A disturbing register of crimes committed by those who are supposed to shield us from crime.
Fierce condemnation of a justice system that systematically commits injustices against nonwhite defendants.
Continuing her book Crook County (2016) and its pointed concluding question—“What if the numbers that we understand as mass incarceration are, in actuality, mass wrongful convictions?”—sociologist Gonzalez Van Cleve looks into a pattern of Chicago police investigations of crimes allegedly committed by Black and Latino youth. Once the prevailing tactic was to beat these young people into confessing crimes that they had nothing to do with; now the techniques have shifted to the psychological but are just as terrifying. The fundamental assumption on the part of the investigators, she charges, is that these minority youth are guilty, if not of the crime in question then of some other crime, and that minority communities are havens of depravity. That’s an old trope that seems ingrained in police culture, a “racist fiction” that lends Chicago and Illinois the distinction of leading the nation in wrongful convictions, as well as outsize rates of arrest in those communities. The author writes that these produce twin traumas, the first of being falsely arrested and thrust into the carceral state, the second of not being believed and “of being told or gaslit into thinking that what happened is something you deserved.” These traumas are lifelong and are never likely to be addressed by a system in which the police and prosecuting attorneys seldom admit error. In the end, after recounting numerous cases of injury, wrongful arrest and conviction, suppression of exculpatory evidence, and other tactics, Gonzales Van Cleve arrives at the same point with which she opens her book: “Police are not the crime fighters you think they are. They are the perpetrators of wrongful convictions, meting out a type of vigilante justice that just so happens to be woven into the fabric of our criminal justice system.”
A disturbing register of crimes committed by those who are supposed to shield us from crime.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9780593447086
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: yesterday
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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