American Police

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.

No Justice is the harrowing story of Robbie Tolan, who early on one New Year's Eve morning, found himself being rushed to the hospital. A White police officer had shot him in the chest after mistakenly accusing him of stealing his own car...while in his own driveway.

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.