To Protect and Serve ─ How to Fix America's Police

American policing is in crisis. The last decade witnessed a vast increase in police aggression, misconduct, and militarization, along with a corresponding reduction in transparency and accountability. Nowhere is this more noticeable and painful than in African American and other ethnic minority communities. Racismfrom raw, individualized versions to insidious systemic examplesappears to be on the rise in our police departments. Overall, our police officers have grown more and more alienated from the people they’ve been hired to serve. In To Protect and To Serve, Norm Stamper offers new insights into the conditions that have created this crisis, reminding us that police in a democratic society belong to the peopleand not the other way around.

To Protect and To Serve also delivers a revolutionary new model for American law enforcement: the community-based police department. It calls for citizen participation inall aspects of police operations: policymaking, program development, crime fighting and service delivery, entry-level and ongoing education and training, oversight of police conduct, and, especially relevant to today’s challenges, joint community-police crisis management. Nothing will ever change until the system itself is radically restructured, and here Norm Stamper shows us how.

Norm Stamper was a cop for 34 years, the first 28 in San Diego, the last 6(1994-2000) as Seattle’s police chief. He is credited as the architect of the nation’s first community policing program and has a PhD in leadership and human behavior. He is the author of Breaking Rank: A Top Cop's Expose of the Dark Side of American Policing (Nation Books, 2005). He served as a founding member of President Clinton’s National Advisory Council on the Violence Against Women Act, and as an advisory board member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, along with numerous other boards dedicated to violence prevention, drug policy reform, and social justice. He has been called as an expert witness in approximately 20 police misconduct cases. He has written essays and opinion pieces for such publications as the New York Times, the Nation,time Magazine, the Guardian (UK and US), Playboy, the Los Angeles Times,San Diego Union Tribune, Penthouse, American Police Beat Magazine, andYES! Magazine.