The Minneapolis Reckoning: Michelle Phelps and Julian Go
@ Pilsen Community Books
1102 W 18th St, Chicago, IL 60608
Opening Tuesday, October 8th, from 7PM - 8PM
Join us as we welcome Michelle Phelps and Julian Go to the store for a discussion on Phelps’ new book The Minneapolis Reckoning.
The eruption of Black Lives Matter protests against police violence in 2014 spurred a wave of police reform. One of the places to embrace this reform was Minneapolis, Minnesota, a city long known for its liberal politics. Yet in May 2020, four of its officers murdered George Floyd. Fiery protests followed, making the city a national emblem for the failures of police reform. In response, members of the Minneapolis City Council pledged to “end” the Minneapolis Police Department.
Yet the politics of transforming policing were more complex than they first appeared. The Minneapolis Reckoning shows how the dualized meaning of the police—as both the promise of state protection and the threat of state violence—creates the complex politics of policing that thwart change.
In The Minneapolis Reckoning, Michelle Phelps describes how Minneapolis seemingly arrived at the brink of police abolition. Her account of the city’s struggles over what constitutes real accountability, justice, and safety offers a vivid picture of the possibilities and limits of challenging police power today.
Michelle S. Phelps is professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is the coauthor of Breaking the Pendulum: The Long Struggle Over Criminal Justice. Her research has been featured in the Washington Post, The New Yorker, Time Magazine, NPR, FiveThirtyEight, The Appeal, and other media outlets, and has informed criminal justice reform efforts by the Human Rights Watch and Pew Charitable Trusts Public Safety Performance Project.
Julian Go is Professor of Sociology and Faculty Affiliate of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics & Culture and the Committee on International Relations at the University of Chicago. His latest book is Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US (Cambridge, 2024). He is the winner of Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting in Sociology given by the American Sociological Association and former President of the Social Science History Association.
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Tags: Chicago, Julian Go, Lower West Side, Michelle Phelps, Pilsen Community Books, The Minneapolis Reckoning, The Minneapolis Reckoning: Michelle Phelps and Julian Go
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