It doesn’t take firsthand experience to learn the meaning of “pain compliance” or “rough ride”

Police: A Field Guide is an illustrated handbook to the methods, mythologies, and history that animate today’s police. It is a survival manual for encounters with cops and police logic, whether it arrives in the shape of “officer friendly,” “Tasers,” “curfews,” “non-compliance,” or reformist discourses about so-called “bad apples.” In a series of short chapters, each focusing on a single term, such as “the beat,” “order,” “badge,” “throw-down weapon,” and much more, authors David Correia and Tyler Wall present a guide that reinvents and demystifies the language of policing in order to better prepare activists—and anyone with an open mind—on one of the key issues of our time: police brutality. In doing so, they begin to chart a future free of this violence—and of police.