The death of Elijah McClain prompted a flood of more than 8,500 letters from outside the state of Colorado—all begging Governor Jared Polis for justice. The author opens every one.

The private grief of Courteney Ross, George Floyd’s girlfriend.

For years, a tactical police unit in Mount Vernon, New York, reigned with impunity—protecting drug dealers, planting evidence, brutalizing citizens. Then one of its own started covertly documenting the abuse.

Last summer, in a small Wisconsin city, the country’s fiercest differences collided in the streets—and a teenager named Kyle Rittenhouse opened fire, shooting three people. In the aftermath, a disquieting question loomed: Were these among the first shots in a new kind of civil war?

How homelessness is criminalized in small cities and towns across the West.

The fathers and father figures of Michael Brown, Terence Crutcher, Daniel Prude, Rayshard Brooks, George Floyd, and Jacob Blake reflect on the violence that forever altered their families’ lives.

A mother’s fight to save a Black, mentally ill 11-year-old boy in a time of a pandemic and rising racial unrest.

The Badger State is designed to keep Republicans in power, at the expense of the minority vote.

I say, Where’s Breonna, why won’t anybody say where Breonna is? He says, Well, ma’am, she’s still in the apartment. And I know what that means.

Activists insist that police departments must change. For half a century, New York City’s P.B.A. has successfully resisted such demands.

Converging in a tense section of Huntsville: A white police officer fresh from de-escalation training, a troubled black woman with a gun, and a crowd with cellphones ready to record.

The writer’s family saw an unmarked NYPD cruiser hit a Black teenager. He tried to find out how it happened, and instead found all of the ways the NYPD is shielded from accountability.

The quest to transform this country cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police.

Six months of life and death in America.

Anytime the racial temperature goes up and hell pays a visit to earth, the disappointment takes a holiday. And you fight. You fight because you’re tired. Yet you’re tired because you’ve been fighting. For so long. In waves, in loops, in vacuums, in vain.

Everything I had going against me he had going for him. Us young Black dudes who were slanging were hated, hunted and haunted for our role in the drug war. He was praised and honored and rewarded with overtime.

Ramsey Orta filmed the killing of Eric Garner—and the police punished him for it.

An unarmed man, a cop charged with murder, and the challenge of policing mental illness.

The battle over police torture and reparations in Chicago’s schools.

American prisons can’t handle mentally ill inmates.

An interview with the activist.

From 2009 to 2014, police in Florida shot 827 people. Many of these incidents were avoidable and unnecessary.

On the shootings, and the response, in Baton Rouge, Falcon Heights, and Dallas this summer.

On police brutality in New York and the race riots of 1964.

An interview with Dallas Police Chief David O. Brown.