Book Review: Built To Punish by Nora V. Demleitner

Anecdotal Over Evidentiary With Sub-Par Bibliography And At Least One Fact So Wrong As To Be Hyperbole. Where to begin with this one. I had such high hopes for it, yet it turned out to be just another left of center (at best) diatribe largely rehashing exactly the same "facts" and commentary as so many other books... several of which have done either this entire narrative or at least certain parts of it far more thoroughly and convincingly.

The bibliography clocking in at just 10%, particularly given some of the claims here, is sub-par... and really quite laughable, actually. "Sub-par" is being rather generous there, particularly given that the fact that I know to be wrong - more on that in a moment - isn't cited at all.

Now, the fact that I know to be wrong:

At one point Demleitner says (and to be fair this *is* an Advance Review Copy that I am reading four months before actual publication, so it is at least possible this passage will be removed or edited to some degree before publication): "Fatal police shootings have not stopped since the pandemic; they have gone up annually. Only twenty years ago, there were well below one thousand such deaths recorded yearly; now there are around two thousand five hundred. Many of these shootings are certainly justified, but information around these deaths remains lacking. Shootings are more likely to end in death than in the past because bullets have become more lethal."

WOW it is worse than I remembered while reading it. The part that caught my eye when I was reading it was the "two thousand five hundred" claim.

For those who don't know, for just over 5 years before I switched my focus to books and became a book blogger via my blog BookAnon.com, I was actually both following and assisting a now long defunct project called KilledByPolice.net, which actively tracked news reports of every single time any person was killed by police in the United States in any way other than actual capital punishment. In other words, we tracked everything from a Michael Brown type shooting by police to an Eric Garner "death in custody" type event to even fatal traffic accidents involving police. Current project MappingPoliceViolence.org - which came to my attention long after I left this space but which is doing in some ways even better work than KBP ever did - uses this as their base statement about their methodology: "At this time, our project tracks fatal police encounters, defined as: Any incident where a law enforcement officer (off-duty or on-duty) applies force resulting in the death of another person, whether it is considered “justified” or “unjustified” by the U.S. criminal legal system."

Whether it be long ago - yet seared into my brain - KBP data or current MPV data, one thing is clear: Even at its worst in the COVID/ post-COVID era, "fatal police shootings" have never once exceeded one thousand four hundred events in a single year that has been tracked. In fact, even at its absolute worst, to get to Demleitner's 2,500 number you would have to combine the 2024 and the 2014 numbers, roughly.

Not only this, but if current MPV trends hold, 2026 will actually be the second consecutive year where such events have *fallen* since their 2024 peak, making a second statement from Demleitner in that one paragraph alone blatantly false.

Further, while the data has never been as complete as some would prefer and many do go severely underreported, claiming that "information around these deaths remains lacking" is, at its most generous, not entirely accurate. Some could make a reasonably strong case that it is actually misleading, though claims of deliberately so speak to motivations that have no direct evidence noted within the text of this book as presented at this time.

Then there is the "bullets have become more lethal" bit. While some bullet tech has been developed over the last decade ish that I certainly find rather impressive - specifically, G2 Research's Radically Invasive Projectile (RIP) copper (rather than lead) round, which opens like a standard hollow point but then separates into separate "knife blades" that slice through soft tissue with what I personally call a "hand of God" effect, real world data for the efficacy of these rounds is insufficient at best, and most in the shooting community will recommend a more standard hollow point round - which have been around in their current form for nearly 40 years now and at all for roughly 60 years now and whose "lethality" remains effectively and statistically (at least) unchanged certainly over that 40 year period.

Y'all, that is *one paragraph* in 213.5 pages of narrative of this book, and it is *that* blatantly and obviously wrong about fairly easily verified facts.

My overall two star here may be a bit generous, but at least for those who agree with Demleitner's views here and either want a complete rehash of views you already hold or perhaps a new book perfectly within your own bubble... meh, this could work reasonably well for such a reader, so I think I'll keep the second star here for them.

Not recommended for anyone who values logic, reasoning, and an accurate reporting of facts, however.

This review of Built To Punish by Nora V. Demleitner was originally written on November 1, 2026.