Books with author Thomas Campbell Jackson

The shooting of Michael Brown sparked a national debate on race relations and law enforcement. Here is the insider’s account you never saw in the media. Following the fatal shooting in broad daylight of unarmed African American Michael Brown by a white cop in August 2014, Ferguson, Missouri became the scene of protests that pitted police against locals and Black Lives Matter activists. Here, former Ferguson police chief Tom Jackson tells the side of the story that you never got to hear about the incident, the aftermath, and the facts versus the lies. He also shows how in any racially-provocative situation, the uninformed media actually fans the flames of unrest and exploits the situation. Because in today’s minute-by minute news cycle, infotainment has become more important than truth, while social media reactionaries spreads the news without providing context. Policing Ferguson, Policing America is the book that finally tells the inside story of what happened in Ferguson and how the good guys became the bad guys through media and political distortion. So if you want to understand what happened in Ferguson for real, “Policing Ferguson is a must read” (Kevin Jackson, author of The BIG Black Lie).

Following the fatal shooting in broad daylight of unarmed African American Michael Brown by a white cop in August 2014, Ferguson, Missouri became the scene of protests that pitted law enforcement against locals and Black Lives matter activists. The media firestorm has not waned, and, in fact, has grown stronger in light of all the recent violence by and against police officers nationwide. According to Ferguson’s former police chief Tom Jackson, the uninformed media actually fans the flames of unrest and exploits the situation: infotainment optics have become more important than truth, while social media spreads the news without providing context. Policing Ferguson, Policing America is the book that finally tells the inside story of what happened in Ferguson, and how good guys became the bad guys through media and political distortion. Pressure is at a boiling point. In 2016, America has been rocked by heart-wrenching fatal shootings of African Americans by police officers in Louisiana and in Minnesota, and by the shootings of police offers in Dallas, Baton Rouge, and Kansas City that left eleven officers dead and a dozen more wounded. To many Americans, the central theme of this continuing bloody story is one of racial injustice and out-of-control policing. Policing Ferguson, Policing America brings common sense and a keen insider's understanding to a complex story. Black Lives Matter, and so do the lives of cops. Citizens and law-enforcement professionals alike feel the urgent need for our systems and procedures to change for the better. Few people are in a better position to explore the issues than Chief Jackson. In Policing Ferguson, Policing America, Jackson tells for the first time the real Ferguson story while sharing his thoughts about the steps we can take together to improve all Americans' lives, and restore the vital trust between the police and the communities they serve. His well-informed recommendations just may improve this dire situation.

Darwin made one of the greatest discoveries ever. But onto his discovery he projected a myth of evolution through war, extermination, disease and death drawn from Victorian capitalism. He presents Natural Selection to us in terms of a causally purposeful external agency as mythical as any god. War, extermination, disease and death do not cause anything. Natural selection is not a cause but a consequence. The young Darwin's experiences of nature during his Beagle voyage were ecstatically sublime, recorded in his journal by one of the greatest prose poets who has ever written in English. But in middle age this wonderful man died emotionally in the most extraordinary way. It is surely one of the greatest tragedies that has ever happened in the history of science. Little of the glory and wonder of nature that he had actually experienced in South America made it into The Origin of Species. He over-emphasiazed the role of death, war and extermination in a way that has misled and perhaps even damaged us all.