My favorite books for understanding why both liberal and conservative takes on the police miss the real problem

This is the autobiography of one of the men hanged for the bombing at Chicago’s Haymarket that took place during the strikes for the eight-hour day that started on May 1, 1886.

He was born in Texas and, after fighting for the Confederacy as a teenager, switched sides and became an activist for the Radical Republicans who defended the rights of the freed people. When Reconstruction ended and Jim Crow was being built, Parsons was driven out of the South and went to Chicago. He came to see the exploitation of workers in the North as a new form of slavery – and the police as a key instrument in the hands of employers to maintain that new wage slavery.

In this work, written just days before he was executed, Parsons developed an early critique of the police and the entire modern system of law, which he saw as inextricably linked to a society based on the exploitation of labor. Whatever one thinks of his ideas, this text is an interesting critique of police and policing, written before police had become widely accepted as a solution to “crime.”

While the origins of northern police in this country were rooted in the development of a new set of class relations among white people, discussions of policing today cannot be untangled from the history of African Americans.

Trotter shows that Black people have always been a crucial part of this country’s workforce. Racism itself is rooted in the ways that Black workers’ position has been shaped by capitalists, non-black workers, and Black workers themselves, and this has been true since the dawn of slavery.

In his last chapters, Trotter brilliantly illustrates how the problems created for the entire working class by the end of the post-World War II economic boom were inflicted out of all proportion on the Black population. In other words, the relatively well-paying jobs were destroyed, and it was Black workers in particular who lost them.

The rise of mass incarceration since the 1970s and the violent and militarized policing that have made it possible cannot be understood without that key part of the story.

This might seem like a strange choice since this book is not directly about policing. But it shows in a powerful and direct way how inextricably bound policing is with the basic organization of this society.

Despite the controversies currently surrounding Hayley’s depiction of Malcolm X’s life, the book retains its power to express Malcolm X’s cutting critique of every one of this country’s justifications for its brutal criminal justice system. No one who engages with it can believe that police exist simply to deal with some criminal element in society.

But the book also shows how impossible it would be for this society to somehow “defund” the force used to keep under control the millions of people who, even with all their talents, this society can find no place for.

Taibbi lays bare the overlapping problems of poverty, policing, mass incarceration, the Democratic Party, and modern protest politics by tracing the life, murder, and movement surrounding Eric Garner, who was choked to death by a police officer on the streets of New York in 2014.

Whatever you think of Taibbi, this book has one of the clearest explanations I have ever read of how a logical and well-meaning idea can become its opposite. “Broken windows theory” began as the idea that keeping cities clean and their residents free from harassment can make people feel safer and more invested in where they live.

In the abstract, this makes sense. But in the context of the massive attacks on the working class, and the black part of the working class in particular, the application of this theory by New York politicians and police officials led to the widespread “social rape” of young black and Latino men on the streets.

It culminated in the murder of Eric Garner for being known as someone who regularly sold loose cigarettes. Alternately, Taibbi’s book The Divide illustrates the extent to which policing is shaped by the class society in which we live. It follows the impoverished people the police targeted exactly as the world’s wealthiest bankers were destroying the global economy during the 2008 financial crisis.

This society inflicts the problems of unemployment, poverty, and the consequent range of problems disproportionately on the black population.

This is the obvious cause of violent crime – both for those who commit crimes, and those who become victims. Police are the only answer this society gives to violent crime. And so, as James Forman brilliantly shows through the lens of Washington D.C., Black politicians, as well as non-black ones, supported policies that created the modern system of mass incarceration that falls so heavily on the black population.

Foreman’s argument has often been misrepresented as somehow showing that the mass incarceration was not driven by racism, since black people participated in building it. In fact, it shows just the opposite – the racist structure of U.S. society is so deeply rooted that black political leaders were no more able to help the residents of Washington escape the racist logic of mass incarceration than their non-black counterparts in other cities.