The death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in May of 2020 engendered an outcry over police killings of unarmed Black citizens that spread beyond the Black communities long aware of such incidents and accustomed to protesting against them. In “Who Got the Camera?,” Rod Brunson, the Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. Professor of Public Life in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University, summarizes a body of research, including his own key studies, that is crucial for understanding the problem of police killings of Black Americans. He explains that Black citizens resent aggressive over-policing but also what they perceive to be police ineffectiveness in reducing serious crimes in their communities. He also suggests that minority attitudes toward police could be improved by police consistently employing the principles of procedural justice.

In the week this research synthesis was released by HFG, CNN reported that 45 mass shootings had occurred in the U.S. in the previous month. While not a new phenomenon, such violent events have again moved near the top of the American issue agenda. In Mass Shootings: Causes and Prevention, criminal justice journalist Mark Obbie presents key findings from leading research on mass shootings. Obbie summarizes a compendium of recent studies suggesting that restricting access to high-capacity weapons, building more effective early-warning systems, and creating a reliable process for data collection could greatly reduce the frequency and toll of this very American type of violence.