A compelling case for top-to-bottom police reform, beginning with genuine self-policing.
An investigative report on longtime efforts by the NYPD to resist reforms against abuse and for better accountability.
As the mayor of New York from 2014 to 2021, Bill de Blasio spent a considerable amount of time trying to put an end to the NYPD’s long-standing “stop and frisk” policy, both “illegal and biased.” As investigative journalist Hayes writes, de Blasio “had staked his campaign on transforming the NYPD into a police agency that was more accountable to the public.” Just before Christmas in 2014, two officers were killed in Brooklyn, and the NYPD dug in its heels even more. De Blasio was placed in a dilemma: He couldn’t simply look past the police given his progressive base, and he was mindful of what happened to David Dinkins, one of his predecessors, when Dinkins tried to initiate similar reforms. De Blasio was serious about his efforts. When he landed on the City Council, he introduced legislation that expanded the purview of the Civilian Complaint Review Board—and again the NYPD resisted. The numbers speak for themselves. As Hayes observes, one report revealed that 83% of all people stopped by police were Black and Hispanic, far out of proportion to their share of the populace. Internal NYPD records indicate, furthermore, that of more than 2,000 complaints of racial profiling, none was “substantiated,” and only 12% of the complaints of abuse or misconduct brought before the CCRB ended in disciplinary action. Emboldened by the law-and-order fundamentalism of former mayor Rudy Giuliani, the NYPD continued to thwart de Blasio and has been rewarded by his successor, Eric Adams, a former NYPD officer whose new anti-gun unit was found to be “mostly pulling over suspects in cars for minor infractions including tinted windows, drug possession and bogus license plates.” Those suspects, naturally, were mostly Black or brown.
A compelling case for top-to-bottom police reform, beginning with genuine self-policing.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9781954220447
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Kingston Imperial
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
