To Protect and Serve: How To Fix America’s Police

FEATURING NORM STAMPER – In his new book, To Protect and Serve, former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper opened with a rosy and fictitious encounter on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri between officer Darren Wilson and teenager Michael Brown. In that fictitious scenario, Wilson was kind and understanding and and the encounter resulted in an arrest for Brown but an eventual college career for the young man. No one died and no riots broke out. And Ferguson went on to being a little known town in Missouri. But of course today we link the name Ferguson intimately with police brutality and injustice.

Norm Stamper, former chief of the Seattle Police Department; he started his career as a law enforcement officer in 1966 in San Diego, California as a beat cop. In 2006 he wrote Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing. His new book is called To Protect and Serve: How To Fix America’s Police.