Race, Politics, Policing, & Protest: Origins of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement: Policing

Using the LAPD as the book's spine and through-line, the author illuminates urban policing at a crossroads during the tumultuous violence-plagued years of the early 1990s. Years when the beating of Rodney King and the LAPD's brutality sparked the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, and police departments were caught between an often brutal, corrupt and racist past, and the demands of a rapidly changing urban population and environment. From LA he moves on to examine the NYPD and a transfomation that resulted in a dramatic decrease in crime. Blue ends in the summer of 2014 with crime at record lows, but events in LA, NYC and Ferguson, Mo., raising alarming warnings about aggressive racial profiling and the militarization of American policing.

Community policing is in decline, threatened with obsolescence by data-driven practices like COMPSTAT and Intelligence-Led Policing. Efficiency driven and aided by technology, these practices are delivering on the crime reduction promises community policing aspired to. Ray argues that much of community policing's difficulties lie in the lack of a clear theoretical foundation informing its community engagement mandate.

On June 15, 2001, the City of Los Angeles signed a consent decree with the United States Department of Justice. The consent decree is essentially a settlement agreement that aims to promote police integrity and prevent conduct that deprives persons of rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States. This study is the result of the mandate of one paragraph that requires an independent examination of police training in the areas of use of force, search and seizure, arrest procedures, community policing, and diversity awareness.

This highly informative and provocative book addresses a number of current law enforcement and citizen issues. Written by a law enforcement professional, it provides examples and terminology from the “real world” of policing, while offering a range of strategies for citizens in the arena of police-community relations, giving readers a peek into world of the police officerand the oft-conflicting power they wield and the constraints they face from the U.S.