Tag: publicpolicy

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#BookReview: The Price Of Mercy by Emily Galvin Almanza

Leftist Language Will Annoy Some Readers. Read This Anyway. Straight up, Galvin Almanza is absolutely a product of her time – in this case, “her time” being 2010s Harvard and Stanford and then abolitionist activism. So the words she chooses – “latinx”, apologizing for being white, etc – are going to annoy at least some readers.

From my view (see postscript for a brief bio relevant to this discussion)… this book is right up there among the ones those new to the field should consider. Those in and around criminal justice will likely know most everything Galvin Almanza presents here – or at bare minimum have largely similar stories of people they did know more directly. Her writing style is engaging – far from the academic speak one might expect from a Stanford Law lecturer and much closer to the dynamism one would expect from a tenacious advocate of the accused during a trial. While this is far from a John Grisham or Randy Singer courtroom drama, Galvin Almanza’s overall style bends more in that direction than a desert dry academic treatise.

One weakness here was her framing of the “racist” origins of policing, but again, that’s the culture Galvin Almanza comes from. It is unclear at this time if she’s ever even heard of Radley Balko’s excellent history of policing The Rise Of The Warrior Cop, released between The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander (who blurbed this book, in case you, the reader of my review, missed that) and the 2013 execution of Michael Brown. Balko has a much more even handed look at the rise of policing in the American tradition, tracing it back even beyond the first “Shire Reefs” in feudal England and up through 2010 or so (with a 2020s update I’ve yet to go back and read). Even here, however, Galvin Almanza’s incorrect history of policing comes across more as a cultural/ worldview thing than an attempt to mislead the reader – she appears to genuinely not know the actual history at hand and genuinely (and uncritically) believes the constant leftist refrain.

That particular weakness aside, however, this is a particularly well documented book, clocking in at about 28% documentation on even the Advance Review Copy edition of the text I’ve had for several weeks before finally reading roughly a month before release. It is quite clear that on most of her points, Galvin Almanza both knows exactly what she’s arguing and is more than willing to show you her work – which is always appreciated (and, yes, frankly expected) in any nonfiction work.

Ultimately Galvin Almanza’s proposals – because all books of this type must end with proposals in nearly as ironclad a genre rule as RWA/ RNA types try to insist that any romance novel end in a happily ever after – all come down to variations on “more funding” and for the most part are things most that are familiar with the field have already heard of before, but Galvin Almanza does put at least enough of her own specific vision in here that the text is still worth reading to see exactly what her own brand of reasoning comes out as.

Overall this was a strong book of its type, just not an overly novel one other than in Galvin Almanza’s own particular experiences.

Very much recommended.

Brief bio of me: Hi, I’m Jeff, and I used to work for a District Attorney for a bit as their office tech guy. Even got sworn in as a witness in one particular trial, in addition to helping my bosses with an “everyman” look at the case he had in a couple of cases. Even then, I was *also* a Libertarian Party official and an anti-police-brutality activist working with an org that has long went by the wayside (at least relative to what it was) and which particularly after Michael Brown’s execution in 2013 was rarely heard from again as more prominent orgs rose up. I even, at some of the very times Galvin Almanza was being recognized as one of the most promising young lawyers in America, had a database that virtually no one knew of, but which made me *the* world’s leading expert in mass shooting, school shooting, and killed by police events – at least in terms of the data I had and was actively both collecting and analyzing.

Which is a particularly long winded way of saying that I’ve been around the block more than a few times as it relates to the subject of this book. Frequently around it, rarely directly in it, but very much close enough to know much of what was happening… from most every side.

This review of The Price Of Mercy by Emily Galvin Almanza was originally written on January 19, 2026.

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#BookReview: Your Data Will Be Used Against You by Andrew Guthrie Ferguson

If You See This Review, You Should Be Terrified. I’m a Xennial. I’ve grown up with computers. The Net first became a public thing when I was 10 yrs old, and within a decade I would complete a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science. I’ve known all along that privacy online was more theater than fact, no matter how careful you are – that if it has a computer chip, you’re safer to assume it is tracking you than not, and that someone you may not like will likely be able to access that data.

Even knowing this almost as long as I’ve known anything… Ferguson makes clear just how much worse it actually is, from a legal perspective. *Even in* the United States, where we “supposedly” have 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments to the Constitution of the United States rights limiting government searching of our data and how it can use the results of such a search.

While Ferguson doesn’t address at all how very eroded and damn near paper thin those Amendments have become over the last 250 yrs of jurisprudence, he makes it all too crystal clear that the words on the papers haven’t kept up with the actual technical capabilities, and because of this, many of the things that once kept your written words on paper safe or even your words to certain people safe no longer protect you in this digital era *at all*. Indeed, quite the opposite – many of the exceptions to those earlier forms that actively limited what government was allowed to do are instead now the rules that give government nearly unlimited abilities to search your data without even having to get a “warrant” rubber stamped.

Indeed, another of Ferguson’s large points throughout this text is just how little privacy you have *specifically* when a warrant is signed… and he even tosses a point or two in about the “qualifications” needed to be able to sign such a warrant. (There are basically none to be a Magistrate Judge in particular.)

While all of this is utterly terrifying – and Ferguson goes to great lengths to show that this *should* be terrifying no matter your own personal political bent -, Ferguson does actually offer paths forward at every level that could at least begin to alleviate many of the concerns he details. He even goes so far as to note which ones are likely more politically palatable within the current system and which ones would do more to actually alleviate privacy concerns… but which are also far larger hauls in the current political environment.

Overall this is absolutely a book every American should read, and indeed anyone globally who thinks of America as the “land of the free”. Ferguson shows here that this “freedom” is illusory at best, particularly in the current world environment.

Very much recommended.

This review of Your Data Will Be Used Against You by Andrew Guthrie Ferguson was originally written on December 22, 2025.

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#BookReview: The Projects by Howard A. Husock

Important History That Should Spark Needed Discussion. First up, I fully admit I am *far* from a public housing expert of any kind. I read books like this to learn about issues, not because I already know about them. The closest first hand knowledge I have of any of this is growing up in Exurban Atlanta and being generally aware of the Atlanta news… right as the Atlanta Projects were coming down and being rethought in the late 90s/ early 2000s around the time of the Olympic Games in Atlanta. And even then, even while working with a community service oriented collegiate honor society throughout my college years in this period, while we worked a lot with various “community revitalization” efforts, we never really worked in the Projects. Maybe some other Atlanta chapters did (Georgia Tech, Morehouse, Spelman, etc), but my school just in the suburbs (Kennesaw State) didn’t.

All of that tangential personal history dealt with, the actual text here is great for sparking discussion on a few different, yet mostly related, topics… but the text here is also written almost as a textbook. It *feels* like something you would actually take a class on with this as the text and expect to be quizzed and tested about the various people and dates and movements and philosophies and such, yet it isn’t as dry and formal as an actual academic paper tends to be. It is one of those University Press (NYU, in this case) titles that seems truly destined to be *most* read as a textbook, very nearly explicitly designed for exactly that… and yet it *should* be read by a much wider audience, particularly among the “leader” / “influencer” / “organizer” set, because it really does have some interesting things to say about the entire history up to 2023 or so – and, somewhat, of the potential future – of public housing in the United States.

Among the discussions relevant here are the Nazi-based origins of public housing as we now know it in the 2020s – literally, the leaders who first proposed the national laws that led to the Projects openly praised Adolf Hitler and many of his acolytes of the late 1920s/ early 1930s – when their antisemitism and violence was already clear, but well before their “final solution” began. How can we openly embrace the freedom and diversity we claim to hold so dear in the US in the 2020s while also advocating for ideas that are in places almost word for word out of Hitler’s own mouth?

Another discussion point that Husock actually does a truly phenomenal job of exploring, even if a touch tangentially, is reparations. No, not for slavery – by and large, clear records of that don’t exist and the people directly affected by it are long dead. HOWEVER, the black communities whose property was effectively stolen -via so-called “eminent domain”, where the government can dictate the price it will pay you for your land – … this happened in the 1930s and later. We have actual property records of those who owned that land at that time. While many of the owners themselves are now dead, as many of them would have been born around the turn of the 20th century, some of the later ones – the projects built more in the “golden era”, as Husock describes it, of the 1950s and early 1960s… some of those original owners *may* still be alive. In either case, it is very likely that direct legal heirs of many of these people – their kids, grandkids, or even great-grandkids – are very much alive today and could be more adequately compensated for what was taken from their near ancestor. In theory, this could be seen as a just remediation for sins that while in the past, are still recent enough to bear accurate justification. Obviously, this would have to be more completely thought through and debated by those with far more knowledge of the specifics than I have, and likely far greater philosophers and ethicists than I will ever begin to approach claiming to be, but I do believe that Husock lays the basic groundwork for such conversations quite well in this text, and it should be read for this if for no other reason.

The final major discussion that Husock leads to here in the text is actually the very original discussion – what, if anything, should be done regarding public housing: Who should fund it, who should manage it, who should benefit from it, *is it possible* to truly benefit from it, under what conditions can it be successful, what is “successful public housing”, etc?

Husock makes clear that in certain times and places – even in this Millennium – public housing *has* worked and *can* work – but he also makes equally clear that the realities of public housing have rarely lived up to the ideals and goals of its proponents.

Read this book. Even if you yourself happen to be a public housing expert, you’re still likely to learn at leasta few things here. Write your own review of this book. And, perhaps more importantly, write to your governmental “leaders” at every level from your local City Councilman (as Housing Authorities are run by local leaders) all the way through your Congressman and even the President (as Federal policy is set in DC) and let them know your thoughts after reading it. Maybe, just maybe, we can actually get these discussions had in the manner than they are due.

Oh, and the star deduction? The bibliography clocked in at just 11% or so, which is short of even my recently relaxed standard of 15%.

Very much recommended.

This review of The Projects by Howard A. Husock was originally written on May 8, 2025.