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Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable
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About This Book
An urgent and definitive examination of how the legal system prevents accountability for police misconduct, from one of the country's leading scholars on policing In recent years, the high-profile murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others have brought much-needed attention to the pervasiveness of police misconduct. Yet it remains nearly impossible to hold police accountable for abuses of power--the decisions of the Supreme Court, state and local governments, and policy makers have, over decades, made the police all but untouchable. In Shielded, University of California, Los Angeles, law professor Joanna Schwartz exposes the myriad ways in which our legal system protects police at all costs, with insightful analyses about subjects ranging from qualified immunity to no-knock warrants. The product of more than two decades of advocacy and research, Shielded is a timely and necessary investigation into why civil rights litigation so rarely leads to justice or prevents future police misconduct. Weaving powerful true stories of people seeking restitution for violated rights, cutting across race, gender, criminal history, tax bracket, and zip code, Schwartz paints a compelling picture of the human cost of our failing criminal justice system, bringing clarity to a problem that is widely known but little understood. Shielded is a masterful work of immediate and enduring consequence, revealing what tragically familiar calls for "justice" truly entail.
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Reviews
"Schwartz's argument is woven around numerous accounts of people, like Onree Norris, James Campbell, and Andrew Scott, who have been denied their constitutional rights but left without the ability to receive compensation for the harm they suffered ..."
"It's incredibly engaging because Schwartz smoothly weaves the human story into each case she explains."
"Even Schwartz, a fierce critic of law enforcement, acknowledges that over the past half century, "departments as a whole have become more professional."
"A well-reasoned case for reforms to create a better system of police accountability."
"Schwartz notes that the criminal legal system 'desperately needs repair,' a claim that seems confirmed by the book's exceptionally lucid and well-argued analysis."
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