The Black Shield — Wilbert L. Cooper

On his mother's side there has been a Cleveland cop in the family since 1950. Both of Wilbert L. Cooper's parents retired from the force, and his sister wore the uniform too. In 2020 he went home to profile the president of the Black Shield, a Black police association that had broken ranks with the rest of the department and lined up behind the reform demands coming out of the protests. Two complications arrived together: the man he came to profile had shot an unarmed young Black man years earlier, and the members received Cooper not as a reporter but as Sergeant Will Cooper's son. What he builds from there braids two histories. One is a family that came north in the Great Migration and took policing because it was among the few routes to a house and a pension in a segregated city. The other is an organization that has spent decades cycling between rebellion and accommodation. A book this well-sourced on a subject this contested is arriving with almost no noise outside the trade; Kirkus gave it a star and nothing else has moved. Publishes August 25 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux — 416 pages, $32.