The Police Can Be Reformed. These Two Books Lay Out How.

Most Americans want to see the police reformed. A Gallup poll conducted in May, two years after the murder of George Floyd, found that 50 percent of adults favored “major changes” to policing, 39 percent wanted “minor changes,” and only 11 percent thought no changes were required. Despite this general consensus and a patchwork of recent policy shifts in communities across the country, injustices continue to accumulate, and it would be easy to see the problems with policing as intractable.

Three high-profile deaths just since the start of this year would seem to confirm this feeling. On January 3, Keenan Anderson, a 31-year-old Black high-school teacher (and cousin of Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter), died after Los Angeles police repeatedly with a Taser. The next day, cops in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Sayed Faisal, a 20-year-old Bangladeshi American college student who allegedly approached them with a knife. And less than a week after that, another Black man, 29-year-old Tyre Nichols, died following by Memphis police officers. Video footage of the incident, released this past Friday, led to mass