Book review: Jennifer E Cobbina, Hands Up, Don’t Shoot: Why the Protests in Ferguson and Baltimore Matter, and How They Changed America
| Author | Andres F Rengifo |
| Date | 01 February 2021 |
| Published date | 01 February 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480620923778 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480620923778
Theoretical Criminology
2021, Vol. 25(1) 1 –3
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1362480620923778
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Book review
Jennifer E Cobbina, Hands Up, Don’t Shoot: Why the Protests in Ferguson and Baltimore Matter,
and How They Changed America, New York University Press: New York, 2019; 286 pp.:
9781479874415, $25.00 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Andres F Rengifo, Rutgers University, Newark, USA
In 1955, Emmett Till’s body was pulled from the Tallahatchie river, Mississippi. He was
a 14-year-old Black boy tortured and ultimately killed by two white males after allega-
tions that he flirted with a white woman. The news of his murder, and in particular the
images documenting the horrific violence that marked his final moments, helped to gal-
vanize the Civil Rights movement across the United States. But Emmett’s story did not
end there: in 2007 a memorial was placed along the river, 50-odd years after the fact. It
was not a particularly impressive structure—a placard with a bare statement about the
aftermath of the killing, not of the killing itself (the six sentences affixed began by duly
stating “This is the site where Till’s body was removed from the river”). For all we know
(age-less and race-less Emmett) Till could have drowned while swimming on a hot sum-
mer day, as the marker omitted the fact that a murdered Black boy had been found. Back
at the site there were no other displays calling for dialogue, reflection, or reconciliation.
Despite its poignant, unpretentious allure, the sign was stolen a year after its dedication.
The new placard fared worse: it was promptly riddled with bullets and discarded. In
2018, a third sign went up eventually and a month later it was shot again multiple times.
And then again in early 2019. Last fall, a new memorial was put in place featuring flow-
ers and lighting and an expanded set of posted remarks. It was also made out of a 500-
pound steel plate and bullet-proof glass.
In Hands Up, Don’t Shoot, Jennifer Cobbina’s first book, we are given an account of
two cities with a “deep history of racial segregation and economic inequality” (p. 8)—
Ferguson and Baltimore—that highlights continuities and discontinuities in forms of vio-
lence and strategies of mobilization shortly after the murders of Michael Brown (2014)
and Freddie Gray (2015). The author links these events and the demonstrations that
ensued to the lived experience of aggressive policing conveyed by local residents and
protesters. In particular, she shows how cumulative routines of citizen harassment and
abuse “set the stage” (p. 53) for subsequent individual and collective reactions to the
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