by Chris Hayes
The people in the park continued to shout and chase. The boys on their bikes were pedaling with all their might across a long green lawn.
I took my phone out, held it in my hand, and considered whether to press the button.
* I hasten to add that he did win Wisconsin that year, 2004.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, I want to thank the many people who took the time to talk to me for this book in cities around the country. Fifteen years into a career as a reporter, I’m still awestruck at the sheer patience and grace people are willing to extend when you ask them to share their experiences.
I was lucky and/or smart enough to hire a phenomenal research assistant in George Aumoithe, whose diligence, brilliance, and razor-sharp critical faculties improved the book immeasurably. (And thanks to Eric Foner for putting me in touch with George.)
A number of folks were kind enough to talk to me while working on the book and offer guidance, expertise, and feedback: Akhil Amar, Peter Moskos, Harold Pollack, John Pfaff, Jelani Cobb, Barry Friedman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michelle Anderson, Collier Meyerson, Cassie Fennell, Issa Kohler-Hausmann, Julily Kohler, and Marty Lafalce. Obviously, all the errors that still made it in are mine and mine alone.
This book also could not have happened without the support of everyone at MSNBC, particularly All In staffers Allison Koch, Joelle Martinez, Tina Cone, Todd Cole, Brian Montopoli, and Diane Shamis, who all contributed reporting that made its way into the book. They and the entire All In team are the best in the business and make me smarter and sharper every day. Denis Horgan, our executive producer, has kept the show steady and thriving even when I was spending long mornings writing. Kristin Osborne is an indefatigable hustler and has been tireless in promoting the show.
My thanks to everyone at Norton, all of whom have been a joy to work with. Huge thanks to my editor, Tom Mayer, who in a very real sense conceived this book when he sent an email to my agent, Will Lippincott, asking if I’d ever considered writing a book about policing. He’s been a rock. Rachel Salzman is incredible at her job. She and the rest of the Norton team—Sarah Bolling, Bill Rusin, Meredith McGinnis, Steve Colca, Don Rifkin, Julia Druskin, Janet Biehl, Elisabeth Kerr, Mary Kate Skehan, and Laura Goldin—have all worked feverishly to make this book a success. I am deeply grateful for their labor. And my relationship with Will Lippincott continues to be one of the most rewarding of my professional life.
Finally, none of this book would’ve happened without my family. My parents, Roger and Geri, raised me in the Bronx and taught me and my brother to love the city and all it offered, something my wife and I are trying to pass along to our little New Yorkers Ryan and David. (With the help of their uncle Luke.) And at every step in my journey as an adult—from waiting tables to writing and broadcasting—I’ve relied on my wife Kate as an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual partner. She is hands down the single best editor I have ever met, and she worked her magic on this book, improving it with every single tug and tweak. But more generally, she is everything good in my life. If this book is any good, that’s mostly her, too.
NOTES
Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.
I
20 a young man named Freddie Gray: “Man Critically Hurt in Taped Police Encounter,” Baltimore Sun, April 14, 2015; Kevin Rector and Jean Marbella, “Injuries in Van Ride Focus of City Probe,” Baltimore Sun, April 21, 2015; Scott Dance, “Gray Injury Suggests ‘Forceful Trauma’: Doctors Compare It to Impact from a Car Accident,” Baltimore Sun, April 21, 2015.
20 His death triggered: “Freddie Gray’s Funeral, Burial Set for Monday,” Baltimore Sun, April 25, 2015; Luke Broadwater, “Police Brace for March: Protest Today; Officials Acknowledge Mistakes in Death of Freddie Gray,” Baltimore Sun, April 25, 2015; Julie Scharper, “A Week After Freddie Gray’s Death, Mourners Gather to Pay Respects,” Baltimore Sun, April 27, 2015; Kevin Rector, Yvonne Wenger, and Jessica Anderson, “Protests Continue: Clashes Contrast with Street Dancing as Police and Troops Seek to Establish Calm,” Baltimore Sun, April 29, 2015.
20 bracing for the trials: Justin Fenton, “Six Baltimore Police Officers Indicted in Death of Freddie Gray,” Baltimore Sun, May 21, 2015.
20 None of them would be: Kevin Rector, “Charges Dropped, Freddie Gray Case Concludes with Zero Convictions Against Officers,” Baltimore Sun, July 27, 2016.
20 “My initial motivation”: Dayvon Love, interviewed on All In with Chris Hayes, MSNBC, November 6, 2015.
20 Today Love coaches: “Baltimore Students Redefine the Rules of Debate,” NPR, April 7, 2008.
22 the most violent developed country: Erin Grinshteyn and David Hemenway, “Violent Death Rates: The US Compared with Other High-Income OECD Countries, 2010,” American Journal of Medicine 129, no. 3 (March 1, 2016): 266–73, doi:10.1016/j.amjmed.2015.10.025.
22 the most incarcerated: Michelle Ye Hee Lee, “Yes, U.S. Locks People up at a Higher Rate than Any Other Country,” Washington Post, July 7, 2015.
22 the country’s homicide rate: Crime in the United States 1995, Uniform Crime Reporting, U.S. Department of Justice, FBI, n.d., https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/1995; Crime in the United States 2015, January-June, Uniform Crime Reporting, U.S. Department of Justice, FBI, n.d., https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/preliminary-semiannual-uniform-crime-report-januaryjune-2015; Andy Kiersz and Brett LoGiurato et al., “Obama Was Right When He Said ‘This Type of Mass Violence Does Not Happen in Other Developed Countries,’ ” Business Insider, June 18, 2015; Global Study on Homicide 2013, UN Office on Drugs and Crime, n.d., https://www.unodc.org/gsh/.
22 imprisons a higher percentage: Lisa Mahapatra, “Incarcerated in America: Why Are So Many People in US Prisons? [CHARTS],” International Business Times, March 19, 2014.
23 rivals the number of Russians: Adam Gopnik, “The Caging of America,” New Yorker, January 30, 2012; Fareed Zakaria, “Incarceration Nation,” Time, April 2, 2012; “US Prison Industrial Complex Versus the Stalinist Gulag,” Sean’s Russia Blog, May 11, 2013, http://seansrussiablog.org/2013/05/11/us-prison-industrial-complex-versus-the-stalinist-gulag/.
23 Nearly one out of every four: Michelle Ye Hee Lee, “Does the United States Really Have 5 Percent of the World’s Population and One Quarter of the World’s Prisoners?,” Washington Post, April 30, 2015.
23 Black men aged 20 to 34: “Collateral Costs: Incarceration’s Effect on Economic Mobility,” Pew Charitable Trusts, September 28, 2010, p. 31.
23 a grand total of three: The Right Investment?: Corrections Spending in Baltimore City, Justice Policy Institute and Prison Policy Initiative, February 2015, http://www.prisonpolicy.org/origin/md/report.html.
23 a homicide rate that is 9,000: “The Debate over Crime Rates Is Ignoring the Metric That Matters Most: ‘Murder Inequality,’ ” Trace, July 25, 2016, https://www.thetrace.org/2016/07/crime-rates-american-cities-murder-inequality/.
24 a once-in-a-century: William J. Stuntz, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 254.
24 The scope of this social upheaval: Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics, Database, U.S. Department of Justice, FBI, n.d., http://www.ucrdatatool.gov/.
25 In 1965 the unrest: Peter B. Levy, “The Dream Deferred: The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Holy Week Uprisings of 1968,” in Baltimore ’68: Riots and Rebirth in an American City, ed. Jessica Elfenbein, Elizabeth Nix, and Thomas Hollowak (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), Kindle ed., loc. 243.
31 Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton published: Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (New York: Vintage, 1967).
31 “nation within a nation.”: Kenneth B. Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989).
33 “Rather than rely on race”: Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in
the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012), Kindle ed., p. 2, loc. 202.
35 the semantic trick of racial vocabulary: Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (2012; reprint London: Verso, 2014), Kindle ed., p. 17, loc. 272.
36 The two-block stretch: “Nearly half of the city’s police calls” went to Section 8 apartments. Jesse Bogan Moskop Walker, “As Low-Income Housing Boomed, Ferguson Pushed Back,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 19, 2014.
38 “Do not treat criminals”: Investigation of the Baltimore City Police Department, U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, August 10, 2016, p. 29.
39 As of 2008, nearly 15 percent: Bruce Western and Becky Pettit, “Incarceration & Social Inequality,” Dædalus, Summer 2010.
II
43 “They are marching toward us”: Ray Downs, “Police in Ferguson Fire Tear Gas on Protesters Standing in Their Own Backyard,” Riverfront Times (St. Louis), August 12, 2014, http://www.riverfronttimes.com/newsblog/2014/08/12/police-in-ferguson-fire-tear-gas-on-protesters-standing-in-their-own-backyard; Ray Downs, “Ferguson Police Fire Tear Gas on Protester with ‘Hands Up’ in Their Own Backyard” (video), YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXhtvd0o2Fw.
44 when he was shot: Western and Pettit, “Incarceration & Social Inequality.”
46 a sixteen-year-old-foster child: The pupil later faced a charge for disturbing schools, as did Niya Kenny, the classmate who filmed the incident. See Loren Thomas, “Student Arrested Says She Was Standing Up for Classmate,” WLTX (Columbia, SC), October 28, 2015, http://www.wltx.com/news/local/student-arrested-says-she-was-standing-up-for-classmate/234859036.
47 “The poorest man may”: William Pitt, speech on the Excise Bill (1763), as quoted in Miller v. United States, 357 U.S. 301, 307 (1958).
47 “The gentleman on the left”: Brandon Friedman, Twitter post, August 13, 2014, https://twitter.com/bfriedmandc/status/499728733830676480?lang=en.
52 “a set of lawless piratical”: British Admiral John Montagu, as quoted in Peter Andreas, Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), Kindle ed., loc. 422.
53 Between 1680 and 1682: Ibid., loc. 352–53.
54 Between 1710 and 1760: Ibid., loc. 354.
55 “While it is true that any”: Floyd v. City of New York, 959 F. Supp. 2d 540, 557 (U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, 2013).
56 “The house of every one”: I am grateful to Barry Friedman and Akhil Amar for helping me understand this line of cases.
56 “enable[d] the custom house officers”: John Adams to William Tudor, Sr., March 29, 1817, National Archives: Founders Online, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6735.
58 “worst instrument of arbitrary power”: James Otis, “Against Writs of Assistance” (February 24, 1761), Constitution Society, http://www.constitution.org/bor/otis_against_writs.htm.
58 “Every man of an immense”: John Adams as quoted in Andreas, Smuggler Nation, loc. 617, emphasis added. See also James Farrell, “The Child Independence Is Born: James Otis and Writs of Assistance,” Communication Scholarship, January 1, 2014, http://scholars.unh.edu/comm_facpub/5.
60 “Convert the brave, honest officers”: Benjamin Franklin, as quoted in Andreas, Smuggler Nation, loc. 663.
61 “sent hither swarms of officers”: Ibid., loc. 803.
62 “Ferguson’s law enforcement practices”: Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, March 4, 2015, p. 2.
63 disproportionately empowered: Matt Pearce, “Ferguson Officials, Now Mostly Black like the City, Still Face Federal Suit over Police Reforms,” Los Angeles Times, February 25, 2016; Trymaine Lee, “Michael Brown Shooting Unearths Ferguson’s Deeper Troubles,” MSNBC, August 12, 2014.
64 “unless ticket writing ramps up”: Investigation of Ferguson Police Department, pp. 9–10.
64 “at disproportionately high rates”: Ibid., p. 5.
65 “We spoke, for example”: Ibid., p. 4.
67 “Lieutenant: Get over here”: Ibid., pp. 17–18.
67 arrested and detained journalists: Mark Berman, “Washington Post Reporter Charged with Trespassing, Interfering with a Police Officer,” Washington Post, August 10, 2015.
68 “In the colonies, the official”: Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), Kindle ed., p. 3, loc. 880.
70 “In the summer of 2012”: Investigation of Ferguson Police Department, 3.
71 “There is the man at the top”: Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), Kindle ed., p. 187, loc. 2361.
72 “In response he was tarred”: Andreas, Smuggler Nation, loc. 738.
72 “put in the stocks”: Carl E. Prince and Mollie Keller, The U.S. Customs Service: A Bicentennials History (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Treasury, U.S. Customs Service, 1989), p. 23, http://archive.org/details/uscustomsservice00prin.
72 “colonialism is not a thinking”: Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, p. 23, loc. 1171.
74 “I-270 traffic enforcement”: Investigation of Ferguson Police Department, pp. 13–14.
75 identical violations: Radley Balko, “How Municipalities in St. Louis County, Mo., Profit from Poverty,” Washington Post, September 3, 2014.
III
81 “Shots fired”: Cleveland 19 Digital Team, “CPD Releases 911, Dispatch Calls and Surveillance Video from Officer-Involved Shooting,” FOX19Now, November 26, 2014.
82 “observed a large sign”: Investigation of Cleveland Division of Police, U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, December 4, 2014, p. 6.
83 “moves through Harlem”: James Baldwin, “Fifth Avenue, Uptown,” Esquire, July 1960, reprinted in Esquire, October 16, 2007.
84 “At night, when we were going aboard”: Ed Southern, ed., The Jamestown Adventure: Accounts of the Virginia Colony, 1605–1614 (Winston-Salem, N.C.: John F. Blair, 2011), Kindle ed., loc. 265.
85 In 1622, Myles Standish: Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (New York: Viking Press, 2006), Kindle ed., loc. 2281; Edward Winslow, “Good Newes from New England” (1624), Plymouth Colony Archive Project, http://www.histarch.illinois.edu/plymouth/goodnews5.html.
85 “The savagery”: Bernard Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600–1675 (New York: Knopf, 2012), Kindle ed., p. 438, loc. 8180.
86 “The slaves, deaf to all”: James Walvin, Short History of Slavery (London: Penguin UK, 2007), Kindle ed., p. 121, loc. 1947.
87 “plunder”: Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” Atlantic, June 2014.
89 “So I’m working last week”: “People, Please Stop Making My Job So Difficult. • /r/ProtectAndServe,” Reddit, n.d.,
89 “So I’m working last week”: “People, Please Stop Making My Job So Difficult. • /r/ProtectAndServe,” Reddit, n.d., https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtectAndServe/comments/34zwuw/people_please_stop_making_my_job_so_difficult/.
94 The typical cadet training: Brian A. Reaves, “State and Local Law Enforcement Training Academies, 2006,” Bureau of Justice Statistics, February 2009, p. 6, http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/slleta06.pdf.
96 “If a mental health unit”: “Police Officer Who Killed Unarmed, Naked Veteran Charged with Murder,” ThinkProgress, January 22, 2016.
97 in 2015 a full quarter: Wesley Lowery et al., “Distraught People, Deadly Results: Fatal Shootings by On-Duty Police Officers,” Washington Post, June 30, 2015.
102 more than one gun: Scott Horsely, “Guns in America, By the Numbers,” NPR, January 5, 2016.
103 two police officers were shot: “2 Cops Shot Outside Ferguson Police Headquarters,” CBS News, March 12, 2015.
104 “We have a war: O.J.: Made in America, ESPN Films, Laylow Films, 2016.
105 SWAT teams: Radley Balko
, Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces (Philadelphia: PublicAffairs/Perseus Books, 2013).
105 “Under this warrior worldview”: Seth Stoughton, “Law Enforcement’s ‘Warrior’ Problem,” Harvard Law Review, April 10, 2015.
IV
110 Between 1960 and 1980: John F. Pfaff, “Escaping the Standard Story: Why the Conventional Wisdom on Prison Growth Is Wrong, and Where We Can Go from Here,” Fordham Law Legal Studies, Research Paper no. 2414596 (March 25, 2014): p. 7, http://ssrn.com/abstract=2414596.
110 But starting in 1980: “Punishment Rate Measures Prison Use Relative to Crime,” Pew Charitable Trusts, March 23, 2016, http://pew.org/1RBTAin.
110 When President Nixon signed: “The Controlled Substances Act (CSA): Overview,” Findlaw, n.d., http://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/controlled-substances-act-csa-overview.html.
111 The number of people in state: “Fact Sheet: Trends in U.S. Corrections,” Sentencing Project, December 2015, p. 3, http://sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Trends-in-US-Corrections.pdf; Nathan James, “The Federal Prison Population Buildup: Options for Congress,” Congressional Research Service, May 20, 2016, https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42937.pdf.
111 The Nixon campaign in 1968: Dan Baum, “Legalize It All,” Harper’s Magazine, April 2016.
111 In 1980 the percentage: Ryan S. King, “Disparity by Geography: The War on Drugs in America’s Cities,” Sentencing Project, May 2008, p. 6, http://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/disparity-by-geography-the-war-on-drugs-in-americas-cities/.
112 black people are four times more likely: Ian Urbina, “Marijuana Arrests Four Times as Likely for Blacks,” New York Times, June 3, 2013; The War on Marijuana in Black and White, American Civil Liberties Union, June 2013, 17–21, https://www.aclu.org/feature/war-marijuana-black-and-white.