Cop Cop

This groundbreaking work takes readers deep into the world of police oversight and reveals what really happens when everyday people try to hold the police accountable.

When you think about the police, who do you think of: Do you think of one officer, or the police as an institution? From movies and TV to the real world, a police presence looms over most conflict. But if there was a defining feature of the 2020 protests over the murder of George Floyd, it was the collective confusion about how America got to this point. Despite fragmented media coverage about police unions, militarization, and systemic racism, the average citizen’s knowledge remained hazy on what exactly police officers had been doing all along. It’s probably different than you would expect.

There is indeed a “Blue Wall of Silence”, but for the first time, it is possible to get behind it without being the police. The authors were senior investigators at the largest police oversight agency in America, tasked with policing the police in New York City. They are our eyes on the inside, and this book takes us into their world.

Cop Cop lays bare the web of real cases investigated by the authors over nearly a decade working for the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB). As the authors combine their unique perspectives as police misconduct investigators, they provide a new way of framing the history of policing, tethering a story that begins in the fields of Ireland and the plantations of Barbados, courses along the cobblestone paths of Charleston, South Carolina, and London, England, flows through the heart of New York City, and bleeds into the present day.

As they unravel cases ranging from stops and frisks to chokeholds and shootings, they illuminate the overwhelming challenges faced by victims of police misconduct and officers alike, spurning both “Defund the Police” and “Blue Lives Matter” as they build a new argument for six concrete solutions to fix American policing.