Books like To protect and to serve by Joe Domanick

Michelle Alexander argues that mass incarceration has become a contemporary system of racial control, striking disproportionately at African‑American men and other disadvantaged groups while perpetuating a new form of Jim Crow.

James Ellroy’s gritty noir jazz in 1958 Los Angeles follows corrupt LAPD Lieutenant Dave Klein as federal investigators turn the city’s underworld into a deadly prison of power and betrayal.

A critique of policing that examines its historical expansion and proposes alternatives such as drug legalization and harm reduction to reduce crime and injustice.

A precise, ten‑year investigation into the 1999 Columbine High School massacre that uncovers the truth behind the myth and examines the killers, victims, and community response.

"Cops, politicians, and ordinary people are afraid of black men. The result is the Chokehold: laws and practices that treat every African American man like a thug. In this explosive new book, an African American former federal prosecutor shows that the system is working exactly the way it's supposed to. Black men are always under watch, and police violence is widespread--all with the support of judges and politicians. In his no-holds-barred style, Butler, whose scholarship has been featured on 60 Minutes, uses new data to demonstrate that white men commit the majority of violent crime in the United States. For example, a white woman is ten times more likely to be raped by a white male acquaintance than be the victim of a violent crime perpetrated by a black man. Butler also frankly discusses the problem of black on black violence and how to keep communities safer--without relying as much on police. Chokehold powerfully demonstrates why current efforts to reform law enforcement will not create lasting change. Butler's controversial recommendations about how to crash the system, and when it's better for a black man to plead guilty--even if he's innocent--are sure to be game-changers in the national debate about policing, criminal justice, and race relations"--

Spring 1992, and the City of Angels was suddenly a modern hell. During five terrifying days, as the world watched in horror, the deadliest urban rioting of the twentieth century laid waste to South Central Los Angeles. But there's a hidden story behind the riots. Lou Cannon, who covered Los Angeles for The Washington Post before, during, and after the violence, has exhaustively interviewed the survivors and learned the definitive story of just what happened and why. Official Negligence takes us behind the scenes at City Hall and at police headquarters, inside jury rooms, onto the front lines of the violence in the streets, and into the hearts and minds of unknown heroes and tells, for the first time, a riveting tale of multiple injustices, mismanagements, and misjudgments. Official Negligence illuminates all the characters and events surrounding what went wrong in Los Angeles. In so doing, it lays bare the ethnic, racial, and economic fault lines that divide American society at the approach of the millennium.

When a call girl from Kiev dies in the line of duty, detectives Chuck Knolls and Brian McCartin seek her killer among a circle of Russian women who have been sold unwittingly into white slavery. When a gangster's daughter, brought up in Las Vegas, takes a bullet, veterans Jerry Stephens and Paul Coulter trace clues scattered across the country to one of Manhattan's wealthiest real estate magnates. A cold case is reopened a suspicious mother-daughter drowning and a baffling rape/murder are solved. And finally, Corwin re-creates the investigation surrounding the late Bonny Lee Bakley, a woman driven--like her city--by the desire for fame, and allegedly murdered by her actor-husband, Robert Blake.--from Publisher's description (http://www.loc.gov/catdir/description/hol032/2003047883.html).