Jennifer Cobbina, Hands Up, Don’t Shoot: Why the Protests in Ferguson and Baltimore Matter and How they Changed America
| Author | Amber Joy Powell |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474520915843 |
| Published date | 01 January 2021 |
| Date | 01 January 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Book reviews
Jennifer 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; 235 pp. (including index). ISBN: 9781479874415,
$25.00 (pbk/hbk)
Nearly seven years after the rise of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, Black
Americans continue to grapple with a history of racial violence that permeates
contemporary relations with law enforcement. Jennifer Cobbina’s new book
Hands Up, Don’t Shoot: Why the Protests in Ferguson and Baltimore Matter
offers a compelling narrative of the Ferguson and Baltimore protests following
the fatal police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown and the death of 25-year-
old Freddie Gray’s after sustaining fatal injuries in a police van. Both Brown and
Gray were unarmed Black men. Their deaths erupted in city-wide protests that
resulted in militarized police action, national media coverage, and growing social
media activism. Under this context, Cobbina and a team of researchers con-
ducted 192 interviews with Ferguson and Baltimore residents and protesters
between 2014 and 2015 to unpack how and why these sites became “ground
zeroes” in the struggle against police violence, racism, and poverty. Cobbina’s
interviews provide in-depth, first-person accounts of direct and indirect policing
injustices, racial discrimination, and perceptions of protest and activism against
police brutality.
Cobbina’s major contribution lies in her demonstration that the recent deaths of
unarmed African American men and women belong to a broader history of racial-
ized violence and economic exploitation against minority communities that per-
vaded Ferguson and Baltimore long before Brown and Gray’s death. As such, each
chapter links contemporary policing practices to slavery, Jim Crow, and the War
on Crime, which targeted African Americans. Furthermore, in a field that often
synonymizes African American’s experiences with Black men’s experiences,
Cobbina also includes women’s and white residents’ voices, taking seriously the
multidimensionality of protester experiences. Cobbina details residents’ and pro-
testers’ narratives across six chapters, allowing readers to better understand com-
munity cynicism towards law enforcement, how the Black Lives Matter movement
emerged and attempted to address community cynicism, and what the Black Lives
Matter movement meant to those on “ground zero.”
Punishment & Society
2021, Vol. 23(1) 127–142
!The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1462474520915843
journals.sagepub.com/home/pun
To continue reading
Request your trial