An
urgent and definitive examination of how the legal system prevents
accountability for police misconduct, from one of the country’s
leading scholars on policing
In
recent years, the high-profile murders of George Floyd, Breonna
Taylor, and so many others have brought much-needed attention to the
pervasiveness of police misconduct. Yet it remains nearly impossible
to hold police accountable for abuses of power—the decisions of the
Supreme Court, state and local governments, and policy makers have,
over decades, made the police all but untouchable.
In
Shielded,
University of California, Los Angeles, law professor Joanna Schwartz
exposes the myriad ways in which our legal system protects police at
all costs, with insightful analyses about subjects ranging from
qualified immunity to no-knock warrants. The product of more than two
decades of advocacy and research, Shielded
is a timely and necessary investigation into why civil rights
litigation so rarely leads to justice or prevents future police
misconduct. Weaving powerful true stories of people seeking
restitution for violated rights, cutting across race, gender,
criminal history, tax bracket, and zip code, Schwartz paints a
compelling picture of the human cost of our failing criminal justice
system, bringing clarity to a problem that is widely known but little
understood. Shielded
is a masterful work of immediate and enduring consequence, revealing
what tragically familiar calls for “justice” truly entail.