On Sale: Jun 1, 2021
Page Count: 512 pages
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN-13: 9781541700284

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A comprehensive exploration of how police forces have become militarized—both in equipment and mindset—and what that means for American democracy.

“Fascinating and at times wrenching.” ―The New Yorker

The last days of colonialism taught America’s revolutionaries that soldiers in the streets bring conflict and tyranny. As a result, our country has generally worked to keep the military out of law enforcement.

But over the last two centuries, America’s cops have increasingly come to resemble ground troops. The consequences have been dire: the home is no longer a place of sanctuary, the Fourth Amendment has been gutted, and police today have been conditioned to see the citizens they serve as enemies.

In Rise of the Warrior Cop, journalist and author Radley Balko shows how politicians’ ill-considered policies and relentless declarations of war against vague enemies like crime, drugs, and terror have blurred the distinction between cop and soldier.

This fascinating, frightening narrative that spans from America’s earliest days through to recent events shows how a creeping battlefield mentality has isolated and alienated American police officers and put them on a collision course with the values of a free society.

“Provokes genuine outrage at the misuse of state power in its most brutal and unaccountable form: heavily armed police raiding the homes of unarmed, non violent suspects on the flimsiest of pretexts, and behaving more like an occupying army in hostile territory than guardians of public safety.” —The Economist

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Radley Balko

About the Author

Radley Balko is an investigative journalist and reporter at the Washington Post. He currently writes and edits The Watch, a reported opinion blog that covers civil liberties and the criminal justice system. He is the author of the 2013 book Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, which has won widespread acclaim, including from the Economist, New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, and Publishers Weekly, and was named one of the best investigative journalism books of the year by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. Since 2006, Balko has written dozens of pieces on Hayne, West, and Mississippi’s forensics disaster. His January 2013 investigation, “Solving Kathy Mabry’s Murder: Brutal 15-Year-Old Crime Highlights Decades-Long Mississippi Scandal,” was one of the most widely read Huffington Postarticles of 2013. In 2015, Balko was awarded the Innocence Project’s Journalism Award, in part for his coverage in Mississippi.

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