Fire The Cops

"Killer cops and cop-killers, 'police as workers' and police as soldiers, copwatching and counterinsurgency operations... these subjects and more are examined in this collection of essays by veteran activist Kristian Williams. Fire the Cops! is a collection of several essays written in the decade following the publication of Williams' Our Enemies in Blue, year in which Williams was heavily involved in the Rose City Copwatch organization in Portland. This book can be read as a supplement to Our Enemies in Blue, or on its own, as a series of attempts to apply historical lessons to circumstances as they unfold. Including both reports from the frontlines and reconnaissance into the plans and practices of our opponents, Fire the Cops! is intended to help inform future critique, and further struggle"--Back cover.

America has become increasingly divided and polarized in recent years. With growing racial tension, animosity toward law enforcement professionals, government corruption, and disregard for the constitutional process, there seems to be no easy answer in sight. But Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke knows where we must begin: we must stop blaming others; look at our problems with open eyes; take ownership of our family, community, and country; and turn to God for solutions. Deeply rooted in Sheriff Clarke's personal life story, this book is not a dry recitation of what has gone wrong in America with regard to race. It's about the issues that deeply affect us today-both personally and politically-and how we can rise above our current troubles to once again be a truly great people in pursuit of liberty and justice for all.

Let's begin with the basics: violence is an inherent part of policing. The police represent the most direct means by which the state imposes its will on the citizenry. They are armed, trained, and authorized to use force. Like the possibility of arrest, the threat of violence is implicit in every police encounter. Violence, as well as the law, is what they represent. Using media reports alone, the Cato Institute's last annual study listed nearly seven thousand victims of police "misconduct" in the United States. But such stories of police brutality only scratch the surface of a national epidemic. Every year, tens of thousands are framed, blackmailed, beaten, sexually assaulted, or killed by cops. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on civil judgments and settlements annually. Individual lives, families, and communities are destroyed. In this extensively revised and updated edition of his seminal study of policing in the United States, Kristian Williams shows that police brutality isn't an anomaly, but is built into the very meaning of law enforcement in the United States. From antebellum slave patrols to today's unarmed youth being gunned down in the streets, "peace keepers" have always used force to shape behavior, repress dissent, and defend the powerful. Our Enemies in Blue is a well-researched page-turner that both makes historical sense of this legalized social pathology and maps out possible alternatives.

From the big cities to dense forests to disasters at sea, authors Michael Sasser and Charles W. Sasser present some of the toughest cases and most harrowing missions faced by arson investigators. A brutal inferno snuffs out the lives of eighty-seven at the Happy Land Social Club in New York City... The Branch Davidians torch their compound in Waco, Texas, killing eighty-one men, women and children… Flames engulf the streets of Detroit on its deadliest Devil’s Day… In each case, some of America’s most intrepid detectives were on the case, seeking out the truth amid the ashes. Here are the toughest cases from real arson investigators—men and women who apply steely determination and extraordinary skills in the pursuit of one goal: to catch scheming profiteers, vicious vandals, and diabolical pyromaniacs. Where the untrained eye sees nothing but destruction, these investigators see clues—and they plunge undaunted into the charred debris of destroyed buildings and incinerated lives to seek them out. From big cities to dense forests to disasters at sea, they bring one vow to every case: to never let justice go up in smoke.

What's it like to have the legal sanction to shoot and kill? This compelling and often startling book answers this, and many other questions about the oft-times violent world inhabited by our nation's police officers. Written by a cop-turned university professor who interviewed scores of officers who have shot people in the course of their duties, Into the Kill Zone presents firsthand accounts of the role that deadly force plays in American police work. This brilliantly written book tells how novice officers are trained to think about and use the power they have over life and death, explains how cops live with the awesome responsibility that comes from the barrels of their guns, reports how officers often hold their fire when they clearly could have shot, presents hair-raising accounts of what it's like to be involved in shoot-outs, and details how shooting someone affects officers who pull the trigger. From academy training to post-shooting reactions, this book tells the compelling story of the role that extreme violence plays in the lives of America's cops.

America has become increasingly divided and polarized in recent years. With growing racial tension, animosity toward law enforcement professionals, government corruption, and disregard for the constitutional process, there seems to be no easy answer in sight. But Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke knows where we must begin: we must stop blaming others; look at our problems with open eyes; take ownership of our family, community, and country; and turn to God for solutions. Deeply rooted in Sheriff Clarke's personal life story, this book is not a dry recitation of what has gone wrong in America with regard to race. It's about the issues that deeply affect us today both personally and politically and how we can rise above our current troubles to once again be a truly great people in pursuit of liberty and justice for all. Foreword by Sean Hannity.

“Not since Angela Davis’s 2003 book, Are Prisons Obsolete?, has a scholar so persuasively challenged our conventional understanding of the criminal legal system.” —Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr., Washington Post From one of our top historians, a groundbreaking story of policing and “riots” that shatters our understanding of the post–civil rights era. What began in spring 2020 as local protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police quickly exploded into a massive nationwide movement. Millions of mostly young people defiantly flooded into the nation’s streets, demanding an end to police brutality and to the broader, systemic repression of Black people and other people of color. To many observers, the protests appeared to be without precedent in their scale and persistence. Yet, as the acclaimed historian Elizabeth Hinton demonstrates in America on Fire, the events of 2020 had clear precursors—and any attempt to understand our current crisis requires a reckoning with the recent past. Even in the aftermath of Donald Trump, many Americans consider the decades since the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s as a story of progress toward greater inclusiveness and equality. Hinton’s sweeping narrative uncovers an altogether different history, taking us on a troubling journey from Detroit in 1967 and Miami in 1980 to Los Angeles in 1992 and beyond to chart the persistence of structural racism and one of its primary consequences, the so-called urban riot. Hinton offers a critical corrective: the word riot was nothing less than a racist trope applied to events that can only be properly understood as rebellions—explosions of collective resistance to an unequal and violent order. As she suggests, if rebellion and the conditions that precipitated it never disappeared, the optimistic story of a post–Jim Crow United States no longer holds. Black rebellion, America on Fire powerfully illustrates, was born in response to poverty and exclusion, but most immediately in reaction to police violence. In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson launched the “War on Crime,” sending militarized police forces into impoverished Black neighborhoods. Facing increasing surveillance and brutality, residents threw rocks and Molotov cocktails at officers, plundered local businesses, and vandalized exploitative institutions. Hinton draws on exclusive sources to uncover a previously hidden geography of violence in smaller American cities, from York, Pennsylvania, to Cairo, Illinois, to Stockton, California. The central lesson from these eruptions—that police violence invariably leads to community violence—continues to escape policymakers, who respond by further criminalizing entire groups instead of addressing underlying socioeconomic causes. The results are the hugely expanded policing and prison regimes that shape the lives of so many Americans today. Presenting a new framework for understanding our nation’s enduring strife, America on Fire is also a warning: rebellions will surely continue unless police are no longer called on to manage the consequences of dismal conditions beyond their control, and until an oppressive system is finally remade on the principles of justice and equality.

Book of poetry about police and fire from the view of a retired law enforcement officer and firefighter. Police are in the news every day, often shown in an unfavorable light. Their role as rule-keepers in society is frequently misunderstood, the officers judged too quickly by visceral emotion before facts are fully collected and revealed, or legal and procedural issues completed. This collection of poems attempts to give faces to cops, a clearer look at the challenges and responses confronting them today, their paranoia, the rationale behind decision-making, their fears and attitudes. Law enforcement personnel are put into situations where expectations are simply too high, no outcome good enough, no answer the right one, all choices debatable, leaving police vulnerable to vilification, criticism and attack. By virtue of their work, they are often exposed to events that force them to respond in crises, to make decisions that affect other people's lives. Cops respond out of duty, sometimes successful in resolving issues, sometimes not, and only on the rarest of occasions, committing some nefarious act, which other cops find just as reprehensible as would the loudest vocal critic. The entire profession doesn't deserve to be judged based on the acts of a few who step outside the bounds of their authority or law. To cover the subject of public service, it also seems appropriate to include poems about fires and firefighters. The close relationship and overlap between police and fire may not be recognized at first glance, but risks and dangers are shared by them all, the stresses and unpredictable threats as common denominators.My personal views in these poems may be tainted and show a certain bias, but no more so than opposing views. At least they are based on thirty-five years in the trenches, most of that time as city cop and federal agent, plus a few early years as wildland firefighter, and a couple years as arson investigator. One common thread that weaves its way through the poems is that cops and firefighters are people, facing the same personal issues as everyone else. They are not heroes or cyborgs who possess abilities beyond the normal, though their actions may occasionally be heroic. They have problems at home the same as anyone else, bills to pay, lawns to mow. Public safety personnel are a cross-section of society - they are you. The word "fire" as used in this collection has several meanings, the most obvious is that of actual flames and burning. It also expresses the idea "...in the line of fire," describing the path of a bullet, someone as a target solely because of a profession or uniform. In a more general sense, and predominantly as used in this collection, the term describes the world's chaos, the wild and uncontrolled events involving imperfect humans, cops and citizens and what lies between, with all the differences of opinion, the human condition at its highest and lowest. Maybe this book of poems can shed a different light on how we view cops and firefighters. It is not intended to defend them, but to expose them, make it clear these are fellow human beings thrust into almost impossible situations. Imagine if these poems could put readers for just a few moments into the middle of those daily challenges, to envision for themselves how they might respond stepping into the fire.