"The New Public Safety" by CWSL Professor Shawn Fields

California Western School of Law is proud to celebrate the release of Professor Shawn Fields’s newest book, The New Public Safety (University of California Press), with a special launch event Thursday, September 25. 
  
This marks Professor Fields’s second major work in just a few years, following the well-received Neighborhood Watch, published with Cambridge University Press. That book established him as a national voice on the intersection of constitutional law and public safety, and it drew attention from both legal scholars and policymakers. Like his first book, The New Public Safety began as a law review article that sparked national attention. As Fields explains, “I had published an article … and an editor from UC Press found it and called me and said, 'This is a good idea. You should turn this into a book.'” The opportunity gave him a platform to deepen the research, broaden the case studies, and offer a comprehensive vision for how America approaches policing and public safety in the 21st century. 
  
At its core, the book makes a compelling argument: America’s reliance on police officers as all-purpose general responders is mismatched with the reality of public health and safety. Professor Fields points out that officers spend “well over 90% of their time triaging non-criminal issues,” including mental health crises, medical emergencies, addiction, and issues arising from the effects of homelessness. 
  
The result, he warns, is that officers too often resort to force in situations where no crime has occurred. “As many as twenty-five percent of all uses of force by police officers are committed against unarmed people who are in the middle of a mental health episode or have a diagnosed mental health disorder.” 
  
What makes The New Public Safety unique is not just the diagnosis, but the roadmap forward. Professor Fields calls for treating public safety with the same level of specialization we expect in law, medicine, and other professions. “We really need to treat public safety like a specialty … the way we do everything else.” 
  
The upcoming book launch event will bring together students, faculty, alumni, and community leaders for a discussion of these urgent issues. Attendees will hear directly from Professor Fields about his vision for reimagining public safety, the constitutional implications of alternative responders, and how local and national conversations can move toward bipartisan solutions.   
 
The event will feature remarks from California Western School of Law Dean and President Miriam H. Baer as well as from two national voices in police reform: Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law Professor Jamelia Morgan and Florida State University College of Law Professor Nadia Banteka. 
 
The event will take place on California Western’s campus at 350 Cedar Street, on September 25, with a cocktail reception at 5:30 and a book talk at 6:30 — we invite the entire CWSL community to join us in celebrating Professor Fields and this important contribution to the national dialogue.