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Chokehold: Policing Black Men
With the eloquence of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the persuasive research of Michelle Alexander, a former federal prosecutor explains how the system really works, and how to disrupt it
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.
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.
320 pages, Paperback
First published May 30, 2017
274 people are currently reading
6376 people want to read
About the author
Paul Butler
2 books56 followersPaul Delano Butler is an American lawyer, former prosecutor, and current law professor of George Washington University Law School. He is a leading criminal law scholar, particularly in the area of race and jury nullification.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 152 reviews
June 14, 2020
WOW!!! Paul Butler took me on an intellectual ride that I never saw coming. There is not one group of people, gender, race or creed who should not read this book! Chokehold: Policing Black Men: A Renegade Prosecutor's Radical Thoughts on How to Disrupt the System is far from the "typical" political and/or social tome that cries foul in the name of an oppressed and suppressed group without clearly defining the issue and offering valid solutions. Paul Butler uses Chokehold as a proper noun versus as the verb we are accustomed to. "The Chokehold is made up of the oppressive systems and social norms that continue to view and treat black men as threats."
According to Butler, the law and order crisis in the US is not created by individual police officers, but rather by the police work itself. "American cops are the enforcers of a criminal justice regime that targets black men and sets them up to fail". The criminal justice regime is comprised of judges, prosecutors, prison wardens, and, us, everyday citizens.
Let that one marinate...
Do you hold your handbag closer when you see a group of young black me coming towards you?
Do you check the locks on the car doors when you drive through a questionable neighborhood?
Do you find yourself standing on the train or bus versus sitting on the only empty seat, which happens to be next to a black man?
Be honest...
Butler works diligently to ensure we understand how the Chokehold exaggerates both the perpetrators and victims of the United States criminal justice system. Were you aware that white men commit the majority of violent crimes in the US? Although, black men make up over 60% of the prisoners in US penal system. And, the icing on the cake? More often than not, black offenders receive prison sentences 10 percent longer than white offenders for the same crime.
Look, I will stop before I alienate anyone who is reading this review. Simply put: Paul Butler's Chokehold:Policing Black Men clearly and succinctly lifts the veil of our criminal justice system and challenges us to open our eyes to the racist and supremacist attitudes that built it. Mass incarceration is the unplanned child of slavery and Jim Crow.
The struggle is real. The system is broken. How many decades, if not centuries, will it take to change our criminial justice system? Until the Chokehold is unlocked, African American men will never be free, and, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, "our justice system will continue to be anything but".
Drop the mic...
UPDATE (06/14/2020):
When, I picked this book up almost 3 years ago, I never anticipated how relevant it would become today. It is beyond frustrating discussing how we got here. We must create a new reality!! We cannot continue to allow the sins of the past to dictate the promises of our future.
October 19, 2017
The problem is the criminal process itself. Cops routinely hurt and humiliate black people because that is what they are paid to do. Virtually every objective investigation of a U.S. law enforcement agency finds that the police, as policy, treat African Americans with contempt…. The police kill, wound, pepper spray, beat up, detain, frisk, handcuff, and use dogs against blacks in circumstances in which they do not do the same to white people and it’s all perfectly legal.
…If the police patrolled white communities with the same violence that they patrol poor black neighborhoods, there would be a revolution.
Author Butler openly admitted that he, while a federal prosecutor, was a perpetrator who defended cops who had racially profiled or used excessive force and sent many black men to prison.
…while politicians worry about Isis and al-Qaeda, legal violence by our own government poses a greater threat to the future of this country—and certainly to individual black men—than legal violence by terrorists.
If you are African American Male, police and prosecutors are waiting for you, watching and regulating the conduct of black men is a major part of their work. Cops are eager to stop and frisk you. They are looking for a reason to arrest you. This will improve their reputation on the force and their precinct’s numbers on Compstat, a management system used by major police departments to track crime. If they make enough stops and arrests, they might make detective. Prosecutors too are working to enroll you in the system.
There was a lot of information to embrace in Chokehold and author Butler did a great job in breaking down the information.
I found Chokehold a disappointment because it didn’t address what African Americans males can do to change their situation or how to change the perception of them and though I found Chokehold a disappointment, it should be read because it did raise some good points.
In reading Chokehold and author Butler’s claim to help African American males avoid becoming victims of law enforcement, I read none of that!
My take-a-way
In Chokehold we learn how to be perfect polite victims but we never learn how to be proactive in changing the status quo. We learn how to become a victim that is 100% submissive and to use the terms slaves used to avoid getting their ass-kicked or being murder by the white supremacist system.
Chokehold remains a great read for those who want to learn to navigate the system.
…If the police patrolled white communities with the same violence that they patrol poor black neighborhoods, there would be a revolution.
Author Butler openly admitted that he, while a federal prosecutor, was a perpetrator who defended cops who had racially profiled or used excessive force and sent many black men to prison.
…while politicians worry about Isis and al-Qaeda, legal violence by our own government poses a greater threat to the future of this country—and certainly to individual black men—than legal violence by terrorists.
If you are African American Male, police and prosecutors are waiting for you, watching and regulating the conduct of black men is a major part of their work. Cops are eager to stop and frisk you. They are looking for a reason to arrest you. This will improve their reputation on the force and their precinct’s numbers on Compstat, a management system used by major police departments to track crime. If they make enough stops and arrests, they might make detective. Prosecutors too are working to enroll you in the system.
There was a lot of information to embrace in Chokehold and author Butler did a great job in breaking down the information.
I found Chokehold a disappointment because it didn’t address what African Americans males can do to change their situation or how to change the perception of them and though I found Chokehold a disappointment, it should be read because it did raise some good points.
In reading Chokehold and author Butler’s claim to help African American males avoid becoming victims of law enforcement, I read none of that!
My take-a-way
In Chokehold we learn how to be perfect polite victims but we never learn how to be proactive in changing the status quo. We learn how to become a victim that is 100% submissive and to use the terms slaves used to avoid getting their ass-kicked or being murder by the white supremacist system.
Chokehold remains a great read for those who want to learn to navigate the system.
August 29, 2017
"The police kill, wound, pepper spray, beat up, frisk, handcuff, and use dogs against blacks in circumstances in which they do not do the same to white people. It is the moral responsibility of every American, when armed agents of the state are harming people in our names, to ask why."
This is in the introduction of the book that just gets better and better with brilliant observations by the author. A must read for anyone interested in dismantling a racist institution and transforming law enforcement.
This is in the introduction of the book that just gets better and better with brilliant observations by the author. A must read for anyone interested in dismantling a racist institution and transforming law enforcement.
August 16, 2017
After watching a great Politics & Prose discussion with Mr. Butler, I had to reserve a copy of this book from my local library. This book, along with "Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America" by James Forman, Jr. are required reading for everyone.
March 6, 2018
“A chokehold is a process of coercing submission that is self-reinforcing. A chokehold justifies additional pressure on the body because the body does not come into compliance, but the body cannot come into compliance because of the vise-grip that is on it. This is the black experience in America. This is how the process of law and order pushes African American men into the criminal system. This is how the system is broke on purpose…The Chokehold means that what happens in places like Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland- where the police routinely harass and discriminate against African Americans- is not a flaw in the criminal justice system. Ferguson and Baltimore are examples of how the system is supposed to work.”
Anyone paying the slightest attention to the news is aware of stories involving the police, courts, and black people in the United States. Ferguson. Charlottesville. Eric Garner. Treyvon Martin. Tamir Rice. And the list goes on. In fact, in the year after Colin Kaepernick began his protest of racism and police killings, at least 223 black Americans were killed by police.
However, author, Paul Butler states clearly that “racist cops are not the main problem. Most police officers are decent working-class men and women with no more racial hang-ups than teachers, doctors, or anyone else. The crisis in law and order stems from police work itself rather than individual cops. The work of police is to preserve law and order, including the racial order.” He flater observes that “…ideas from critical race theory help us understand why the crisis in criminal justice stems more from legal police conduct than illegal police misconduct… The system is now working the way it is supposed to, and that makes black lives matter less.”
Butler also explains that “anti-blackness is instrumental rather than emotional.” Black men, who are perceived as a threat, must demonstrate that they are not a threat to whites. This anti-blackness tool of oppression builds the wealth and status of whites and keeps them in power by exploiting blacks, keeping them down, and then blaming them for their position in society. Anti-blackness, then, is “racialized capitalism.” This anti-blackness is also internalized by those who are black which then leads to a sense of diminished self-worth and even creates and encourages self-loathing.
With numerous examples, statistics, and studies, Butler explains that the justice system is based on fear and the image of black men as “thugs” must be controlled. The justice system is designed to respond to—and perpetuate--that image and, thereby, oppress African-Americans. Sadly, Butler states, the justice system is not broke but is doing exactly what it was designed to do, and that current efforts to reform the system will not work because they do not address the real problem.
Though Butler emphasizes that this tool of oppression applies to many “outside groups,” not just blacks, his book focuses on the intersection of males who are black in the United States.
This is a very readable and extremely important book that not only “speaks truth” in plain language, but also suggests remedies for the problem we see acted out daily. It is a book that makes clear that all of us are affected by what lies behind our justice system, and that we all must consider if we really are OK supporting a justice system that treats people differently based on gender, skin, income, neighborhood, and so forth.
This is a “must-read” book.
June 21, 2022
I didn’t think that I would be saying this again so soon, but after having read “Just Mercy” a few months ago, I have to say again…this might be one of the most important book that I’ve read in years. To me, it completes a quartet of texts on policing and mass incarceration that include the likes of Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery By Another Name, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, and Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy. His frank description of the problems with the criminal justice system in the U.S. is so well-researched and well argued that it is difficult not to be swayed by his argument. If you have any interest in understanding how and why the U.S. criminal justice system is built on a foundation of white supremacy and more importantly want some ideas on how this racist system can be transformed, I would highly recommend reading this.
September 28, 2017
Chokehold was pitched this year as a book exposing police violence and targeting of black men in the same way that The New Jim Crow exposed prison violence and targeting of black men in America.
“A chokehold is a process of coercing submission that is self reinforcing… The Chokehold is a way of understanding how American inequality is imposed. It is the process by which black lives are made vulnerable to death imposed by others and death that comes from African Americans themselves. The Chokehold works through overt state violence- such as the way communities of color are policed- and slower forms of vulnerability, such as the poison water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and the gentrification, all over the country, of inner-city neighborhoods formerly occupied by poor people of color, and the way that when a black man chooses to kill somebody, nine times out of ten it is another black person… The Chockhold evolved as a ‘colorblind’ method of keeping African Americans down, and then blaming them for their own degradation… The Chokehold means that what happens in places like Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland- where the police routinely harass and discriminate against African Americans- is not a flaw in the criminal justice system. Ferguson and Baltimore are examples of how the system is supposed to work.”
Racial Profiling
The Supreme Court decision Terry v. Ohio in 1968 it was upheld that it was not a violation of the 4th amendment to do search and seizure (stop and frisk) without probable cause to arrest if the police officer has reasonable cause to suspect the person “may be armed and presently dangerous.” Butler argues that these practices are done to “humiliate and control” black men specifically.
“Stop and frisks signal that the police control the streets, and they signal this in a way that is, as Foucault described torture, ‘public,’ ‘spectacular,’ ‘corporal,’ and ‘punitive.’ When one sees a row of black men spread against a wall, one is witnessing what Foucault called ‘the very ceremonial justice being expressed in all its force.”
In the 2000 Supreme Court case, Illinois v. Wardlow ruled that if a person runs from the police, the police have a reasonable cause to follow and search a person. The white man would not flee because he has no reason to suspect interaction with police if he has not done anything wrong. The black man will flee because he has lived a lifetime of unnecessary stop and frisks.
“Throughout the existence of America, there have always been legal ways to keep black people down. Slavery bled into the old Jim Crow; the old Jim Crow bled into the New Jim Crow. In order to halt this wretched cycle we must not think of reform- we must think of transformation. The United States of America must be disrupted, and made anew.”
Police Violence
Along with this racial profiling also comes differences in police use of violence. Butler explains how the media has not helped in ending racial bias.
“Here is an amazing fact that goes a long way toward explaining the construction of the thug: Most white people have only one black friend. If the primary way you get to know African American men is the local evening news, I don’t blame you for being scared of us. Several studies have demonstrated that news programs overrepresent African American men as criminals and white people as victims.
With this fear of black men in our society, cops are given more leeway when using violence against people of color who predominately make up the popualation of low income, “high crime” areas.
“Police brutality is so widespread, and so predictable, that many small and medium-size cities actually purchase insurance policies to pay money to people who have been subject to police abuse. Big cities, however, self-insure, which means they set aside a certain amount of money to be used for this purpose. This raises an issue scholars call moral hazard, since police departments might be less likely to encourage their officers to act responsibly because paying for brutality is already included in the budget.”
Critical Race Theory
Critical race theory provides a framework for critical examination of society and culture around the intersections of race, power and law. As Butler notes in the book,
“…ideas from critical race theory help us understand why the crisis in criminal justice stems more from legal police conduct than illegal police misconduct… The system is now working the way it is supposed to, and that makes black lives matter less.”
Examining society through the lens of critical race theory shows that our criminal justice system must change. Whether this is through “reform” as liberals advocate for, or “prison abolition” as radicals call for.
“…white privilege itself brings a sort of prison abolition. White people don’t get locked up, or get less time, for the same conduct that sends black people to prison. When we wonder what would be the effect if most people who break the law were not locked up, we can look at white folks as an example of a community where that is already the case.”
Butler references three suggestions for immediate action toward prison abolition.
Advocating for a maximum sentence of 21 years in prison (a current law in Norway). In the the US, 1/9 people in prison are serving a life sentence or more.
Reduce number of things you can be sent to prison for. Every year currently, 10 million people go to prison for misdemeanors. Also, we need to reduce fines to be based on income.
Stop spending excessive money on the police and instead invest this money in community health care. Almost 80% of people in prison suffer from either addiction or mental illness.
If you would like to read about black women’s experiences with police, check out the book: Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color by Andrea J. Ritchie.
“A chokehold is a process of coercing submission that is self reinforcing… The Chokehold is a way of understanding how American inequality is imposed. It is the process by which black lives are made vulnerable to death imposed by others and death that comes from African Americans themselves. The Chokehold works through overt state violence- such as the way communities of color are policed- and slower forms of vulnerability, such as the poison water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and the gentrification, all over the country, of inner-city neighborhoods formerly occupied by poor people of color, and the way that when a black man chooses to kill somebody, nine times out of ten it is another black person… The Chockhold evolved as a ‘colorblind’ method of keeping African Americans down, and then blaming them for their own degradation… The Chokehold means that what happens in places like Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, Maryland- where the police routinely harass and discriminate against African Americans- is not a flaw in the criminal justice system. Ferguson and Baltimore are examples of how the system is supposed to work.”
Racial Profiling
The Supreme Court decision Terry v. Ohio in 1968 it was upheld that it was not a violation of the 4th amendment to do search and seizure (stop and frisk) without probable cause to arrest if the police officer has reasonable cause to suspect the person “may be armed and presently dangerous.” Butler argues that these practices are done to “humiliate and control” black men specifically.
“Stop and frisks signal that the police control the streets, and they signal this in a way that is, as Foucault described torture, ‘public,’ ‘spectacular,’ ‘corporal,’ and ‘punitive.’ When one sees a row of black men spread against a wall, one is witnessing what Foucault called ‘the very ceremonial justice being expressed in all its force.”
In the 2000 Supreme Court case, Illinois v. Wardlow ruled that if a person runs from the police, the police have a reasonable cause to follow and search a person. The white man would not flee because he has no reason to suspect interaction with police if he has not done anything wrong. The black man will flee because he has lived a lifetime of unnecessary stop and frisks.
“Throughout the existence of America, there have always been legal ways to keep black people down. Slavery bled into the old Jim Crow; the old Jim Crow bled into the New Jim Crow. In order to halt this wretched cycle we must not think of reform- we must think of transformation. The United States of America must be disrupted, and made anew.”
Police Violence
Along with this racial profiling also comes differences in police use of violence. Butler explains how the media has not helped in ending racial bias.
“Here is an amazing fact that goes a long way toward explaining the construction of the thug: Most white people have only one black friend. If the primary way you get to know African American men is the local evening news, I don’t blame you for being scared of us. Several studies have demonstrated that news programs overrepresent African American men as criminals and white people as victims.
With this fear of black men in our society, cops are given more leeway when using violence against people of color who predominately make up the popualation of low income, “high crime” areas.
“Police brutality is so widespread, and so predictable, that many small and medium-size cities actually purchase insurance policies to pay money to people who have been subject to police abuse. Big cities, however, self-insure, which means they set aside a certain amount of money to be used for this purpose. This raises an issue scholars call moral hazard, since police departments might be less likely to encourage their officers to act responsibly because paying for brutality is already included in the budget.”
Critical Race Theory
Critical race theory provides a framework for critical examination of society and culture around the intersections of race, power and law. As Butler notes in the book,
“…ideas from critical race theory help us understand why the crisis in criminal justice stems more from legal police conduct than illegal police misconduct… The system is now working the way it is supposed to, and that makes black lives matter less.”
Examining society through the lens of critical race theory shows that our criminal justice system must change. Whether this is through “reform” as liberals advocate for, or “prison abolition” as radicals call for.
“…white privilege itself brings a sort of prison abolition. White people don’t get locked up, or get less time, for the same conduct that sends black people to prison. When we wonder what would be the effect if most people who break the law were not locked up, we can look at white folks as an example of a community where that is already the case.”
Butler references three suggestions for immediate action toward prison abolition.
Advocating for a maximum sentence of 21 years in prison (a current law in Norway). In the the US, 1/9 people in prison are serving a life sentence or more.
Reduce number of things you can be sent to prison for. Every year currently, 10 million people go to prison for misdemeanors. Also, we need to reduce fines to be based on income.
Stop spending excessive money on the police and instead invest this money in community health care. Almost 80% of people in prison suffer from either addiction or mental illness.
If you would like to read about black women’s experiences with police, check out the book: Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color by Andrea J. Ritchie.
December 24, 2021
Paul Butler writes an extraordinary book on the policing of black men. He is detailed, thorough and offers practical solutions to shift our society to the values Americans espouse.
This is a must read book for all. Thank you Paul Butler.
This is a must read book for all. Thank you Paul Butler.
August 31, 2018
Another excellent contribution to the growing canon of books that ask the tough questions and as is the case with this one, propose some answers. A formidable salvo to add to that canon of books that stress Black Lives Matter and discusses ways that those lives are interrupted. In Chokehold, former Prosecutor Paul Butler flips the term Chokehold from an action that has been employed on Black men, ofttimes fatally, to a systemic thing that acts as a serious behemoth in keeping Black folks mired under the crushing weight of a system that places zero-value on Black life.
“The Chokehold is a way of describing law and social practices designed to respond to African American men. It is a two-step process. Part one is the social and legal construction of every black man as a criminal or potential criminal. Part two is the legal and policy response to contain the threat—to put down African American men literally and figuratively. Think of these two parts as “garbage in/ garbage out.” The “garbage in” is anxiety about black men that we internalize. The “garbage out” is law and policy based on this anxiety, which positions African American men as public enemy number one.”
Paul Butler offers some good information that could be potentially useful to anyone finding themselves or loved ones entangled in the unjust justice system. Chokehold will take its place among those other releases and will stand strong as an added piece of weaponry. Penned by the former prosecutor Paul Butler, he adds an insiders voice to the justice system even including a chapter that gives you tips on how to deal with the system if ever unlucky enough to be victimized by it. If You Catch a Case: Act Like You Know.
The advice is both instructive and damning in its reality, “you should resent having to do these things. They severely curtail your rights as a citizen of the United States, and as a free human being.” Some of those things he mentions simply fall under living while Black, like running fast in a hoodie, getting into a loud argument, wearing a “ Black Lives Matter” tee shirt. These activities will get you surveilled and possibly detained and arrested. The last chapter speaks of not only reforming the system but transforming the whole system including abolishing prisons. That of course is a bold pronouncement and is difficult to even conceive of.
The Chokehold as repped by this book is not the literal outlawed maneuver police have employed on Black men, but it is “a process of coercing submission that is self-reinforcing. A chokehold justifies additional pressure on the body because the body does not come into compliance, but the body cannot come into compliance because of the vise grip that is on it. This is the black experience in the United States. This is how the process of law and order pushes African American men into the criminal system. This is how the system is broke on purpose.”
After establishing that as a foundation Paul Butler meticulously lays out that process and the deleterious effects on Black men and women. He is very conscious about not making his book about “Black men are more oppressed than Black women”, he takes great pains to avoid falling into that easy trap, however he isn’t shy about highlighting the Chokehold in reference to Black men because the outcomes tend to be different, if not more debilitating. “If you are an African American male, police and prosecutors are waiting for you. Watching and regulating the conduct of black men is a major part of their work. Cops are eager to stop and frisk you. They are looking for a reason to arrest you.”
This is one to have on your shelf right between The New Jim Crow and Locking Up Our Own. Butler lays out his case like a skilled prosecutor putting the system on trial, and the reader gets to be on the jury carefully deciding on a verdict. If you are truly interested in what is going on and want to be a change agent and advocate for true justice, start by getting this book and reading it and get in the fight!
“The Chokehold is a way of describing law and social practices designed to respond to African American men. It is a two-step process. Part one is the social and legal construction of every black man as a criminal or potential criminal. Part two is the legal and policy response to contain the threat—to put down African American men literally and figuratively. Think of these two parts as “garbage in/ garbage out.” The “garbage in” is anxiety about black men that we internalize. The “garbage out” is law and policy based on this anxiety, which positions African American men as public enemy number one.”
Paul Butler offers some good information that could be potentially useful to anyone finding themselves or loved ones entangled in the unjust justice system. Chokehold will take its place among those other releases and will stand strong as an added piece of weaponry. Penned by the former prosecutor Paul Butler, he adds an insiders voice to the justice system even including a chapter that gives you tips on how to deal with the system if ever unlucky enough to be victimized by it. If You Catch a Case: Act Like You Know.
The advice is both instructive and damning in its reality, “you should resent having to do these things. They severely curtail your rights as a citizen of the United States, and as a free human being.” Some of those things he mentions simply fall under living while Black, like running fast in a hoodie, getting into a loud argument, wearing a “ Black Lives Matter” tee shirt. These activities will get you surveilled and possibly detained and arrested. The last chapter speaks of not only reforming the system but transforming the whole system including abolishing prisons. That of course is a bold pronouncement and is difficult to even conceive of.
The Chokehold as repped by this book is not the literal outlawed maneuver police have employed on Black men, but it is “a process of coercing submission that is self-reinforcing. A chokehold justifies additional pressure on the body because the body does not come into compliance, but the body cannot come into compliance because of the vise grip that is on it. This is the black experience in the United States. This is how the process of law and order pushes African American men into the criminal system. This is how the system is broke on purpose.”
After establishing that as a foundation Paul Butler meticulously lays out that process and the deleterious effects on Black men and women. He is very conscious about not making his book about “Black men are more oppressed than Black women”, he takes great pains to avoid falling into that easy trap, however he isn’t shy about highlighting the Chokehold in reference to Black men because the outcomes tend to be different, if not more debilitating. “If you are an African American male, police and prosecutors are waiting for you. Watching and regulating the conduct of black men is a major part of their work. Cops are eager to stop and frisk you. They are looking for a reason to arrest you.”
This is one to have on your shelf right between The New Jim Crow and Locking Up Our Own. Butler lays out his case like a skilled prosecutor putting the system on trial, and the reader gets to be on the jury carefully deciding on a verdict. If you are truly interested in what is going on and want to be a change agent and advocate for true justice, start by getting this book and reading it and get in the fight!
July 23, 2020
I got this book because I heard there were some prisons banning prisoners from reading it. There must be some forbidden fruit in it, and there is. Butler, a black former district attorney, uses “chokehold” as a metaphor for all the problems with the U.S. criminal justice system. He reveals all the hidden loopholes and secrets in the criminal justice system that police do not want black and brown people to know about. Chapter 7 alone is worth the price of the book. It is virtually an insider’s guide on how to avoid getting caught up in the system and how to navigate the system if you happen to get caught up in it. This book is an excellent companion book to Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow,” which was excellent at diagnosing the problems of on-going racial injustice and mass incarceration, but a little short on concrete, viable solutions. Paul Butler offers a smorgasbord of viable solutions. Highly recommended.
August 20, 2017
The history of abuse of power and how it has affected us as a people was thought provoking and made me wonder how we have come so far as a people. It's in our DNA as a people to want to be free. The author connects the dots of cause and effect well. You won't be the same after you read it...
August 24, 2020
This book was a ride. In content, it is equal parts pragmatic and analytic: full of statistics and case notes and real-world advice, all of which are objectively horrifying and some of which defy belief. These are all offered to shore up his characterization of the criminal justice system as “not broke,” but purposefully designed to prey on our fear of black men and created to control and supervise the behavior of black men. In tone, however, the book is full of a good prosecutor’s deliberate provocation. In drily reciting facts and statistics while also adding in little zingers, you feel that the author is needling you, steering you toward action, trying to get a rise out of you. It’s a brilliant maneuver and it works. In his final analysis, Butler suggests that the time-worn liberal approaches to police reform (civil rights lawsuits, federal oversight) must give way to more direct action, more civil disobedience. Case closed.
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October 11, 2020If you don't see anything wrong with how police police, I'd suggest reading this. If you've been putting in the work already this title doesn't shock but is an important entry into the literature for social justice.
June 12, 2020
This book was very educational and thought provoking. It gives so much insight about how our nation got to where we are with racial injustice and white supremacy. It takes you from slavery, convict leasing, to the segragation and mass incarceration that exists for African Americans today. It explains how laws allow for racism to continue in the United States in present day.
There are many things that allow for racism to coninue many years after the Civil Rights Movment - Economic disadvantage, race discrimination, fewer opportunites in housing and employment, unfair treatment by the laws.
The author argues that transformation must look far beyond the police and at the larger structural issues.
What happens when voices aren't heard? What happens when years of injustice continue without enough change? History tells us that unrest and violence will occur.
There are many things that allow for racism to coninue many years after the Civil Rights Movment - Economic disadvantage, race discrimination, fewer opportunites in housing and employment, unfair treatment by the laws.
The author argues that transformation must look far beyond the police and at the larger structural issues.
What happens when voices aren't heard? What happens when years of injustice continue without enough change? History tells us that unrest and violence will occur.
January 27, 2018
With candor, intellect, and wit, Professor Butler puts in very readable and personal language the lived experiences of African American men in America. His book is also extremely tragic and eye-opening and an indictment of our country's so-called justice system. Reading his book should be part of our country's journey in understanding, empathizing and taking part in the fight for racial equity because this country has created the problem of oppression of African Americans through prohibitive laws and this country needs to solve it. His recommendations are a good place to start.
November 29, 2017
This book really opened my eyes to the probability that men of color can and are being “policed” by law enforcement and court officials. The author demonstrates from the voice of an expert prosecuting attorneys how critical crime and punishment is for our brothers, and in many incidents a casein today’s judicial system can be the end of any promising future. I was scared about the futility of racism in America. Why can’t we all refresh and “get along?”
Want to read
January 16, 2018Started reading this after reading Invisible No More, which focuses on police treatment of women/gender-non-confirming people of color. So his use of intersectionality to frame why he was specifically focusing on Black men felt... strange to me. That said, I'm not sure I have a fully formed opinion on this because I'm not a member of the community. It's possible I would have kept reading this and enjoyed it, but it was way overdue at the library.
February 24, 2018
Chapter 7, which is a essentially a guide for African American men who get stopped by the police on how to behave in order to avoid arrest, prison time, etc, just broke my heart. We have two parallel justice systems in this country: one is the one white people are held to and which most white people think applies to every citizen, the other is the real one that African Americans are held to which is incredibly discriminatory, unfair and unjust.
June 25, 2018
Paul Butler gave people an extraordinary gift in the writing of this book.
At every turn this former federal prosecutor hands us information about
causes and effects that we overlook as the majority in the US.
Even as a person who sees racism apologists at every turn there were several
issues that I had never given much thought.
Very much worth the read.
At every turn this former federal prosecutor hands us information about
causes and effects that we overlook as the majority in the US.
Even as a person who sees racism apologists at every turn there were several
issues that I had never given much thought.
Very much worth the read.
May 25, 2017
Well-researched and eye-opening.
August 17, 2019
4.5!
Incredibly eye-opening and thorough. Butler said it best himself: “History will be your judge, as it has been of the freedom fighters before you.”
Incredibly eye-opening and thorough. Butler said it best himself: “History will be your judge, as it has been of the freedom fighters before you.”
February 28, 2020
This was a book review I wrote for Howard's Human and Civil Rights Law Review:
Book Review: Chokehold by Paul Butler
Reviewed by Justin Hansford
When Mike Brown was killed on August 9th, 2014, few of the people who took to the streets in protest could explain in-depth the structural details of the system that we knew would, in all likelihood, allow the killer escape without punishment. We just knew the whole system was guilty as hell. Any instincts to take a systemic perspective were made more challenging in a place like Ferguson, Missouri, where villainizing the individual “bad apples” was easy. Darren Wilson, Police Chief Jackson, and Prosecutor Bob McCullough seemed like characters pulled straight from an episode of “Eyes on the Prize;” segregation-era Alabama sheriffs would be proud of the Ferguson officials’ thinly veiled sense of racial superiority and arrogance. The national discourse fixated on these cartoonish characters localized Ferguson and framed it as an exception. Without the language and analysis of systematic legal, structural injustice, crafting a response that could move racial reform nationally proved problematic. In the gap during that first year of turmoil, the Federal government intervened, supplying its own narratives about “restoring trust between police and communities,” and implementing moderate reforms, body cameras, and police training.
I begin with this history because, at its best, “Chokehold” is the book we needed most in 2014 and 2015. It’s free to use of popular culture and hip hop street slang indicates that the book is meant to be accessible to an “ordinary person” who just needs to “know the facts,” It even includes a chapter on what do if you catch a case—particularly helpful as the author was a former federal prosecutor—indicating that it aspires to be an on the spot useful tool for someone recently arrested who is hoping to stay out of jail. From a movement perspective, I can imagine youth activists in Ferguson reading this book, discussing this book, and responding to mainstream media interviewers with citations to supreme court cases and scholarly studies proving that, far from an isolated incident, the killings of Mike Brown, Freddie Gray, and others were examples of the system “working exactly the way that it was designed to.”
The dual pragmatic and analytic nature of this text is not surprising as the author, Paul Butler, is a leading figure in the field of “critical race theory,” a lens which seeks to expose the central way that race informs American law, and importantly, often seeks to actively engage in advocating for progressive racial reform. That merging of theory and practice, called “praxis,” is a hallmark of critical race theory work. And that’s key to this book’s resonance. Another important factor is it’s framing. It’s not just the fact that Butler amassed this information about the legal system that strikes a chord. It’s his reading of this information—using the data to argue that the system was designed to kill Mike Brown and Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland and Rekia Boyd—that is so jarring.
This reading harmonizes with the BLM movement. Outside of its inheritance of Black Power era critiques of liberalism (which is also shared by CRT), BLM’s two most substantive contributions to the discourse on race have been its popularization and the manifestation of intersectionality and its critique of respectability politics. Butler uses both to excellent effect. He implicitly attacks respectability norms through his use of hip hop and street slang in a book that engages in a deep critique of supreme court jurisprudence and philosophy. And perhaps the book’s most interesting contribution to the scholarly discourse is its application of intersectionality and gender analysis to the unique way that gender works to harm black men in the criminal process. This is particularly bracing as in the BLM world, the concept of intersectionality is often flattened to signify nothing more than the drive to incorporate the experiences of Black women, or queer black women, into the discussion. This is fundamental to do of course. However, as the progenitor of the term Kimberly Crenshaw has argued in other platforms, intersectionality is often misunderstood. It isn’t simply a more complex way of saying Black feminism. It’s a separate concept. Butler demonstrates that here by using an intersectional lens to discuss police violence against Black men, demonstrating the idea’s usefulness in this context by explaining how police stops become “masculinity contests” that a Black man with an intersectional lens would be more likely to survive.
Surveying the field, it is clear that chokehold is perhaps the most on-topic book project to emerge from the deluge of literature which hit the bookshelves after the sparking of the Black Lives Matter movement. Most of the primary Black Lives Matter activists themselves have written memoirs that focused primarily on their own personal histories, as did the Ferguson police chief. Observers and commentators who were not lawyers or law professors tended to (appropriately) write in their own fields, using Ferguson as a launch point. Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery and Jennifer E. Cobbina’s documented the voices of the participants of the protests but didn’t offer any answers to the questions that brought people to the streets. Many of the most widely celebrated scholarly texts, from Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, or Tahnesi Coates, Eddie Glaude or Jeff Chang are wide surveys of racial issues that each scholar had studied previously, briefly touching on the issues at stake in Ferguson to add relevance.
Perhaps the most significant scholarly contributions thus far were Marc Lamont Hill’s Nobody and Making All Black Lives Matter by Barbara Ransby. While Hill takes an anthropological view and provides substantive context of the broader issues involved in a wide array of the most prominent Black Lives Matter related campaigns, Ransby does the most significant deep dive into the roots of the movement, exploring the pragmatics of the organizations involved, and adding the intellectual history of the movement’s core contributions to Black politics. Yet neither are scholars of law and policing. Yes, there have been compilations of law and policing scholars that have sought to 1) focus on policing and 2) adhere to the movement’s values. In hindsight, however, none of these other texts posits an argument nearly as effectively as Butler on the legitimacy of the BLM argument for systemic transformation. This is primarily because, as a monograph, Butler can more effectively maintain his theoretical framework throughout all of his chapters than any compilation could.
Sadly, no scholar has undergone to directly engage the arguments made over the policing issues brought about in the debates other than the pro-police screed “War on Police” by McDonald. Reading these two books alongside each other is interesting, however, as it further demonstrates the usefulness of this book for activists engaged in debates over the criminal justice system. Butler’s response to the urge to focus on Black on Black crime (all races commit crime intra race), more black are criminals, so they belong in jail, stop and frisk works, and training and other reforms are enough (the system is designed through the law and court cases to have racially biased outcomes, so well trained officers can’t stop it) are well researched and indeed more persuasive than McDougalls.
This leads me to conclude that the greatest weakness of the book is perhaps not in its substance but in its inability to reach its most urgent goals. From the nature of the work, I ascribe to Butler the goal of providing ammunition for activists to bolster their arguments in the theater of activism. But why aren’t more young activists reading this book, or using it to add scholarly legitimacy and data to their arguments for radical policing transformation? Why have they instead read many of the books listed above, even if they are less useful to them in their work and less on the topic?
Even more urgently, Butler says in the introduction that another of his goals is to spark a revolution, in the same way that if the chokehold were happening to white people, he imagines they would react. Taking him at his word, it’s not an impossible feat. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe played a role in abolition; Karl Marx’s Das Kapital helped to remake many societies. Books like Silent Spring or the Second Sex helped spring the environmental and the feminist movements. Why hasn’t this book had a similar popular impact?
It’s not an easy answer. It does appear that, with the exception of The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, the most popular books on racial reform by Black lawyers have been narratives. The founder of CRT, Derrick Bell, wrote afro-futurism allegories and even made films to spread his message; to Bryan Stevenson used a novel and feature film to make his impact. Perhaps Butler’s next foray into advocacy should rely more on narrative and read less like a “brief;” even a highly accessible legal argument with hip hop lyrics may not be what moves the people. I say this as someone who sincerely hopes his dream comes true and his ideas become widely embraced, sparking a revolution.
Book Review: Chokehold by Paul Butler
Reviewed by Justin Hansford
When Mike Brown was killed on August 9th, 2014, few of the people who took to the streets in protest could explain in-depth the structural details of the system that we knew would, in all likelihood, allow the killer escape without punishment. We just knew the whole system was guilty as hell. Any instincts to take a systemic perspective were made more challenging in a place like Ferguson, Missouri, where villainizing the individual “bad apples” was easy. Darren Wilson, Police Chief Jackson, and Prosecutor Bob McCullough seemed like characters pulled straight from an episode of “Eyes on the Prize;” segregation-era Alabama sheriffs would be proud of the Ferguson officials’ thinly veiled sense of racial superiority and arrogance. The national discourse fixated on these cartoonish characters localized Ferguson and framed it as an exception. Without the language and analysis of systematic legal, structural injustice, crafting a response that could move racial reform nationally proved problematic. In the gap during that first year of turmoil, the Federal government intervened, supplying its own narratives about “restoring trust between police and communities,” and implementing moderate reforms, body cameras, and police training.
I begin with this history because, at its best, “Chokehold” is the book we needed most in 2014 and 2015. It’s free to use of popular culture and hip hop street slang indicates that the book is meant to be accessible to an “ordinary person” who just needs to “know the facts,” It even includes a chapter on what do if you catch a case—particularly helpful as the author was a former federal prosecutor—indicating that it aspires to be an on the spot useful tool for someone recently arrested who is hoping to stay out of jail. From a movement perspective, I can imagine youth activists in Ferguson reading this book, discussing this book, and responding to mainstream media interviewers with citations to supreme court cases and scholarly studies proving that, far from an isolated incident, the killings of Mike Brown, Freddie Gray, and others were examples of the system “working exactly the way that it was designed to.”
The dual pragmatic and analytic nature of this text is not surprising as the author, Paul Butler, is a leading figure in the field of “critical race theory,” a lens which seeks to expose the central way that race informs American law, and importantly, often seeks to actively engage in advocating for progressive racial reform. That merging of theory and practice, called “praxis,” is a hallmark of critical race theory work. And that’s key to this book’s resonance. Another important factor is it’s framing. It’s not just the fact that Butler amassed this information about the legal system that strikes a chord. It’s his reading of this information—using the data to argue that the system was designed to kill Mike Brown and Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland and Rekia Boyd—that is so jarring.
This reading harmonizes with the BLM movement. Outside of its inheritance of Black Power era critiques of liberalism (which is also shared by CRT), BLM’s two most substantive contributions to the discourse on race have been its popularization and the manifestation of intersectionality and its critique of respectability politics. Butler uses both to excellent effect. He implicitly attacks respectability norms through his use of hip hop and street slang in a book that engages in a deep critique of supreme court jurisprudence and philosophy. And perhaps the book’s most interesting contribution to the scholarly discourse is its application of intersectionality and gender analysis to the unique way that gender works to harm black men in the criminal process. This is particularly bracing as in the BLM world, the concept of intersectionality is often flattened to signify nothing more than the drive to incorporate the experiences of Black women, or queer black women, into the discussion. This is fundamental to do of course. However, as the progenitor of the term Kimberly Crenshaw has argued in other platforms, intersectionality is often misunderstood. It isn’t simply a more complex way of saying Black feminism. It’s a separate concept. Butler demonstrates that here by using an intersectional lens to discuss police violence against Black men, demonstrating the idea’s usefulness in this context by explaining how police stops become “masculinity contests” that a Black man with an intersectional lens would be more likely to survive.
Surveying the field, it is clear that chokehold is perhaps the most on-topic book project to emerge from the deluge of literature which hit the bookshelves after the sparking of the Black Lives Matter movement. Most of the primary Black Lives Matter activists themselves have written memoirs that focused primarily on their own personal histories, as did the Ferguson police chief. Observers and commentators who were not lawyers or law professors tended to (appropriately) write in their own fields, using Ferguson as a launch point. Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery and Jennifer E. Cobbina’s documented the voices of the participants of the protests but didn’t offer any answers to the questions that brought people to the streets. Many of the most widely celebrated scholarly texts, from Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, or Tahnesi Coates, Eddie Glaude or Jeff Chang are wide surveys of racial issues that each scholar had studied previously, briefly touching on the issues at stake in Ferguson to add relevance.
Perhaps the most significant scholarly contributions thus far were Marc Lamont Hill’s Nobody and Making All Black Lives Matter by Barbara Ransby. While Hill takes an anthropological view and provides substantive context of the broader issues involved in a wide array of the most prominent Black Lives Matter related campaigns, Ransby does the most significant deep dive into the roots of the movement, exploring the pragmatics of the organizations involved, and adding the intellectual history of the movement’s core contributions to Black politics. Yet neither are scholars of law and policing. Yes, there have been compilations of law and policing scholars that have sought to 1) focus on policing and 2) adhere to the movement’s values. In hindsight, however, none of these other texts posits an argument nearly as effectively as Butler on the legitimacy of the BLM argument for systemic transformation. This is primarily because, as a monograph, Butler can more effectively maintain his theoretical framework throughout all of his chapters than any compilation could.
Sadly, no scholar has undergone to directly engage the arguments made over the policing issues brought about in the debates other than the pro-police screed “War on Police” by McDonald. Reading these two books alongside each other is interesting, however, as it further demonstrates the usefulness of this book for activists engaged in debates over the criminal justice system. Butler’s response to the urge to focus on Black on Black crime (all races commit crime intra race), more black are criminals, so they belong in jail, stop and frisk works, and training and other reforms are enough (the system is designed through the law and court cases to have racially biased outcomes, so well trained officers can’t stop it) are well researched and indeed more persuasive than McDougalls.
This leads me to conclude that the greatest weakness of the book is perhaps not in its substance but in its inability to reach its most urgent goals. From the nature of the work, I ascribe to Butler the goal of providing ammunition for activists to bolster their arguments in the theater of activism. But why aren’t more young activists reading this book, or using it to add scholarly legitimacy and data to their arguments for radical policing transformation? Why have they instead read many of the books listed above, even if they are less useful to them in their work and less on the topic?
Even more urgently, Butler says in the introduction that another of his goals is to spark a revolution, in the same way that if the chokehold were happening to white people, he imagines they would react. Taking him at his word, it’s not an impossible feat. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe played a role in abolition; Karl Marx’s Das Kapital helped to remake many societies. Books like Silent Spring or the Second Sex helped spring the environmental and the feminist movements. Why hasn’t this book had a similar popular impact?
It’s not an easy answer. It does appear that, with the exception of The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, the most popular books on racial reform by Black lawyers have been narratives. The founder of CRT, Derrick Bell, wrote afro-futurism allegories and even made films to spread his message; to Bryan Stevenson used a novel and feature film to make his impact. Perhaps Butler’s next foray into advocacy should rely more on narrative and read less like a “brief;” even a highly accessible legal argument with hip hop lyrics may not be what moves the people. I say this as someone who sincerely hopes his dream comes true and his ideas become widely embraced, sparking a revolution.
March 19, 2022
The book was phenomenal, my only issue was one chapter.
I work in criminal defense. Chapter 7 is an over generalization of how it works and what to do. Most of what was said is laughable in my county. It just isn’t how it works. For example, you don’t get an arraignment in 48 hours, because that means something different here. You do go before a judge and get your charges read and a bond assigned, but charges may not even have been officially filed at this point. Arraignments and preliminary hearings are where evidence are presented (or have been presented in front of a secret jury, which is a whole other issue). So filing a motion to dismiss to trigger this usually would just make the prosecution laugh and the judge angry and waste the time of the defense attorney since this hearing is already part of the process here (though an attorney should be filing for a bond reduction immediately and be looking for ways to get evidence suppressed or the case dismissed from the very start). Diversion is not community service, but an intense probation that sometimes includes community service but only to very specific places. My county was also called out for its lack of use of the diversion program in the last election by NPR. Since then there has been a huge push for diversion, which has seen a rise in cases filed to be pushed to diversion instead of just not filed at all.
So please take that chapter with a grain of salt. Yes, there is great advice, but it doesn’t apply perfectly to every court system. Look into how the local systems work. Do your county, municipal/city, and federal courts have the same procedure? Who are the defense attorneys for each setting? Pay attention to elections for sherif and district attorney. They are small ways to change the system when you don’t know where to start or you aren’t on board with radical suggestions (though, the radical suggestions aren’t even radical at this point. The call for defunding the police and ending mass incarcerations are based both on feelings and data. It has both heart and logic. Consider them seriously.)
I did appreciate the acknowledgement that public defenders are over worked, under funded, but amazing attorneys due to the experience they get in the system. It’s not often that they are given credit for even trying.
I work in criminal defense. Chapter 7 is an over generalization of how it works and what to do. Most of what was said is laughable in my county. It just isn’t how it works. For example, you don’t get an arraignment in 48 hours, because that means something different here. You do go before a judge and get your charges read and a bond assigned, but charges may not even have been officially filed at this point. Arraignments and preliminary hearings are where evidence are presented (or have been presented in front of a secret jury, which is a whole other issue). So filing a motion to dismiss to trigger this usually would just make the prosecution laugh and the judge angry and waste the time of the defense attorney since this hearing is already part of the process here (though an attorney should be filing for a bond reduction immediately and be looking for ways to get evidence suppressed or the case dismissed from the very start). Diversion is not community service, but an intense probation that sometimes includes community service but only to very specific places. My county was also called out for its lack of use of the diversion program in the last election by NPR. Since then there has been a huge push for diversion, which has seen a rise in cases filed to be pushed to diversion instead of just not filed at all.
So please take that chapter with a grain of salt. Yes, there is great advice, but it doesn’t apply perfectly to every court system. Look into how the local systems work. Do your county, municipal/city, and federal courts have the same procedure? Who are the defense attorneys for each setting? Pay attention to elections for sherif and district attorney. They are small ways to change the system when you don’t know where to start or you aren’t on board with radical suggestions (though, the radical suggestions aren’t even radical at this point. The call for defunding the police and ending mass incarcerations are based both on feelings and data. It has both heart and logic. Consider them seriously.)
I did appreciate the acknowledgement that public defenders are over worked, under funded, but amazing attorneys due to the experience they get in the system. It’s not often that they are given credit for even trying.
June 17, 2022
It’s true, this one’s for the people who want to do more. Very few books completely knock me off my feet. This was one. At times very hard to read simply because of how devastating it is to know these raw truths. But I cannot overemphasize the importance of this book. Paul Butler uses his perspective as a Black male and former prosecutor who was wrongfully arrested to show us the harsh realities of, to paraphrase Justice Sotomayor, our justice system that is anything but.
January 23, 2018
Butler is well-researched and has thought through this book well. He shares much history and practice that is not well known to most of the general public. However, he is often redundant in some areas. It saddens me that the conversation in Chapter 8 even has to happen while the conversation itself is debatable. I’ll gladly listen to arguments on both sides of the issue.
December 28, 2021
An interesting book from a perspective I haven’t seen before— a former prosecutor who “caught a case”. I don’t think all the arguments he makes were consistent (i.e., we can only consider homicides appropriately addressed, unlike police violence, if the metric of success is prosecution/jailing) it was a valuable read with lots of insight.
August 25, 2020
Excellent! Educational and thought-provoking.
April 5, 2021
A pretty good balance of the topic it's covering.
Read
February 10, 2023acab, (or abolition) the book.
June 20, 2020
Everyone should read this book even if they only read Chapter 7, which addresses how to behave as a Black man if you are noticed by the police and then put through the criminal justice system. It truly was like reading a nightmare. It made me sick and uncomfortable and angry.
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