Hi, my name is Malcolm Gladwell. I am the host of Revisionist History podcast.
Malcolm Gladwell has made a career out of challenging conventional wisdom. He's an intellectual iconoclast, author of The Tipping Point and Outliers. And he says there's one book that changed the way he thinks about criminal justice. A book that digs deep into racism and police brutality.
Welcome to Bookmarks.
Now, the book I would like to recommend is a book by a criminologist named Frank Zimring called When Police Kill Spiri. Much timely.
I ran across it. He was one of these. I don't know. I hope it sells many, many, many, many, many hundreds of thousands of copies now. But at the time, it was a kind of book by an academic and he basically systematically tried to figure out how many people die at the hands of police in United States. How does that compare to other countries? And why? Why do people so many people die at the hands of police?
You know, it's it's it's completely dispassionate.
It is not a work of advocacy. It's a work of analysis. And he walks you through. He. I mean, I can't it's just this kind of education in this problem. An older man who's been one of the leading criminologists in the world for decades written many, many books, many of which I've read. And I've always come away from reading his books profoundly smarter than I was before he started. So he wrote a book about New York. But the crime drop in New York called The City That Became Safe, which is just brilliant. I mean, it just he just has a way of thinking about and understanding the roots of complex social phenomena, particularly crime.
I'm going to read you a couple of titles of the books he's written over the years. The Scale of imprisonment. That's from 1991, trying to figure out why are so many people in American jails American capital punishment. Right. The contradictions of American capital punishment. That's from 2003, American Youth Violence in 1988. I mean, so he's been thinking about this for decades now.
Anyway, I read that book in twenty seventeen when I was thinking about writing this book, my book Talking to Strangers, and I hadn't figured out how I was going to write it. And Frank Zaman's book just comes out in the middle of that wave of cases. I chose one Sandra Bland for my for my book and it just maybe understand what was going on. And it radicalized me in a really profound way. This is not a kind of aberration. This is not about a few bad apples. This is about something systemic that's gone wrong in our society. And Frank Zimring was there thinking about this in a profound way long before almost everyone else.
Malcolm Gladwell recommends When Police Kill by criminologist Frank Semarang. Gladwell hosts the podcast Revisionist History. And you can read an in-depth conversation with him on our Web site at TTD book Dot Org.
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