Center for Policing Equity’s Comments (group member since Jan 12, 2023)

Center for Policing Equity’s comments from the #JusticeNerds: Reading to Make a Better World group.

Looking for some texts to better understand the AAPI experience? Check out our bookshelf for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month! Have you read any of them before? Have any suggestions we should add?

For non-fiction, Elizabeth Hinton (America on Fire, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime) and Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow) and Angela Davis (Are Prisons Obsolete?) are hugely influential for doing current justice work.

Anna wrote: "Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. It was so beautifully written and thought-provoking"

This book is as powerful as it is gut-wrenching and heartbreaking. Beautiful writing about the ugliest of topics, indeed.

Wendell wrote: "The New Jim Crow"

A GREAT primer for understanding structural racism and the criminal legal system. Absolutely.

lillian wrote: "I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X earlier on and it fundamentally changed how I viewed Black studies, the civil rights movement, and, though it wasn't its explicit intention, the whitewashing o..."

The great thing about this book in addition to all you named is just how accessible it is! This will be a great addition to our bookshelf.

There is a very real movement to erase Black history, culture, and people from K-12 and university curricula. Let's lift up and share pivotal texts with each other as an act of resistance. What texts have moved you? Given you a better understanding of Black people or the Black experience? Inspired you to act? We'll add each book mentioned to a bookshelf that will live here in the group.

Jon wrote: "New ways to conceptualize and measure the impact of hate crime on communities."

Have you seen any books/research that do a good job of introducing this idea? Not exactly related to your area of interest but there was an interesting study done on student achievement (test scores) and their relationship to police shootings. Terrible phenomenon but important research.

Dana Michelle wrote: "Rethinking incarceration, becoming an abolitionist, and we lock up our own."


Locking Up Our Own by James Forman, Jr. is SO GOOD. Heartbreaking in many ways but so informative. Black people want to be safe but are offered VERY limited choices on how to achieve even a crumb of that.

Interested in reading more about how people are reimagining public safety in their communities and creating new, innovative ways to remain safe and relying less on police.