Shielded

BOOK REVIEW
Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable
by Joanna Schwartz 2023

About the Author
Joanna Schwartz is a professor of law at UCLA, where she teaches civil procedure and courses on police accountability and public interest lawyering. Her writing, commentary, and research about police misconduct, qualified immunity, indemnification, and local government budgeting have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Christian Science Monitor, ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, CNN, NPR, and elsewhere.

About the Book
“Whatever you believe about the police in the United States, you need to read Shielded. It is eye-opening and cracklingly clear about why it’s so hard to hold them accountable when they hurt people—and how to fix that problem. This book is an essential tool for addressing one of the country’s most pressing and wrenching problems.”
—Emily Bazelon, author of Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration

“A magnificent but sobering account of the reality of the many obstacles to holding police accountable in our legal system. The book is compelling in telling human stories about the effects of police misconduct on people’s lives and at the same time presenting her original research on how rarely the law succeeds when there is police misconduct. Shielded is a must read for all who care about policing in the United States, which should be all of us.”
—Erwin Chemerinsky, author of Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights

“Through deep research and gripping storytelling, Schwartz reveals a broken legal system in which justice so often remains elusive for those whose lives have been shattered by police violence. Cutting through polemics and misinformation, Shielded is both a searing indictment of our current system and a clear-eyed roadmap for change. This is a profound and indispensable work that will shape the national discussion around police accountability for years to come.”
—Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America

An urgent and definitive examination of how the legal system prevents accountability for police misconduct, from one of the country’s leading scholars on policing

In recent years, the high-profile murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others have brought much-needed attention to the pervasiveness of police misconduct. Yet it remains nearly impossible to hold police accountable for abuses of power—the decisions of the Supreme Court, state and local governments, and policy makers have, over decades, made the police all but untouchable.

In Shielded, University of California, Los Angeles, law professor Joanna Schwartz exposes the myriad ways in which our legal system protects police at all costs, with insightful analyses about subjects ranging from qualified immunity to no-knock warrants. The product of more than two decades of advocacy and research, Shielded is a timely and necessary investigation into why civil rights litigation so rarely leads to justice or prevents future police misconduct. Weaving powerful true stories of people seeking restitution for violated rights, cutting across race, gender, criminal history, tax bracket, and zip code, Schwartz paints a compelling picture of the human cost of our failing criminal justice system, bringing clarity to a problem that is widely known but little understood. Shielded is a masterful work of immediate and enduring consequence, revealing what tragically familiar calls for “justice” truly entail.