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Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves with Stuart Schrader and Robert Vargas
Past event
Featured Book
Blue PowerUninsured in Chicago Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves
In America today, police enjoy unmatched power. On the streets, officers employ violence at their own discretion. Behind closed doors, they are even more powerful. In city halls, police strong-arm local leaders and nullify attempts at public oversight. And in state legislatures and Washington, DC, police lobbyists and union leaders zealously uphold a bipartisan consensus against even mild reform. Yet as recently as fifty years ago, police still served at the pleasure of democratically elected politicians, not the other way around. In Blue Power, Stuart Schrader narrates the rise of a bottom-up movement of rank-and-file officers who lifted policing above the law.
About This Event
Join us as we welcome Stuart Schrader and Robert Vargas to the store for discussion of Schrader's new book Blue Power: How Police Organized to Protect and Serve Themselves, a history of police unions that reveals how American law enforcement built a political movement that made cops untouchable.
Featured Author
Stuart Schrader
Stuart Schrader is an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University, where he directs the Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism. He is also the author of Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing.
About the Venue
Pilsen Community Books
Pilsen Community Books is a worker owned and operated independent bookstore that specializes in new and used literary fiction, radical history and politics, and literature in translation. The staff's goal is to unite their bookselling experience with their belief that labor is entitled to all it produces.
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