Take Hands Up, Dont Shoot: Why The Protests In Ferguson And Baltimore Matter, And How They Changed America By Jennifer E. Cobbina Depicted In Digital Copy

Up, Don't Shoot is an academic discussion on police brutality, particularly about the tragic events in Ferguson and Baltimore.
I really appreciated that this book included quotes and direct input from people in those communities, It does a great job analyzing these conversations and putting them into an academic and data driven perspective.
However, what took the star off for me were the typos and misspellings, There were at leastobvious typos, mostly towards the front half of the book and one of the references was misspelled in the text but correctly spelled on the reference list.
Overall, I would still recommend this to anyone interested in policing and race studies, This book covers a wealth of information about the shootings
we have seen on the News over the years.
It's so painful to
know this still goes down due to racism, The writer is well informed
with the facts and it's all here in this book! It made it hard to read at times
but I felt like I owed it to these families to read the truth.


Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for giving me the chance to
read an early copy! In her book, Hands Up Don't Shoot, author Jennifer E.
Cobbina, gives a wellresearched look at the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Freddie Gray in Baltimore at the hands of the police and how they led to widespread protests and the formation of the Black Lives Matter movement.
She looks at the historical conditions that led to the distrust that many African Americans have towards the police including slavery, Reconstruction, and the Black Codes which unfairly targeted Blacks for much lesser crimes than for Whites for generations, that led to convict leasing and eventually to today and the very profitable incarceration of so many young Black men.
She looks at these two cities and these two deaths because they are emblematic of the wider issue of the power imbalance between Blacks and Whites: they are both majority Black cities they have a high incidence of poverty and racial imbalance and these two murders became very high profile cases.


She uses statistics to prove her case as well as, and perhaps most importantly, interviews with some of the young people involved in the protests who explain why they got involved, and what they hope they can accomplish.
This includes eye witnesses to both the deaths whose stories contradicted both the police and mainstream media accounts.


Hands Up, Don't Shoot is wellresearched, wellwritten, cogent, and easily accessible, It shows how the imbalance of power between Blacks and Whites since slavery especially in the judicial system has led to the distrust of the police in Black communities and it is very eyeopening.
She makes it clear that the country has still a long way to go to reach equality but these protests have helped to move it closer.
An important book and I cannot recommend it highly enough,

Thanks to Netgalley and NYU Press for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review Thanks to Books Forward PR for the free copy of this book.


HANDS UP DON'T SHOOT is an academic look at the social forces behind the Black Lives Matter movement.
It includes extensive quotes and interviews with protestors on the ground in these cities, as well as other residents, police, and more.
It breaks down very neatly both the reasoning

people make for protesting, and also the calculations police officers are making in these moments and the social pressure both groups of people are reacting to.


If you've been paying attention to or involved in BLM protests over the past few years, there isn't a lot of new information here, but it is still validating to see hard data about what's happening, and to know it's not all in your head.


Content warnings: blood, child death, death, gun violence, hate crime, police brutality, racial slurs, racism, slavery, and violence.
The author's painstaking research and attention to detail is obvious in the writing of this book, There were many facts that I only discovered after reading this! Understanding the explosive protests over police killings and the legacy of racism



Following the highprofile deaths of eighteenyearold Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and twentyfiveyearold Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland, both cities erupted in protest over the unjustified homicides of unarmed black males at the hands of police officers.
These local tragediesand the protests surrounding themassumed national significance, igniting fierce debate about the fairness and efficacy of the American criminal justice system.
Yet, outside the gaze of mainstream attention, how do local residents and protestors in Ferguson and Baltimore understand their own experiences with race, place, and policing

In Hands Up, Don't Shoot, Jennifer Cobbina draws on indepth interviews with nearly two hundred residents of Ferguson and Baltimore, conducted within two months of the deaths of Brown and Gray.
She examines how protestors in both cities understood their experiences with the police, how those experiences influenced their perceptions of policing, what galvanized Black Lives Matter as a social movement, and how policing tactics during demonstrations influenced subsequent mobilization decisions among protesters.
Ultimately, she humanizes people's deep and abiding anger, underscoring how a movement emerged to denounce both racial biases by police and the broader economic and social system that has stacked the deck against young black civilians.


Hands Up, Don't Shoot is a remarkably current, ontheground assessment of the powerful, protestordriven movement around race, justice, and policing in America.
I went into this work with a strong confirmation biasI suspected that the author and I would share many of the same views, which is part of the reason that I bought it.
Im not ashamed to admit that,

With that said, it was very refreshing and educational to see a scholarly work by a criminologist on the topic of mass protests against police brutality in the United States.
The book is chock full of referencesthe appendices and notes take uppages in a very slender text.
The author based many of her findings on personal interviews with protestors and then used related data unique to each communityBaltimore and Fergusonto support and contextualize her findings.
She confirmed for me the importance of archiving these experiences in the digital age, I found her brief overview of the political and social histories of each city extremely helpful in understanding how and why these two cities experienced such large protests, when similar acts of antiBlack violence have occurred at multiple times and multiple locations in other parts of the United States.
I also think that her interviews with protestors were aided by the fact that she is BlackI imagine this helped foster trust with protestors, something she notes in her conclusion.


For me the most informative chapter was about the culture of people of color primarily Black people within police departments.
She confirmed my fear that merely diversifying police forces is not enough to reduce racebased, violent policing, It was especially striking because this morning, I was reading a chronology from a Dallas Black Panther written some decades ago Im unsure of the exact date and his findings were consistent with her own writings about Black police officers.
It was astonishing, and depressing,

I wish this book had been longer but I will be looking out for her other works in the future.
I would have liked for her to develop her conclusion a bit more, to elaborate on what the protests mean for America.
That part was very brief and I am sure she has more valuable insights to offer, .