wars. The book's central figure is police chief William Bratton, who reenergized stalled reform initiatives while lowering crime rates. Multifaceted, even-handed, sharp-eyed, and plainspoken, this gripping narrative is one of the best investigations yet of the explosive issue of police relations with minority communities.