police
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Straight out of Kafka
All for a novel? Eighth grade school teacher Patrick McLaw was placed on leave by the Dorchester County Board of Education and is currently being investigated by the County’s Sheriff, James Phillips, who explained—somewhat cryptically—that McLaw is at a “location…
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“Let America be America Again”
In an interview with The New Yorker, Graywolf poet Claudia Rankine discusses Ferguson, James Baldwin, and the experience of invisibility: “[T]he sort of execution-style shooting takes [Michael Brown’s shooting] to this whole other place that starts approaching the language of…
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Ferguson: A Rumpus Roundup
On Saturday, August 9, an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, was shot and killed by a police officer. The boy was on his way home from a convenience store in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, where about two-thirds…
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Towards a Fight
The future is coming, it is coming for everyone in this story. Someday that cop will turn on his TV and see the first black president, the first president who looks like he does, say that he thinks couples like…
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A Stabbing in Finsbury Park
What I’m interested in is: How do you write what you weren’t allowed to know about what you know? How do you write what nobody wants to know about what you know?
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Safe
A cop without a beat. Not so unlike a writer without a story. He could only fantasize how he’d realize his deepest desire: to fire those weapons in a glorious blaze of noise and carnage.
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On Loitering
In Charles Moore’s iconic black-and-white photograph, Coretta looks on stoically, lips parted, hands clasped in front as her husband, Martin Luther King, has his right arm bent behind his back by a police officer in a tall hat.
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Pre-Olympic Pre-Emptive Strikes
London authorities are bent on making sure that the Olympics Games will proceed without a hitch. Their strategies include arresting people who they think may pose a threat to that smoothness, in advance, before any crimes are committed. Four men,…
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Police Poetry
Police reports are supposed to be the dry recounting of facts, neutral, admissible as evidence. They are not often considered great literature. But Sergeant Martinez of the LAPD has captured at least one writer’s attention. “How can I identify Martinez…