America On Fire by Elizabeth Hinton

This book is all about looking back on the police who murdered George Floyd triggering the wide spread Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020 and seeing it as not so much a culmination of police murders of black people recently, but as part of police incited violence in black communities going back to the 1960's. History has been told by the victors, or in this case, by the state and federal government who both protect and fund the police. This narrative sets that perspective upside down, and does so convincingly. For most of U.S. history, the conventional narrative has had law enforcement authorities responding to widespread community violence, necessitating the so-called war on crime. This framing has provided advance justification for the use of force by police and set the conditions for a political economy that supplants reasoned governance with empty sloganeering. Slogans like “law and order” act as a talisman that has served to immunize police from accountability and politicians from their failure to address the myriad social problems that disproportionately affect citizens of color. The reality, the author contends, is that Black communities have for decades responded to police violence with acts of rebellion. The follow up to the protests, largely peaceful, is not a happy story either, with the funding of police forces to community services at a rate of 10:1 and no publicized efforts to rid police forces of white supremacists. So the fight continues.