The Zebra Murders: A Season of Killing, Racial Madness, and Civil Rights

This look at a largely forgotten reign of terror in San Francisco in 1973 and 1974 is an interesting if superficial true police procedural. Sanders, the SFPD's first African-American chief of police, was one of the lead detectives on the case code-named the Zebra Murders, involving a group of African-American men who, apparently racially motivated, were targeting whites in vicious random acts of violence that claimed 15 lives. The book reads less like an objective assessment of these events than a memoir of Sanders's experiences with the investigation and his role in a civil lawsuit against the SFPD to combat rampant racial discrimination. Oddly, about halfway in, the authors break the linear narrative with information derived only at the case's end, rather than lay out the police work and discoveries as they happened. The efforts to compare the police tactics with post-9/11 targeting of Muslims will strike most readers as labored despite Sanders's insistence that the killings were acts of political terror, not mere serial killings. Nonetheless, this serves as a useful introduction to the case. (Oct.)