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
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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SEEN & HEARD
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