Read for a police violence class I'm taking for law school this summer.

The core weakness of this book is that it believes the fiction that police exist to protect all people and ensure fairness in society. They literally don't and never have. The purpose of the system is what it does: to brutalize the poor and the marginalized. Virtually all actors within the system have been working towards that goal consistently for 250 years. When there is an aberration, like the Warren Court that Chemerinsky loves so much, the normative forces within the authoritarian, imperial government course corrected and wiped out their changes within just 20 years. And worked on clawing them back even more later. The remnants that remain, like Miranda v. Arizona, are the reforms that accidentally helped the police brutalized people.

Chemerinsky also criticizes the court's handling of rulings about police policy specifically without discussing the extent to which the state of things is the fault of lawyers like himself. In the 1800s, largely in reaction to labor strikes, lawyers spearheaded the shift in this country from "mob justice" to centering all disputes within the courts. Lawyers subsidized and promoted cops. Congress people who immunized cops are usually lawyers. The Supreme Court Justices are lawyers. The weakest part of chemerinsky's argument is always his assumption that what courts say goes, but the reality is that the Authoritarian decisions of the court go because the government will back authoritarianism. Consider the fact that the Supreme Court has ruled debtors prisons unconstitutional multiple times, and yet we still have bail.

He really lets the mask slip when he tries to talk about the potential of a future with better policing. A world where police don't kill people "unnecessarily." A world which could not possibly have abolished the police. A world where "The majestic promise of the Constitution has been realized."

Maybe law professors who have spent their entire lives losing the war over police violence and only want to try the same things aren't the ones we should be listening to.