Licensed to Kill,Not Prepared to Serve

Every police encounter has someone's loved one on the other side of it. Licensed to Kill, Not Prepared to Serve asks why the law permits officers to use deadly force long before it prepares them to serve the people they meet.

Drawing on more than thirty years in law enforcement, much of it in Chicago's most contested neighborhoods, and on research in criminal justice, social psychology and moral philosophy, William B. Jones examines the gap between what the law allows an officer to do and what a moment actually requires.

The book puts the people officers are sworn to serve first. It looks at the system that sends officers onto the street licensed to use force but not prepared to serve, and at what that costs the communities they enter.

Licensed to Kill, Not Prepared to Serve is grounded in peer-reviewed research, shaped by Chicago's hardest streets, and unflinching about what the profession has yet to reckon with.