Racial Trustbuilding and Friends of LaGrange Memorial Library invite you to “Walk the Walk” author talk.
Saturday, January 20, 2024, at 10:30 a.m. at LaGrange Memorial Library, 115 Alford Street, LaGrange, GA
Pretty Good Books will be on-site with books you can purchase and get autographed by Professor Neil Gross.

From a leading sociologist and former cop, the story of three police departments and their struggle to change aggressive police culture and achieve what Americans want: fair, humane, and effective policing

What should we do about the police? After the murder of George Floyd, there's no institution more controversial: only 14% of Americans believe that “policing works pretty well as it is.” We're swimming in proposals for reform, but most do not tackle the aggressive culture of the profession, which prioritizes locking up bad guys at any cost, loyalty to other cops, and not taking flak from anyone on the street. Far from improving public safety, this culture, in fact, poses a danger to citizens and cops alike.

Walk the Walk brings readers deep inside three unusual departments-- in Stockton, California; Longmont, Colorado; and LaGrange, Georgia --whose chiefs signed on to replace that aggressive culture with something better: models focused on equity before the law, social responsibility, racial reconciliation, and the preservation of life. Informed by research, unflinching, and by turns gripping, tragic, and inspirational, this book follows the chiefs--and their officers and detectives--as they conjure a new spirit of policing. While every community faces unique challenges with police reform, walk the walk opens a window onto what the police could be if we took seriously the charge of creating a more just America.

Neil Gross is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology and chair of the social sciences division at Colby College. An expert in policing, crime, higher education, politics, and trends shaping American society, he holds a BA in legal studies from the University of California-Berkeley and a PhD in sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He taught previously at the University of Southern California, Harvard, the University of British Columbia, and Princeton.
 
Gross grew up near Berkeley, California, raised by his stay-at-home mother and his father, a legal editor. Both of his parents were avid readers.  Before going to graduate school, Gross was a patrolman in the Berkeley Police Department in Berkeley, California
 
Gross is the author of Walk the Walk: How Three Police Chiefs Defied the Odds and Changed Cop Culture (Metropolitan/Holt, 2023), which the New York Times described as “informed and impassioned… thoughtful and important,” adding that “Gross’s optimism about police reform offers an antidote to the cynicism and gloom that pervade most such discussions.”