Police History

From Robin D. G. Kelley, a "leading black historian of the age," Black Bodies Swinging is a fierce, distilled history of the pillage and defiance of Black America.

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

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.

They called it Satan's Circus - a square mile of Midtown Manhattan where vice ruled, sin flourished, and depravity danced in every doorway. At the turn of the twentieth century, murder was so common in the vice district that few people were surprised when the loudmouthed owner of a shabby casino was gunned down on the steps of its best hotel. But when, two weeks later, an ambitious district attorney charged young policeman Charley Becker with ordering the murder, even the denizens of Satan's Circus were surprised.

Buster, an English springer spaniel who has served his comrades and his country with unstinting devotion, has saved thousands of lives. This is the story of his partnership with RAF Police Sergeant Will Barrow, told by Will himself, describing how each came to save the other's life. It is a relationship that produced some heroic feats - including sniffing out explosive vests that led to the arrests of two suicide bombers - in the dust and desert heat of Afghanistan and beyond.

Today, as one of the biggest cities in the country, Chicago means a lot of different things to different people, but the Windy City, as culturally rich as it is, has long been known for controversial political corruption and its gangster past. While those kinds of crimes are less prominent today, one recent documentary Chiraq provided a new chilling, sobering, and wildly unfortunate sobriquet for the city. For far too many of the city’s youth, the places they call home are just a few steps removed from an actual war zone.

Diving deep into the unseen and unheard, Neely uses personal interviews, court records, media reports, and analytical data to understand how and why Black women are disproportionately more likely to die from homicide in comparison to their white counterpoints. Sounding an urgent alarm, No Human Involved contends that it is time for Black women’s lives to matter not only to their families and communities, but especially to those commissioned to protect them.

Ordinary Men explores the actions of a group of German police officers — Reserve Police Battalion 101 — that repeatedly carried out mass murder in Nazi Germany. Browning's text explores how seemingly average men became capable of committing horrific atrocities. This audio study guide presents the same expert content — written by experienced teachers, professors, and literary scholars — in an easy-to-access audio format.