A former prosecutor's journey to reimagine policing, justice, and public safety.
As a child growing up in Queens in the 1980s, Charles F. Coleman Jr. quickly learned that the police did not protect everyone. As a young prosecutor in Brooklyn, he believed he could help make the justice system fairer from the inside. Instead, he witnessed how political incentives, institutional pressure, and deeply rooted inequity shaped outcomes long before a case ever reached the courtroom. Today, as a civil rights attorney and legal analyst, he has spent years helping Americans make sense of the country's most visible failures of justice.
In Rethinking Police: Cops, Color, and an American Crisis, Coleman brings together these three distinct perspectives--his lived experience as a Black man, his years inside the criminal justice system, and his work as a civil rights attorney and national legal analyst--to explore one of America's most urgent issues. He asks: What is policing actually designed to do?
Coleman dismantles myths about law enforcement and challenges readers to rethink the very concept of safety. Through powerful narrative that stuns with rhythm and verve, he shows how policing has consistently failed its promise of protection while fulfilling its true purpose: preserving structural inequality. From the streets of Queens to the Brooklyn courthouse and national debates over democracy and civil rights, he argues that understanding policing today requires us to confront the history, power, and inequity embedded within the system.
This candid, deeply personal work urges us to wrestle with hard questions and imagine serious alternatives. Coleman invites us to imagine what genuine public safety could look like--and why rethinking policing means rethinking America itself.
