Mother Jones

BUY THE BOOK

Early one morning in June 2015, after Kris Jackson had been fighting loudly with his girlfriend, a police officer knocked on the door to their motel room a few blocks from California’s Lake Tahoe. Jackson, a Black 22-year-old who was on probation for a drug offense, did not stick around to deal with the cops. Wearing only a pair of shorts, he hoisted himself partway out of the bathroom window into the cool, dark air of the motel’s back alley. That’s when another officer, Joshua Klinge, rounded the corner of the building, spotted Jackson hanging out the window, and shot him from several feet away. Klinge later claimed that Jackson looked “aggressive” and had a gun. No gun was found. Jackson died at the hospital a few hours later.

As in the majority of police killings, the local

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Mother Jones

Mother Jones6 min read
Party Crashers
EVEN BEFORE THE last shots of the Revolutionary War were fired, John Adams wrote a friend to warn, “There is nothing I dread so much as a division of the Republic into two great parties.” Alas, political scientists will tell you the winner-takes-all
Mother Jones4 min read
Apocalypse News
IT’S BEEN A BRUTAL year for journalism so far. How many times have I written that sentence now? Enough that I wasn’t going to write it again, despite the headlines about how the current troubles in the news business represent an “extinction-level eve
Mother Jones10 min read
Spoiler Alert
IN THE SUMMER of 2000, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a scion of the Democratic Party dynasty, took time out of his schedule as an environmental attorney to write an op-ed for the New York Times. In the piece, Kennedy hailed consumer advocate Ralph Nader as

Related Books & Audiobooks