The Model City, Part 2: Promises

Even as city leaders were making big promises about the model city they claimed Louisville was going to become, they were making decisions that undermined those policing reform goals. In 2016, there were 117 homicides in Louisville — at that point, the most in decades. Police res ...  Show more

For LMPD to become the police department it claimed to want to be, the department would have to recruit the best of the best, retain experienced officers, and effectively discipline and remove problem one. But LMPD’s disciplinary system makes the latter hard to do. Former and cur ...  Show more

Los Angeles in the ‘70s was a dangerous place to be. The city was menaced by multiple serial killers, and by 1978, yet another one had emerged on the scene. In Skid Row, nearly a dozen identical murders put the area’s homeless residents on high alert. Police put their prime suspe ...  Show more

One of the defining characteristics of the modern nation state is that the state has a monopoly on the use of force. In the United States, police officers are a manifestation of this agreement, to which we are all parties--whether we like it or not--and that is perhaps one rea ...

The trial for the former Dallas police officer who shot and killed a black man she mistakenly thought broke into her home started yesterday.  

By the 1850s, Los Angeles was one of the most dangerous places to live in the West. Extrajudicial killings, unchecked racial violence, and vigilante groups like the Los Angeles Rangers prevailed. This “Wild West” culture seeped into and was propagated by the Sheriff’s Department ...  Show more