They Can't Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America's Racial Justice Movement Audible Audiobook – Unabridged Wesley Lowery (Author), Ron Butler (Narrator), Hachette Audio (Publisher) (Hachette Audio )

This book is reporter Wesley Lowery’s account of the shooting of African Americans by police that he covered during approximately the past 3 year period. Similar Instances that he did not report on, no matter how egregious—for example, Corey Jones or Anthony Hill—get name checked, but no detail is provided. Most of the information is well known to anyone who has been following the news with the exception of some interesting detail on the various activists and organizers of the protests against the police.

Lowery’s story is a reminder—unintentional, of course—of why the media is often viewed with such disdain. For example, he cong ratulates a friend and colleague in the electronic media for “land[ing] the first major scoop of Ferguson: the emotional reaction of Michael Brown’s mother as she arrived at the scene” of his death. Yes, being the first person to shove a microphone in front of a grieving mother and videotape her response to the loss of her son is a feather in a journalist’s cap.

Lowery spends much of his time as a reporter attempting to find and cultivate sources so that he can be the first person to reveal what will in any event quickly become public knowledge. In Ferguson he spends “my days pacing my hotel room, working the phones to suss out new details of when the grand jury investigation would conclude.”

There is an occasional glimmer of what real journalism might look like. Lowery refers to the St. Louis Police Department’s practice of using traffic stops “to milk revenue for their city’s bottom line” or Baltimore’s policy of arresting large numbers of people “in many cases for minor crime or for no crime at all,” but he provides no account of any individual victimized by such policies. In addition to investigating the shootings, we need to hear about the many thousands of people whose lives and economic well being have been disrupted by substantial fines, court appearances, etc. for such nonsense as “improper” walking or jaywalking, all in order to fund city bureaucracies out of the pockets of the people who can least afford it. Perhaps Lowery could have unearthed some of these stories while he was waiting for the grand jury to report.