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.
