American Police

Danny Marsh is a good guy and also an escaped felon. He has 24 hours to make it to freedom in Mexico. Along the way, he must evade the rabid Texas authorities and, even deadlier, the schemes of one of his closest allies, who isn't who he seems.

Presumed Guilty reveals how the Supreme Court allows the perpetuation of racist policing by presuming that suspects, especially people of color, are guilty.

Recently drummed out of a prestigious local university and its forensic research laboratory for blowing the whistle on pillars of the community, Dr. Cornell Westerly is a promising forensic scientist with a brand-new diploma and a California license plate. He's an apprentice crime scene investigator in need of a steady job to pay the rent. Westerly, an expert in DNA analysis, finds that opportunity with Detective Dash Brogan of the Los Angeles Police Department, a man steeped in the hard-boiled, old-school police procedurals of bygone times.

Crime in America features selections from a series of six books Paul Brakke wrote on what's wrong with the criminal justice system and how to fix it. These books deal with the police, courts, and prisons, and consider of some of the crises now facing America due to illegal immigration, the opioid crisis, and the growing divide between racial, ethnic, rural-urban, and income groups. This book summarizes the critical insights of these other books in order to reach the widest possible audience, because one of Brakke's reasons for writing this book is to inspire real change.

Former Havana detective Marlene Martínez, now happily running a bakery in Miami, has booked a week-long cruise to Mexico and the Caribbean with her niece, Sarita, as the girls quinceañera present. Sarita is beyond thrilled to discover that a Cuban telenovela star, Carloalberto, is also aboard for the trip. But even while trying to keep her niece away from the unsettlingly handsome actor, Marlene gets the feeling Carloalberto is in some kind of trouble - he is constantly on edge, and shady characters seem to find their way to him.

The subject of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls fails to get the attention it deserves. Facts show that Native American women and girls are twice as likely to be assaulted than any other race, and their third leading cause of death is injury. And out of nearly 6,000 missing and murdered cases, just shy of 200 are in the national law enforcement databases. We need to do something about this epidemic.

Sixteen years after Richard Hill testified in court that he crouched under the tablecloth and saw Henry Clayton rape his white momma and murder her and his black poppa, a DNA swab earns the prisoner a pardon and his freedom. Returning to Red River Falls, Clayton claims that he has been reborn and offers to help Hill, now a patrol officer, identify who really killed his parents. Hill, who relives the family horrors every day, doesn't believe him. But how can he prove DNA evidence wrong?

On the last Friday evening of the summer of 2013, five shots rang out in the parking lot of a new Boys & Girls Club in a part of northeast Denver known as the Holly. Long a destination for African American families fleeing the Jim Crow South, the Holly had become an “invisible city” within a historically white metropolis. While shootings weren’t uncommon, the identity of the shooter that night came as a shock.

The recent killings in Dallas, Baton Rouge, Ferguson, and elsewhere are just the latest examples of the longstanding rift between law enforcement and people of color. In this revealing journey to the heart of a growing crisis, CBS News justice and homeland security correspondent Jeff Pegues provides unbiased facts, statistics, and perspectives from both sides of the community-police divide.

At 15, Victor Rios found himself a human target - flat on his ass amid a hail of shotgun fire, desperate for money and a place on the street. Faced with the choice of escalating a drug turf war or eking out a living elsewhere, he turned to a teacher, who mentored him and helped him find a job at an auto shop. That job would alter the course of his whole life - putting him on the road to college and eventually a PhD.

Why is there so much uncertainty about how to reduce crime and fix what’s wrong with the criminal justice system? How can we make these fixes and lower the high costs of incarceration? Uncertain Justice discusses recent problems and suggests some fixes. The chapters in each section highlight what’s wrong in response to recent developments in legislation, in the news, and in research reports. Then, each chapter concludes with some suggestions for reforming the system.

Petrus first published and performed this poem after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. With every subsequent police shooting, it has taken on new urgency, culminating in the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, blocks from Junauda's home.