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Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the Nation's Capital
Named one of the best nonfiction books of the year by The Washington Post“Tangled Up in Blue is a wonderfully insightful book that provides a lens to critically analyze urban policing and a road map for how our most dispossessed citizens may better relate to those sworn to protect and serve.” —The Washington Post “Remarkable . . . Brooks has produced an engaging page-turner that also outlines many broadly applicable lessons and sensible policy reforms.” —Foreign AffairsJournalist and law professor Rosa Brooks goes beyond the "blue wall of silence" in this radical inside examination of American policingIn her forties, with two children, a spouse, a dog, a mortgage, and a full-time job as a tenured law professor at Georgetown University, Rosa Brooks decided to become a cop. A liberal academic and journalist with an enduring interest in law's troubled relationship with violence, Brooks wanted the kind of insider experience that would help her understand how police officers make sense of their world—and whether that world can be changed. In 2015, against the advice of everyone she knew, she applied to become a sworn, armed reserve police officer with the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department.Then as now, police violence was constantly in the news. The Black Lives Matter movement was gaining momentum, protests wracked America's cities, and each day brought more stories of cruel, corrupt cops, police violence, and the racial disparities that mar our criminal justice system. Lines were being drawn, and people were taking sides. But as Brooks made her way through the police academy and began work as a patrol officer in the poorest, most crime-ridden neighborhoods of the nation's capital, she found a reality far more complex than the headlines suggested.In Tangled Up in Blue, Brooks recounts her experiences inside the usually closed world of policing. From street shootings and domestic violence calls to the behind-the-scenes police work during Donald Trump's 2016 presidential inauguration, Brooks presents a revelatory account of what it's like inside the "blue wall of silence." She issues an urgent call for new laws and institutions, and argues that in a nation increasingly divided by race, class, ethnicity, geography, and ideology, a truly transformative approach to policing requires us to move beyond sound bites, slogans, and stereotypes. An explosive and groundbreaking investigation, Tangled Up in Blue complicates matters rather than simplifies them, and gives pause both to those who think police can do no wrong—and those who think they can do no right.
413 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 9, 2021
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April 12, 2021
This is both a valuable book and an entertaining one. In the midst of controversy about the role of police in America, Georgetown Law professor Rosa Brooks became a part-time volunteer officer with the D.C. police department, which maintains a “reserve officer” corps of people who have gone through the full officer training but are only required to put in a few shifts a month. In that position she patrolled one of the poorest areas of D.C. and got an insider view of policing. The book is full of great stories from her job—some very funny, others tragic or frustrating, but all told with empathy for the people she encountered. Honestly I would have enjoyed the book just for this; I love a well-written book of weird stories from an intense job, and very much empathized with the author’s enjoyment of being an officer because it gave her access to places and situations she wouldn’t otherwise have.
The book has a personal component as well, particularly around Brooks’s relationship with her mother, writer and activist Barbara Ehrenreich, who was deeply disturbed by her daughter’s decision to “join the enemy.” I got the sense Brooks could write a great memoir about her relationship with her mom, and it provides a nice emotional arc here. But I suspect Ehrenreich is also featured in this book to provide a stand-in for the liberal reader—Brooks is perhaps talking more to the left than the right, because these are her people, and therefore the book is more focused on pointing out that police aren't faceless monsters raring to arrest every black man they see, rather than explaining structural problems leading to high crime rates in some minority neighborhoods (though she certainly refers to these problems as well).
The biggest takeaway about policing for me is that most of the time, it’s just a job. Many of the officers seem a bit lazy (which I’ve also seen in real life), but not otherwise bad people—they want to avoid paperwork where they can, and often what they can actually do to resolve someone’s situation is limited. Brooks is very interested in the use of violence, and gives a striking account of a situation where she and her partner could legally have shot someone who turned out to be an innocent teenage boy (fortunately, no violence was used). But she shows the pressures that can lead police to that point: seeing threats to themselves everywhere is constantly drummed into them from the beginning of their training, and often the cops as well as the civilians in a situation are bringing trauma in with them. She also encounters the so-called “blue wall” early on when recruits are told they don’t need to share any information about harassment from a training officer.
So, Brooks provides a critique of some aspects of policing—and some laws police are required to enforce, with unintended consequences—at the same time as showing the real-life environment of a police station. She also critiques Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow for overlooking some of the realities: for instance, one of the reasons police are so heavily present in African-American neighborhoods is because the residents themselves call the police all the time, for problems ranging from being victimized by violent crime to petty disputes.
That said, she never addresses drugs, which seems to me a serious oversight. Although, according to this analysis, mass incarceration actually isn’t nearly as driven by drug offenses as I believed, the disparate enforcement of drug laws in black vs. white communities is the crux of The New Jim Crow, and it confuses me that Brooks never discusses policing for drugs at all. Has D.C. decriminalized possession, or the department told officers to stop pursuing it, to the point that it wasn’t even part of her experience? If so, I wish she’d said so. Because otherwise, it seems like too large and too loaded a puzzle piece to omit.
Overall though, I enjoyed this book a lot, and it raises a lot of important issues while providing a humanizing view of both the police and the people they arrest. It’s a fairly quick read and well worth your time.
The book has a personal component as well, particularly around Brooks’s relationship with her mother, writer and activist Barbara Ehrenreich, who was deeply disturbed by her daughter’s decision to “join the enemy.” I got the sense Brooks could write a great memoir about her relationship with her mom, and it provides a nice emotional arc here. But I suspect Ehrenreich is also featured in this book to provide a stand-in for the liberal reader—Brooks is perhaps talking more to the left than the right, because these are her people, and therefore the book is more focused on pointing out that police aren't faceless monsters raring to arrest every black man they see, rather than explaining structural problems leading to high crime rates in some minority neighborhoods (though she certainly refers to these problems as well).
The biggest takeaway about policing for me is that most of the time, it’s just a job. Many of the officers seem a bit lazy (which I’ve also seen in real life), but not otherwise bad people—they want to avoid paperwork where they can, and often what they can actually do to resolve someone’s situation is limited. Brooks is very interested in the use of violence, and gives a striking account of a situation where she and her partner could legally have shot someone who turned out to be an innocent teenage boy (fortunately, no violence was used). But she shows the pressures that can lead police to that point: seeing threats to themselves everywhere is constantly drummed into them from the beginning of their training, and often the cops as well as the civilians in a situation are bringing trauma in with them. She also encounters the so-called “blue wall” early on when recruits are told they don’t need to share any information about harassment from a training officer.
So, Brooks provides a critique of some aspects of policing—and some laws police are required to enforce, with unintended consequences—at the same time as showing the real-life environment of a police station. She also critiques Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow for overlooking some of the realities: for instance, one of the reasons police are so heavily present in African-American neighborhoods is because the residents themselves call the police all the time, for problems ranging from being victimized by violent crime to petty disputes.
That said, she never addresses drugs, which seems to me a serious oversight. Although, according to this analysis, mass incarceration actually isn’t nearly as driven by drug offenses as I believed, the disparate enforcement of drug laws in black vs. white communities is the crux of The New Jim Crow, and it confuses me that Brooks never discusses policing for drugs at all. Has D.C. decriminalized possession, or the department told officers to stop pursuing it, to the point that it wasn’t even part of her experience? If so, I wish she’d said so. Because otherwise, it seems like too large and too loaded a puzzle piece to omit.
Overall though, I enjoyed this book a lot, and it raises a lot of important issues while providing a humanizing view of both the police and the people they arrest. It’s a fairly quick read and well worth your time.
June 4, 2021
The digital library copy of the book I got from the library disappeared while I was on vacations, along with my notes and highlighted passages. So this will be brief and broad. The book is a nice balance of memoir (a law school professor, highly regarded expert on violence and the military, daughter of "veteran muckraker" Barbara Ehrenrich, of "a certain age," she decided to join the Washington DC Metropolitan Police Reserves, a position that required virtually the same training full-time cops went through, gave her arrest authority and required her to be armed while on duty, and made her work a certain number of hours -- day and night -- each month), insight into the daily lives and thought processes of police officers, and analysis of the country's police system.
I found it to be smart, very engaging, strikingly balanced (it's clear that Brooks was herself surprised by some of the things she learned and experience), and candid. Brooks notes that the way we currently train police officers leaves them with one overriding conviction: That at any moment of any day, someone will try to kill them. She acknowledges the dangers the police face each day -- in her time as a reserve officer, she had to face them too -- but says that this training predisposes police officers to be mistrustful, defensive, tense, and more likely to resort -- almost reflexively -- to violence.
She is straightforward in letting the reader know when she is critical of the system or a particular cop, and equally when she thinks cops are victims of political, social, and legal forces that are based on notions entirely divorced from reality. Her stories about crime, abuse, neglect, and despair in poor, mostly Black DC neighborhoods, are both revelatory and heartbreaking. She talks too about the social impact of training police officers as if they were in the military. And, more down-to-earth, how much all the stuff police have to wear on their belts weighs, and how incredibly difficult this apparatus makes it for a policewoman to simply go to the bathroom.
I would urge anyone who is truly interested in getting insight into policing in America to read this book. It's very readable and very revealing. Brooks appears to have no other agenda than to observe, understand, and analyze how it all really works, both the good and the bad. She ends the book with a number of suggested programs that might go some distance toward fixing a very complicated and fraught situation.
I found it to be smart, very engaging, strikingly balanced (it's clear that Brooks was herself surprised by some of the things she learned and experience), and candid. Brooks notes that the way we currently train police officers leaves them with one overriding conviction: That at any moment of any day, someone will try to kill them. She acknowledges the dangers the police face each day -- in her time as a reserve officer, she had to face them too -- but says that this training predisposes police officers to be mistrustful, defensive, tense, and more likely to resort -- almost reflexively -- to violence.
She is straightforward in letting the reader know when she is critical of the system or a particular cop, and equally when she thinks cops are victims of political, social, and legal forces that are based on notions entirely divorced from reality. Her stories about crime, abuse, neglect, and despair in poor, mostly Black DC neighborhoods, are both revelatory and heartbreaking. She talks too about the social impact of training police officers as if they were in the military. And, more down-to-earth, how much all the stuff police have to wear on their belts weighs, and how incredibly difficult this apparatus makes it for a policewoman to simply go to the bathroom.
I would urge anyone who is truly interested in getting insight into policing in America to read this book. It's very readable and very revealing. Brooks appears to have no other agenda than to observe, understand, and analyze how it all really works, both the good and the bad. She ends the book with a number of suggested programs that might go some distance toward fixing a very complicated and fraught situation.
February 12, 2021
Brooks, a law professor and researcher with a focus on human rights and the military, wrote the perceptive and prophetic book How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, brings that same balance of on-the-ground footwork and solution-focused theorizing to this book on modern policing.
It's mostly a narrative about her somewhat comical and George Plimpton-esque training as part of Washington D.C.'s unique "reserve police force" in which civilians can essentially become cops but only put in a few hours a month. It's like the law enforcement version of the National Guard. That part of the book is entertaining (especially for the reactions of her disapproving mother, Barbara Ehrenreich) but also informative. Brooks brings an even-handed point of view to her new role and the (mostly male) officers she trains and ultimately goes on patrol with, seeing good intentions everywhere despite the inevitable layering of cynicism. But while she avoids simplistic defund denunciations, she also highlights the problems inherent in the model that ends up forcing police like her into spending their days and nights "arresting poor people for trivial offenses."
It is really the last section where the book becomes essential. In this policy paper for the layman, Brooks proposes a complete revamp of how she saw police trained to see everything and everyone as a threat. In what will likely become a controversial point, she calls to do away with how in police culture cops are told they have "a right to go home safe." Brooks calls this not only dangerous, leading to many civilians dying as a result, but also unusual: "No one tells soldiers that they have 'a right' to go home safe."
A balanced and humane call for a new approach to policing in which the safety of the people, not the police assigned to protect them, is made paramount.
It's mostly a narrative about her somewhat comical and George Plimpton-esque training as part of Washington D.C.'s unique "reserve police force" in which civilians can essentially become cops but only put in a few hours a month. It's like the law enforcement version of the National Guard. That part of the book is entertaining (especially for the reactions of her disapproving mother, Barbara Ehrenreich) but also informative. Brooks brings an even-handed point of view to her new role and the (mostly male) officers she trains and ultimately goes on patrol with, seeing good intentions everywhere despite the inevitable layering of cynicism. But while she avoids simplistic defund denunciations, she also highlights the problems inherent in the model that ends up forcing police like her into spending their days and nights "arresting poor people for trivial offenses."
It is really the last section where the book becomes essential. In this policy paper for the layman, Brooks proposes a complete revamp of how she saw police trained to see everything and everyone as a threat. In what will likely become a controversial point, she calls to do away with how in police culture cops are told they have "a right to go home safe." Brooks calls this not only dangerous, leading to many civilians dying as a result, but also unusual: "No one tells soldiers that they have 'a right' to go home safe."
A balanced and humane call for a new approach to policing in which the safety of the people, not the police assigned to protect them, is made paramount.
August 6, 2021
Whew. I'm super ambivalent about this book, and it seems that Rosa Brooks is, too. (The gist of the book, for people who haven't read it: Brooks is a law professor who became a reserve police officer in Washington, DC for a few years, and the book is an account of her experiences as a cop, plus some of her interpretations of these experiences.)
On the positive side, the book is compellingly written. Brooks is clearly a thoughtful person, and I guess I can see why it was useful for her to become a cop to gain insight into how police training works, perspective on what officers think, say, and do while on patrol, and credibility in talking about what is wrong with police culture.
On the other hand, I'm just not convinced that Brooks's insights are worth her spending hundreds of hours making life measurably worse for residents of DC's Seventh District. Brooks freely acknowledges that much of her time on patrol was a total waste, and worse, that most of the arrests she made, and many of her non-arrest interventions, only made bad situations worse. When her duty as a reserve cop butts up against her personal ethics, she goes ahead an abandons her personal ethics, arresting a woman for shoplifting laundry detergent and admitting that she would be willing to kill or die to protect Donald Trump because she "would have no choice--I had sworn an oath." (Kindly, Rosa: get over yourself.) And while Brooks eventually argues that her time as a cop was necessary in order to change policing from the inside or whatever, this is a post hoc justification through and through. The section about why she became a reserve cop is literally titled "Because It Was There," and a lot of her reasoning for going to police school involved working through her mommy issues. I'm not sure I can, off the top of my head, name a good reason for becoming a cop, but I'm quite sure that sticking it to your perfectly decent mom for taking you to anti-war protests as a kid and imparting confusing ideas about gender does not make the list.
Beyond these qualms, Brooks's allergy to "defunding" the police (always in scare quotes, for reasons that elude me) is baffling. Pretty much every problem she talked about in the book could've been addressed by cutting police funding and putting the money toward other services: she noted that too many cops had to waste their time on "bullshit calls", that there was such an abundance of officers that they clogged up crime scenes, that having lots of cops ensures lots of arrests without reducing crime, that arrests don't really help anyone, and that victims of crime "just want to feel safe in their own neighborhoods," not necessarily to have their neighbors locked up. But then, when she gets around to recommending policy changes, her most innovative idea is to start a fellowship program for young cops to learn about and discuss racism, gentrification, alternatives to arrest, and other issues. This seems like a perfectly lovely program; I'm just not sure why Brooks is advocating for this and not for defunding MPD, when so many of the problems she identified as a reserve cop would NOT be solved by having more thoughtful or well-read police officers, and WOULD be solved by having fewer cops and more services.
Similarly, in what I think is an attempt to be ~nuanced~, Brooks comes up with absolutely preposterous strawmen. For example, after a chapter detailing the racism and violence so deeply baked into the police system that fellow officers do not even see it, she writes that "the existence of violent crime is not a right-wing myth dreamed up to justify the incarceration of minorities and the poor." What?? Is anyone, anywhere, arguing this??? I can't say I've heard it before, and certainly not from anyone advocating to defund or abolish the police--in my experience, these folks tend to point out that violence and harm are real, pervasive, and exacerbated (rather than solved) by policing.
In Appendix A, Brooks writes: "Although calls to 'defund' or abolish the police are supported (as of July 2020) by only about a quarter of Americans, these demands have triggered an important conversation about the role of police and the allocation of resources between police and social services...as I write this in July 2020, changes that once seemed impossible are beginning to seem both necessary and possible." Maybe she got increasingly convinced toward defunding the police over the course of writing her book, and that's why her message feels so incoherent. It's an experience I have some empathy for. Still, this is not a book that I would recommend to most of the liberals in my life. There's too big a gap between Brooks's (interesting, compelling) reporting and her policy proposals, and it would be too easy to walk away from this book smugly convinced that mere reform is the way forward, despite Brooks's personal experiences pointing overwhelmingly in the opposite direction. It seems to have happened to Brooks herself.
On the positive side, the book is compellingly written. Brooks is clearly a thoughtful person, and I guess I can see why it was useful for her to become a cop to gain insight into how police training works, perspective on what officers think, say, and do while on patrol, and credibility in talking about what is wrong with police culture.
On the other hand, I'm just not convinced that Brooks's insights are worth her spending hundreds of hours making life measurably worse for residents of DC's Seventh District. Brooks freely acknowledges that much of her time on patrol was a total waste, and worse, that most of the arrests she made, and many of her non-arrest interventions, only made bad situations worse. When her duty as a reserve cop butts up against her personal ethics, she goes ahead an abandons her personal ethics, arresting a woman for shoplifting laundry detergent and admitting that she would be willing to kill or die to protect Donald Trump because she "would have no choice--I had sworn an oath." (Kindly, Rosa: get over yourself.) And while Brooks eventually argues that her time as a cop was necessary in order to change policing from the inside or whatever, this is a post hoc justification through and through. The section about why she became a reserve cop is literally titled "Because It Was There," and a lot of her reasoning for going to police school involved working through her mommy issues. I'm not sure I can, off the top of my head, name a good reason for becoming a cop, but I'm quite sure that sticking it to your perfectly decent mom for taking you to anti-war protests as a kid and imparting confusing ideas about gender does not make the list.
Beyond these qualms, Brooks's allergy to "defunding" the police (always in scare quotes, for reasons that elude me) is baffling. Pretty much every problem she talked about in the book could've been addressed by cutting police funding and putting the money toward other services: she noted that too many cops had to waste their time on "bullshit calls", that there was such an abundance of officers that they clogged up crime scenes, that having lots of cops ensures lots of arrests without reducing crime, that arrests don't really help anyone, and that victims of crime "just want to feel safe in their own neighborhoods," not necessarily to have their neighbors locked up. But then, when she gets around to recommending policy changes, her most innovative idea is to start a fellowship program for young cops to learn about and discuss racism, gentrification, alternatives to arrest, and other issues. This seems like a perfectly lovely program; I'm just not sure why Brooks is advocating for this and not for defunding MPD, when so many of the problems she identified as a reserve cop would NOT be solved by having more thoughtful or well-read police officers, and WOULD be solved by having fewer cops and more services.
Similarly, in what I think is an attempt to be ~nuanced~, Brooks comes up with absolutely preposterous strawmen. For example, after a chapter detailing the racism and violence so deeply baked into the police system that fellow officers do not even see it, she writes that "the existence of violent crime is not a right-wing myth dreamed up to justify the incarceration of minorities and the poor." What?? Is anyone, anywhere, arguing this??? I can't say I've heard it before, and certainly not from anyone advocating to defund or abolish the police--in my experience, these folks tend to point out that violence and harm are real, pervasive, and exacerbated (rather than solved) by policing.
In Appendix A, Brooks writes: "Although calls to 'defund' or abolish the police are supported (as of July 2020) by only about a quarter of Americans, these demands have triggered an important conversation about the role of police and the allocation of resources between police and social services...as I write this in July 2020, changes that once seemed impossible are beginning to seem both necessary and possible." Maybe she got increasingly convinced toward defunding the police over the course of writing her book, and that's why her message feels so incoherent. It's an experience I have some empathy for. Still, this is not a book that I would recommend to most of the liberals in my life. There's too big a gap between Brooks's (interesting, compelling) reporting and her policy proposals, and it would be too easy to walk away from this book smugly convinced that mere reform is the way forward, despite Brooks's personal experiences pointing overwhelmingly in the opposite direction. It seems to have happened to Brooks herself.
September 14, 2021
I’m truly unsure how to rate this book. At times I found it interesting and insightful. Yet I found it to also be one of the most infuriating books I’ve ever picked up. First of all, let’s examine the premise. A white, successful, presumably middle-to-upper class (based on her profession) law professor becomes a part-time police officer in DC’s poorest neighborhoods and writes a book detailing her perspective and sharing the stories of the people she encounters. I found myself asking throughout the book, “why is this the voice I should be listening to? Do we need another book featuring a white lady with a savior complex?” Also, despite changing the names she shares deeply intimate stories of the people she’s policing. Did these people consent to have their stories told? Or is this yet another example of a white person violating the privacy and rights of POC for their own personal gain? I found her tone to be self congratulatory and full of false humility. She says multiple times that she’s far from the best MPD officer, and yet seems to be the saving grace in all the stories she tells, such as the one where she encourages a woman caught shoplifting food to call the police station next time she’s hungry and then slips her a $20 while arresting her. I found that the author picks and chooses when to portray herself as part of the policing system, and when to paint herself as outside it. She constantly laments having to make arrests for non-violent, minor crimes, and yet acts as though she’s powerless to make any sort of change. Forget the fact that she’s a lawyer and professor at a prestigious law school with a wide audience. Yet other times she talks about her “real life” outside of policing. Why is this author continuing to participate in a system that she herself admits is deeply deeply flawed, especially when she has the privilege to not be dependent on the income and the social, political, and cultural capital to make real changes?! The part I found most interesting, but also most mind-bogglingly angering is the epilogue, where the author details how quickly and cohesively she was able to deploy a new program that would change policing from the inside. Undoubtably we need to reform police training, but throughout the book her constant refrain is that her fellow officers are good people with good intentions stuck enforcing broken laws with too few social services. So her solution is….spend more money on police services and maybe that will somehow trickle down to the people she laments suffer from poverty and too few resources. Got it.
February 16, 2021
I really enjoyed reading this book. We all need to think and find a way to work together to solve complex issues. I admire Brooks' courage and actions.
October 19, 2024
'The truly open minded person regularly interacts with those with whom they disagree.'
I began doing this after the 2016 election, after things did not quite turn out the way I expected. I spent about an hour watching Fox News and - no, that was not the way to insight.
Then I began reading conservative academic literature - Thomas Sowell, Walter E. Williams, and maybe J.D. Vance.
JD Vance has gone insane now due to being a politician haha, but Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis is incredible.
Regardless - all I did was read. And though I am far from conservative, these authors opened up my mind to different sides of a story.
Rosa Brooks does more than just read - she acts
Rosa Brooks, daughter of the inimitable Barbara Ehrenreich, who is herself more left-wing than Noam Chomsky, joins as a volunteer cop in her mid-forties.
She sees another side of the current debate.
And like open-minded engagement - she is not 'completely converted' - she sees that there are difficulties amongst disadvantaged groups, and in fact might see this from an even better vantagepoint.
But this is not everything - there is a different side to this story, a story of the cop who is always on edge and feels it - and perhaps more uplifting -
A story of a woman who is kind of tired of academia and finds joy in a mid-career boost like this.
In any case - I recommend this book!
I began doing this after the 2016 election, after things did not quite turn out the way I expected. I spent about an hour watching Fox News and - no, that was not the way to insight.
Then I began reading conservative academic literature - Thomas Sowell, Walter E. Williams, and maybe J.D. Vance.
JD Vance has gone insane now due to being a politician haha, but Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis is incredible.
Regardless - all I did was read. And though I am far from conservative, these authors opened up my mind to different sides of a story.
Rosa Brooks does more than just read - she acts
Rosa Brooks, daughter of the inimitable Barbara Ehrenreich, who is herself more left-wing than Noam Chomsky, joins as a volunteer cop in her mid-forties.
She sees another side of the current debate.
And like open-minded engagement - she is not 'completely converted' - she sees that there are difficulties amongst disadvantaged groups, and in fact might see this from an even better vantagepoint.
But this is not everything - there is a different side to this story, a story of the cop who is always on edge and feels it - and perhaps more uplifting -
A story of a woman who is kind of tired of academia and finds joy in a mid-career boost like this.
In any case - I recommend this book!
June 1, 2022
4.5 ⭐️
This was a great book, and I feel like lots of people should read it. I have lots of thoughts. Here goes…
This is the story of a 40-something law professor who decided to take on the challenge of becoming a police officer. Call it a mid-life challenge; call it curiosity. Brooks was able to become a part-time reserve officer for the DC Metro police - a perfect arrangement for her, not wanting to abandon her day job altogether.
So she walks the reader through it. We get a front-row seat to her training; her physical fitness training; her firearms training. We see how she responds to the people in her life as they react to her new direction. And then we go on the beat with her.
Here’s some takeaways from Brooks’s account:
- all the things we think cops should be learning - all the societal stuff we’re working on to dismantle inequity and whatnot - they’re not learning it. At least not in the training academy. Maybe they discuss it in college classes. But there’s no room in the training curriculum for it (at least not in the DC Metro police).
- there is no way for cops to do their jobs the way they’re told to do it. For safety purposes, they’re taught to minimize the number of people on a scene; to not let them leave the room in case they go get a weapon; to keep enough distance to allow for reaction time. This just isn’t possible at most calls.
- most cops know what everyone knows: most arrests don’t really help anyone. They don’t rehabilitate anyone; they don’t truly keep anyone safer; they jam up people who are already on the margins. There’s just sometimes no choice, or no better option.
- I wonder if we wouldn’t be better served by more people like Brooks in our forces 🤔. People who come to the position with 20 years of life experience under their belts. People with a full life before they even apply. People from a different walk of life. I don’t know how common reserve/part-time officers are - I know it’s not unheard of - I had a high school teacher who undertook this same challenge at around the same point in her life, and she was an English teacher. Maybe we should encourage this kind of contribution more.
There’s so much more I’m not even touching here. The last thing I’ll mention is that Brooks ends the book by creating the space that is missing - an initiative in conjunction with Georgetown to give a place and time for new officers to process what they’re experiencing and put it up against the pressures from society for more just policing. It’s in its infancy. But it shows promise as a vehicle for real change.
If you have any interest in this matter, pick this up. It’s a good starting point to get talking about policing.
This was a great book, and I feel like lots of people should read it. I have lots of thoughts. Here goes…
This is the story of a 40-something law professor who decided to take on the challenge of becoming a police officer. Call it a mid-life challenge; call it curiosity. Brooks was able to become a part-time reserve officer for the DC Metro police - a perfect arrangement for her, not wanting to abandon her day job altogether.
So she walks the reader through it. We get a front-row seat to her training; her physical fitness training; her firearms training. We see how she responds to the people in her life as they react to her new direction. And then we go on the beat with her.
Here’s some takeaways from Brooks’s account:
- all the things we think cops should be learning - all the societal stuff we’re working on to dismantle inequity and whatnot - they’re not learning it. At least not in the training academy. Maybe they discuss it in college classes. But there’s no room in the training curriculum for it (at least not in the DC Metro police).
- there is no way for cops to do their jobs the way they’re told to do it. For safety purposes, they’re taught to minimize the number of people on a scene; to not let them leave the room in case they go get a weapon; to keep enough distance to allow for reaction time. This just isn’t possible at most calls.
- most cops know what everyone knows: most arrests don’t really help anyone. They don’t rehabilitate anyone; they don’t truly keep anyone safer; they jam up people who are already on the margins. There’s just sometimes no choice, or no better option.
- I wonder if we wouldn’t be better served by more people like Brooks in our forces 🤔. People who come to the position with 20 years of life experience under their belts. People with a full life before they even apply. People from a different walk of life. I don’t know how common reserve/part-time officers are - I know it’s not unheard of - I had a high school teacher who undertook this same challenge at around the same point in her life, and she was an English teacher. Maybe we should encourage this kind of contribution more.
There’s so much more I’m not even touching here. The last thing I’ll mention is that Brooks ends the book by creating the space that is missing - an initiative in conjunction with Georgetown to give a place and time for new officers to process what they’re experiencing and put it up against the pressures from society for more just policing. It’s in its infancy. But it shows promise as a vehicle for real change.
If you have any interest in this matter, pick this up. It’s a good starting point to get talking about policing.
September 1, 2022
This is a fascinating book by a law professor who goes becomes a reserve police officer in Washington DC. As a reserve officer, she goes through the same police academy training as full time officers, must amass 480 hours of patrol hours with an established officer and must present a portfolio of work in order to be authorized for solo patrols. I did not know when I bought this book that Brooks is the daughter of Barbara Ehrenreich, who I am an admirer of. It was amusing to read about her activist and very liberal mother's scepticism about her new hobby.
Brooks is fair and occasionally perhaps overly forgiving in her portrayal and assessment of her colleagues. Most of the book is anecdotes about her experiences at the academy and on patrol, with the occasional mention of problems with policing as it is practiced in the US today. The last section in which she describes a development program for new police recruits that is a collaboration between her Georgetown law school colleagues and the MPD is the closest the book comes to addressing what can be done to address problems of mass incarceration, implicit bias, overpolicing, etc. This is more a memoir than a book about policy, but it does offer valauble insight into how police operate and make decisions.
Brooks is fair and occasionally perhaps overly forgiving in her portrayal and assessment of her colleagues. Most of the book is anecdotes about her experiences at the academy and on patrol, with the occasional mention of problems with policing as it is practiced in the US today. The last section in which she describes a development program for new police recruits that is a collaboration between her Georgetown law school colleagues and the MPD is the closest the book comes to addressing what can be done to address problems of mass incarceration, implicit bias, overpolicing, etc. This is more a memoir than a book about policy, but it does offer valauble insight into how police operate and make decisions.
February 15, 2021
First, a quick note that I work in the social sciences but have no particular background in or knowledge about law enforcement. I also used to teach a class in education that sounds a lot like Dr. Brooks' policing program--an opportunity for teachers-in-training to step back from their quotidian professional concerns and consider the many contexts of the enterprise of which they are a part and how to make it work better for everyone--so I completely see the value in that.
That said, I found this book to be a considered, even-handed look at American policing. It's so rare that a scholar would seek out an opportunity to immerse herself so thoroughly in the enterprise she wants to understand (beyond the standard scholarly approaches of participant observation, etc.), and care about doing a good job of it (while always questioning what it means to do a good job of it, of course), and then actually help improve it (at the invitation and with the collaboration of the enterprise itself). (Yes, many people end up in academe having worked in professions they want to understand and/or improve--but few dip back into such professions once they're established in academe.) I wonder how much more publicly interesting/applicable/useful scholarship would be if more of it were carried out that way.
I was also impressed by how much respect Dr. Brooks had for her fellow officers. This book didn't feel like an expose to me--it felt like she was both trying to understand how the criminal justice system creates certain roles and expectations for the police, and how individual officers do the best they can within them.
The only thing I think this book would have benefited from was some examples of how policing is thought about and carried out in other countries, to show that alternatives are possible.
That said, I found this book to be a considered, even-handed look at American policing. It's so rare that a scholar would seek out an opportunity to immerse herself so thoroughly in the enterprise she wants to understand (beyond the standard scholarly approaches of participant observation, etc.), and care about doing a good job of it (while always questioning what it means to do a good job of it, of course), and then actually help improve it (at the invitation and with the collaboration of the enterprise itself). (Yes, many people end up in academe having worked in professions they want to understand and/or improve--but few dip back into such professions once they're established in academe.) I wonder how much more publicly interesting/applicable/useful scholarship would be if more of it were carried out that way.
I was also impressed by how much respect Dr. Brooks had for her fellow officers. This book didn't feel like an expose to me--it felt like she was both trying to understand how the criminal justice system creates certain roles and expectations for the police, and how individual officers do the best they can within them.
The only thing I think this book would have benefited from was some examples of how policing is thought about and carried out in other countries, to show that alternatives are possible.
June 3, 2021
I consistently wanted this book to be better. The concept is great, a law school professor joins the DC police force as a part time officer. There is the potential for an impactful combination of educational theory and real world experience. Unfortunately this book fell far short of what I hoped for.
Between derivations into childhood memories, an overindulgence of insignificant details (the author spends nearly a whole chapter talking about bruises that resulted from Lyme disease), this book felt like a lot of raw material that was never properly refined. I almost quit reading at a couple times, but the last quarter was valuable enough that I’m glad it didn’t.
In the last like 20% of the book, the author talks about her reflections and the partnership she creates with the police force in DC her and her Georgetown law that seem really interesting. Some of her takeaways seem decently founded and respectful of both the difficulties of policing and the awful experience many people have in the system. I didn’t love her summaries of “The New Jim Crowe” and other books, again the writing was lackluster, but the combination of the fact that she read them and the overlay into experience was compelling.
There is this underlying thread of violence that I really wanted the author to explore more. She tiptoes around it when talking about self-defense classes in the Academy but beyond her descriptions of “oh geez someone brandishing a knife is common“ and a sort of coda about the military and policing in the last chapter, it wasn’t explored. Her looks at reform to the police system are interesting but seem to miss the mark of wholistic because of this.
Between derivations into childhood memories, an overindulgence of insignificant details (the author spends nearly a whole chapter talking about bruises that resulted from Lyme disease), this book felt like a lot of raw material that was never properly refined. I almost quit reading at a couple times, but the last quarter was valuable enough that I’m glad it didn’t.
In the last like 20% of the book, the author talks about her reflections and the partnership she creates with the police force in DC her and her Georgetown law that seem really interesting. Some of her takeaways seem decently founded and respectful of both the difficulties of policing and the awful experience many people have in the system. I didn’t love her summaries of “The New Jim Crowe” and other books, again the writing was lackluster, but the combination of the fact that she read them and the overlay into experience was compelling.
There is this underlying thread of violence that I really wanted the author to explore more. She tiptoes around it when talking about self-defense classes in the Academy but beyond her descriptions of “oh geez someone brandishing a knife is common“ and a sort of coda about the military and policing in the last chapter, it wasn’t explored. Her looks at reform to the police system are interesting but seem to miss the mark of wholistic because of this.
March 17, 2022
I think the next time someone approaches me and tries to talk to me about their radical “demolish all jails” or “defund the police” opinions, I’m gonna recommend they pull a “Rosa Brooks” so to say. In plain English, I’m gonna ignore them until they join their local police services reserve or auxiliary unit. Ok maybe that’s asking to much, but I’m gonna at least ask them to read this book.
This book offers an incredibly well written view into the real life experiences of a police officer in a major American city. Not only was it refreshing for me to read a memoir (for the first time in a long time), I found that Brooks offers a more unbiased and fact based view on lots of topics, and doesn’t align herself with a political narrative when revealing the truth about policing, a truth she literally lived.
I think the only thing I disagree with in this entire book is when Brooks goes on a feminists rant and says something along the lines of “men get to do all the fun stuff… like fight in wars”. I wonder if she asked many veterans how much fun they had a D Day they would give her a very different answer to the one she was expecting.
The (relatively) small pet peeve is the only fault I could find with the book. Brooks was honest, humorous, and not nearly as annoying as I thought she’d be going in. Definitely recommend this book to anyone on either side of the political isle, to simply improve their knowledge on a very relevant and important issue.
This book offers an incredibly well written view into the real life experiences of a police officer in a major American city. Not only was it refreshing for me to read a memoir (for the first time in a long time), I found that Brooks offers a more unbiased and fact based view on lots of topics, and doesn’t align herself with a political narrative when revealing the truth about policing, a truth she literally lived.
I think the only thing I disagree with in this entire book is when Brooks goes on a feminists rant and says something along the lines of “men get to do all the fun stuff… like fight in wars”. I wonder if she asked many veterans how much fun they had a D Day they would give her a very different answer to the one she was expecting.
The (relatively) small pet peeve is the only fault I could find with the book. Brooks was honest, humorous, and not nearly as annoying as I thought she’d be going in. Definitely recommend this book to anyone on either side of the political isle, to simply improve their knowledge on a very relevant and important issue.
February 13, 2022
This book was miscategorized: it’s actually a memoir. And if I had known that, I would not have picked it up. There is just way to much irrelevant personal information in there. I could not care less what kind of street she grew up on or what her relationship with her mother is like. There are some interesting insights into policing, and specifically policing in the District of Columbia. It’s useful for checking assumptions and biases about police, particularly among the liberal crowd Brooks is writing for. But I wanted more rigor and fewer feelings.
dnf
June 16, 2021I read half and just didn’t find it compelling in a way that made me want to finish. I thought this would offer insight into the complexities of being a police officer. Instead, it looks at the minutiae of the daily tasks and it just didn’t seem to have a lot to say.
September 9, 2020
Although I disagree with some of her conclusions, Brooks’ description of police work is thoughtful, informative, and accessible.
December 12, 2021
Sometimes, I just want to drive off in to the sunset and go do something else, live somewhere else, and be someone else. Today, this book makes me want to move to our nation's capitol and become a Washington DC Metropolitan Reserve Police Officer. Just like that.
Brooks is a woman of a certain age, a Georgetown law professor, a mother, and loaded with experience. Her mother is powerhouse journalist and writer Barbara Ehrenreich of Nickel and Dimed fame. This book about policing is an immersion - Nellie Bly, almost undercover style, but not quite.
How did this forty-something, mother of two become a sworn reserve officer, after about a year of night and weekend trainings? Brooks ultimately served for about five years, mostly part time. Brooks is impressive, tenacious and brings a wealth of life experience, keen judgment and legal acumen to the job. She pursued becoming an officer despite her family's misgivings about policing in America. I initially thought that this was some type of inside job - an infiltration designed to to be an exposé. But it is not any of these things.
Brooks assesses many aspects of her police training with a careful eye. In the nation's capitol, she is shocked to learn that the training programs don't discuss race or racially-charged encounters between citizens and police. This is in 2017! The blue wall of silence is an actual wall of silence. They don't discuss it in any official capacity. The training focuses instead on safety, firearms, and legal traffic stops, etc. Brooks shares that she is twice the age of most of the other recruits - she could easily be the mother of any one of these young 20-something cadets. Most of the calls for police service she eventually goes on seem have a lot of social work components to them.
However, I am concerned that Brooks' approach somewhat smacks of 'police tourism'. In the world of K-12 education, we often see Teach for America/alternatively-certified candidates do fly-bys in education for a few years as educational tourists and then leave the profession with criticism and all the answers to what ails the system. The only advantage Brooks has on entry level teachers in this case is a lot of life experience and almost two decades practicing law. She doesn't pretend to have all the answers, but she definitely has some good ideas.
One of her good ideas ultimately leads to the creation of a program between the DC Metropolitan Police and Georgetown Law called the Police of Tomorrow Fellowship. This community partnership program asks new officers to apply and is attempting to change the culture of silence and connect law enforcement to the community in which they serve with specific workshops and other opportunities for engagement with the public.
Lastly, despite the publication date - this book does not cover or even mention the Metropolitan DC Police Department's response to the events of January 6th in relation to the invasion of the Capitol. Did she ever work alongside Officers Eugene Goodman or Michael Fanone?? Inquiring minds want to know! However, that is another book entirely.
Brooks is a woman of a certain age, a Georgetown law professor, a mother, and loaded with experience. Her mother is powerhouse journalist and writer Barbara Ehrenreich of Nickel and Dimed fame. This book about policing is an immersion - Nellie Bly, almost undercover style, but not quite.
How did this forty-something, mother of two become a sworn reserve officer, after about a year of night and weekend trainings? Brooks ultimately served for about five years, mostly part time. Brooks is impressive, tenacious and brings a wealth of life experience, keen judgment and legal acumen to the job. She pursued becoming an officer despite her family's misgivings about policing in America. I initially thought that this was some type of inside job - an infiltration designed to to be an exposé. But it is not any of these things.
Brooks assesses many aspects of her police training with a careful eye. In the nation's capitol, she is shocked to learn that the training programs don't discuss race or racially-charged encounters between citizens and police. This is in 2017! The blue wall of silence is an actual wall of silence. They don't discuss it in any official capacity. The training focuses instead on safety, firearms, and legal traffic stops, etc. Brooks shares that she is twice the age of most of the other recruits - she could easily be the mother of any one of these young 20-something cadets. Most of the calls for police service she eventually goes on seem have a lot of social work components to them.
However, I am concerned that Brooks' approach somewhat smacks of 'police tourism'. In the world of K-12 education, we often see Teach for America/alternatively-certified candidates do fly-bys in education for a few years as educational tourists and then leave the profession with criticism and all the answers to what ails the system. The only advantage Brooks has on entry level teachers in this case is a lot of life experience and almost two decades practicing law. She doesn't pretend to have all the answers, but she definitely has some good ideas.
One of her good ideas ultimately leads to the creation of a program between the DC Metropolitan Police and Georgetown Law called the Police of Tomorrow Fellowship. This community partnership program asks new officers to apply and is attempting to change the culture of silence and connect law enforcement to the community in which they serve with specific workshops and other opportunities for engagement with the public.
Lastly, despite the publication date - this book does not cover or even mention the Metropolitan DC Police Department's response to the events of January 6th in relation to the invasion of the Capitol. Did she ever work alongside Officers Eugene Goodman or Michael Fanone?? Inquiring minds want to know! However, that is another book entirely.
May 27, 2021
The only thing that consoled me was my growing awareness that being a good cop is hard. In fact, it was nearly impossible. There was just too much to keep track of. Many officers were better at it than I was, but no one consistently did it well, because no one could always do it well. (p. 305)Perhaps the best book I’ve read this year. Both fun to read and thoughtful.
It is based on the author’s experience as a part-time police officer in Washington, D.C., while also being a professor at Georgetown University law school..
I respect the author because she wrote a book which will displease all sides of the problem of policing in America, and because, instead of relying on what she heard or read, she went out and saw for herself. Her method will displease the left because, unsurprisingly, when you work with someone regularly and see the problems they face, it is difficult to think about them as irredeemably evil. Her conclusion will displease the right because she proposes a change in policing philosophy that is likely to result in more police losing their lives in the line of duty.
She was not afraid to portray herself as slightly ridiculous, because she was not writing to please an audience. She was saying what happened. She found her police uniform difficult to get out of when she went to the toilet, which led to her being mistaken, on one occasion, for a man in a woman’s bathroom. She had bossy mother problems. In other words, she had a life that seemed to have the normal amount of personal difficulties which the average policeman might face. I thought the inclusion of these details made the book more interesting.
I’ve read some criticism to the effect that the author is setting herself up as an expert without the necessary experience, which is just plain unfair -- the author never hides the amount of time she spent in a blue uniform, or how dependent she was on “real” (meaning: full-time) police. But she spent a lot of time dealing with crazy people, being present at family tragedies, and engaging in situations that could have very easily ended in tragedy, so I think she has more of right to comment than people who have not done so.
This is another book which says that there are no easy answers. Books like that rarely make it onto the required reading list of any political ideology, but they are worth reading because, by reading about the unfiltered experience of the author, we can enlarge our own experience, too.
February 14, 2021
Brooks tries to humanize police in this memoir of training and working as a volunteer reserve police officer in Washington, DC. Despite the job and the memoir's episodic nature, Brooks does a good job organizing the stories to keep a thematic momentum going. There is more personal backstory than I wanted, but after the first few chapters I couldn't stop reading. The stories have both humor and compassion.
Brooks approached the police from a very liberal viewpoint, and I think that she must have planned to write a timely and complicated book about American police. In this, I think she largely fails. Her day-to-day patrols are disconnected from conversations about police violence, race, or even drugs or guns, except, perhaps, urban poverty. That itself could be the point. But I think that in "The Second Chance Club," Jason Hardy more successfully combines a memoir about his experience as a parole officer with a social and political discussion of parole and sentencing.
It is still a good book.
> Patrol has no plot. I learned this very quickly. This is why there are thousands of books and movies about detectives, but not many about patrol officers. The work of detectives comes with built-in narratives.
> The medic tried again. “Listen, man. What’s your name?” Nothing, just a blank look. “Buddy,” said the medic. “You know what day it is?” A light went on inside the dull brown eyes. “Hey, yeah, man, it’s like, I think it’s like … it’s … Sunday, right, man? Sunday.” “You know who the president is?” The medic was running through the standard mental status checklist. The guy paused, looking puzzled and, for the first time, a little alarmed. “Is Donald Trump the president?” “Sorry, man, yeah.” “ Shee-it.” He closed his eyes again, this time with some determination.
> For a police officer, having three or four firmly attached belt keepers is a very good thing if you happen to be breaking up a fight or running up five flights of stairs to respond to an urgent assault-in-progress call, since the duty belt holds your radio, gun, handcuffs, flashlight, pepper spray, baton, tourniquet, and various other vital odds and ends. You really want it to stay on your waist and not go flying off as you run—or, worse, fall down around your ankles, snaring your legs in a lasso of your own creation. But if you happen to be a woman and you happen to need to pee, belt keepers are not your friends. … I fumble around in the tiny stall, groping blindly for the lost belt keeper. The stiff leather duty belt, almost but not quite freed from its underbelt, swings around wildly, and my holstered gun hits the toilet tank with a loud smack. By now I’ve twisted my whole body around so I’m facing away from the stall door. I’m practically straddling the toilet, bracing my legs to try to keep my radio, which now dangles from its holder, from sliding away.
> We were stopped at a red light when I noticed that the woman in the car next to us was screaming. I rolled down my window. “Oh my God oh my God!” shrieked the woman. She lifted both hands off the steering wheel. “Oh God oh God!” “Ma’am,” I called. “What’s wrong?” “Oh God oh God there’s a spider in my car. Oh God help me.” She was hyperventilating. Ben and I looked at each other. Then Ben hit the blue lights and we both jumped out of the car. “Ma’am, just come on out of your car,” I said. “My partner here is going to take care of that spider.”
> “Ms. Watkins,” I said dutifully, “I just wanted to let you know that we don’t have any additional information yet, but we’re looking all over, and the minute we find out anything, we’ll let you know.” “Oh, she’s back!” “She’s back?” “I’m sorry, officer, I meant to call you, but I got so busy yelling at her, I forgot. She come back about an hour ago.” She gestured at a sulky-looking teen sitting on the sofa. “You gonna arrest her now? I’m sick and tired of this. She won’t mind me. Night in jail would do her a world of good.”
> In every district, the majority of calls for police service involve reports of disorderly conduct. This can mean anything: an aggressive panhandler, kids smoking weed in the park, a loud drunk staggering around in the middle of the road, someone peeing in an alley. But after the ubiquitous disorderly calls, the seven police districts diverge. In the wealthy Second District, the most common calls after disorderly conduct complaints involve burglar alarms and business alarms going off, followed by accidental property damage (usually minor fender benders) and traffic complaints. In 7D, after disorderly conduct calls, most calls for service involve “family disturbances,” assaults, and “other,” with burglar alarms coming in fifth
> MPD code words were more prosaic, and often silly: backpack, optional, happy, love, fun, rocket, urology, and waffle featured among recent entries. It was hard to imagine a desperate undercover officer trying to identify himself as a “friendly” during an armed police raid by yelling, “Waffle! Waffle!” and shouting “Rocket!” struck me as a recipe for dangerous misunderstandings. At one point, the police code word was police, which seemed both redundant and unpersuasive.
> only about 3 percent of DC residents suffer from schizophrenia or severe bipolar disorder. Within the city’s homeless population, 13 percent suffer from severe mental illness, and another 15 percent suffer from chronic substance abuse problems. Encounters with mental health consumers could be sad and frustrating, but they were also treasured by officers for their comic potential. Only with a mental health consumer, for instance, was an officer likely to encounter someone deploying a snapping turtle as a weapon.
> “He says he’s an alien. He’s waiting for the other aliens to pick him up.”
> All told, the average arrest costs the city several thousand dollars—even when arrestees are ultimately released without formal charges. Nearly a third of all DC arrests are “no-papered,” meaning they don’t lead to formal charges because prosecutors decide not to move forward with the case.
> the Police for Tomorrow initiative. We would invite applications from officers and MPD civilian employees with less than a year on the job, we decided. Those selected as fellows would participate in intensive monthly workshops on topics such as race and policing, implicit bias, poverty and crime, DC’s changing demographics and the impact of gentrification on policing, mental illness, adolescent brain development, police use of force, and innovative approaches to reducing violence, over-criminalization, and mass incarceration … Christy Lopez and I developed and co-taught a practicum course on innovative policing at the law school, and we trained our law students to serve as discussion facilitators at the police academy. MPD asked us to help rethink the entire academy curriculum, and a team of law students worked with academy staff to develop proposals for change. We put other student teams to work helping MPD rethink its performance evaluation system, develop new approaches to recruiting, and analyze the data on police stops to identify and address racial disparities. We expanded beyond MPD as well, helping a community activist in New Orleans launch a Police for Tomorrow–like program with the New Orleans Police Department
> I talked about my previous writing on war and the military, and the ways in which our tendency to view more and more global threats through the lens of war had undermined the rule of law even as it expanded the role of the military. When it came to domestic, US issues, I said, we were seeing a strikingly similar phenomenon: we were categorizing more and more behaviors as crimes, with devastating consequences for the most vulnerable Americans, and we were steadily expanding the role of police. … “We live in a world in which everything has become war and the military has become everything, everything is becoming crime and the police are becoming everything, and war and policing are becoming ever more intertwined, both on the level of law and the level of institutions. These trends remain invisible to most Americans—but they are having a devastating effect on human rights, democratic accountability, and the rule of law
> In the US, for instance, we consider it normal to have armed police officers enforce compliance with traffic regulations, even though most traffic violations don’t constitute criminal offenses. … American society asks police officers to use violence when needed to enforce the law, but we also ask them to serve as mediators, protectors, social workers, mentors, and medics.
> I found that mention of Donald Trump’s presidency offered a fairly reliable test of mental alertness. Otherwise-stuporous people could be jolted quickly back to consciousness—often irate consciousness—by mention of Trump’s name, and the test worked even if you didn’t name names … “Great, you’re doing great. Just one more question,” the medic told her. “You know who the president is?” For a moment, her eyes fogged over, but then they snapped back into focus and she jerked herself upright. “That . . . white . . . motherfucker!” “Yeah, she’s good,” said the medic, jotting a note on his tablet. “Fully oriented to time, place, and person.”
> ACCUNK stands for “Accident with Unknown Injuries,” for instance, while THRTPER stands for “Threat—In Person” and BERGMACHRPT stands for “Burglary of Machine, More than 30 Minutes Ago.”
> In Britain, there are only 6.6 guns per 100 people; in Germany and France, there are roughly 30 guns per 100 people. In the United States, there are somewhere between 88 and 112 guns per 100 people. The per capita US homicide rate also far outpaces other developed countries: it’s roughly three times higher than in France, four times higher than in Britain, five times higher than in Germany, and 13 times higher than in Japan. The United States’ violence problem has obvious implications for American police officers and how they think about their on-the-job encounters
Brooks approached the police from a very liberal viewpoint, and I think that she must have planned to write a timely and complicated book about American police. In this, I think she largely fails. Her day-to-day patrols are disconnected from conversations about police violence, race, or even drugs or guns, except, perhaps, urban poverty. That itself could be the point. But I think that in "The Second Chance Club," Jason Hardy more successfully combines a memoir about his experience as a parole officer with a social and political discussion of parole and sentencing.
It is still a good book.
> Patrol has no plot. I learned this very quickly. This is why there are thousands of books and movies about detectives, but not many about patrol officers. The work of detectives comes with built-in narratives.
> The medic tried again. “Listen, man. What’s your name?” Nothing, just a blank look. “Buddy,” said the medic. “You know what day it is?” A light went on inside the dull brown eyes. “Hey, yeah, man, it’s like, I think it’s like … it’s … Sunday, right, man? Sunday.” “You know who the president is?” The medic was running through the standard mental status checklist. The guy paused, looking puzzled and, for the first time, a little alarmed. “Is Donald Trump the president?” “Sorry, man, yeah.” “ Shee-it.” He closed his eyes again, this time with some determination.
> For a police officer, having three or four firmly attached belt keepers is a very good thing if you happen to be breaking up a fight or running up five flights of stairs to respond to an urgent assault-in-progress call, since the duty belt holds your radio, gun, handcuffs, flashlight, pepper spray, baton, tourniquet, and various other vital odds and ends. You really want it to stay on your waist and not go flying off as you run—or, worse, fall down around your ankles, snaring your legs in a lasso of your own creation. But if you happen to be a woman and you happen to need to pee, belt keepers are not your friends. … I fumble around in the tiny stall, groping blindly for the lost belt keeper. The stiff leather duty belt, almost but not quite freed from its underbelt, swings around wildly, and my holstered gun hits the toilet tank with a loud smack. By now I’ve twisted my whole body around so I’m facing away from the stall door. I’m practically straddling the toilet, bracing my legs to try to keep my radio, which now dangles from its holder, from sliding away.
> We were stopped at a red light when I noticed that the woman in the car next to us was screaming. I rolled down my window. “Oh my God oh my God!” shrieked the woman. She lifted both hands off the steering wheel. “Oh God oh God!” “Ma’am,” I called. “What’s wrong?” “Oh God oh God there’s a spider in my car. Oh God help me.” She was hyperventilating. Ben and I looked at each other. Then Ben hit the blue lights and we both jumped out of the car. “Ma’am, just come on out of your car,” I said. “My partner here is going to take care of that spider.”
> “Ms. Watkins,” I said dutifully, “I just wanted to let you know that we don’t have any additional information yet, but we’re looking all over, and the minute we find out anything, we’ll let you know.” “Oh, she’s back!” “She’s back?” “I’m sorry, officer, I meant to call you, but I got so busy yelling at her, I forgot. She come back about an hour ago.” She gestured at a sulky-looking teen sitting on the sofa. “You gonna arrest her now? I’m sick and tired of this. She won’t mind me. Night in jail would do her a world of good.”
> In every district, the majority of calls for police service involve reports of disorderly conduct. This can mean anything: an aggressive panhandler, kids smoking weed in the park, a loud drunk staggering around in the middle of the road, someone peeing in an alley. But after the ubiquitous disorderly calls, the seven police districts diverge. In the wealthy Second District, the most common calls after disorderly conduct complaints involve burglar alarms and business alarms going off, followed by accidental property damage (usually minor fender benders) and traffic complaints. In 7D, after disorderly conduct calls, most calls for service involve “family disturbances,” assaults, and “other,” with burglar alarms coming in fifth
> MPD code words were more prosaic, and often silly: backpack, optional, happy, love, fun, rocket, urology, and waffle featured among recent entries. It was hard to imagine a desperate undercover officer trying to identify himself as a “friendly” during an armed police raid by yelling, “Waffle! Waffle!” and shouting “Rocket!” struck me as a recipe for dangerous misunderstandings. At one point, the police code word was police, which seemed both redundant and unpersuasive.
> only about 3 percent of DC residents suffer from schizophrenia or severe bipolar disorder. Within the city’s homeless population, 13 percent suffer from severe mental illness, and another 15 percent suffer from chronic substance abuse problems. Encounters with mental health consumers could be sad and frustrating, but they were also treasured by officers for their comic potential. Only with a mental health consumer, for instance, was an officer likely to encounter someone deploying a snapping turtle as a weapon.
> “He says he’s an alien. He’s waiting for the other aliens to pick him up.”
> All told, the average arrest costs the city several thousand dollars—even when arrestees are ultimately released without formal charges. Nearly a third of all DC arrests are “no-papered,” meaning they don’t lead to formal charges because prosecutors decide not to move forward with the case.
> the Police for Tomorrow initiative. We would invite applications from officers and MPD civilian employees with less than a year on the job, we decided. Those selected as fellows would participate in intensive monthly workshops on topics such as race and policing, implicit bias, poverty and crime, DC’s changing demographics and the impact of gentrification on policing, mental illness, adolescent brain development, police use of force, and innovative approaches to reducing violence, over-criminalization, and mass incarceration … Christy Lopez and I developed and co-taught a practicum course on innovative policing at the law school, and we trained our law students to serve as discussion facilitators at the police academy. MPD asked us to help rethink the entire academy curriculum, and a team of law students worked with academy staff to develop proposals for change. We put other student teams to work helping MPD rethink its performance evaluation system, develop new approaches to recruiting, and analyze the data on police stops to identify and address racial disparities. We expanded beyond MPD as well, helping a community activist in New Orleans launch a Police for Tomorrow–like program with the New Orleans Police Department
> I talked about my previous writing on war and the military, and the ways in which our tendency to view more and more global threats through the lens of war had undermined the rule of law even as it expanded the role of the military. When it came to domestic, US issues, I said, we were seeing a strikingly similar phenomenon: we were categorizing more and more behaviors as crimes, with devastating consequences for the most vulnerable Americans, and we were steadily expanding the role of police. … “We live in a world in which everything has become war and the military has become everything, everything is becoming crime and the police are becoming everything, and war and policing are becoming ever more intertwined, both on the level of law and the level of institutions. These trends remain invisible to most Americans—but they are having a devastating effect on human rights, democratic accountability, and the rule of law
> In the US, for instance, we consider it normal to have armed police officers enforce compliance with traffic regulations, even though most traffic violations don’t constitute criminal offenses. … American society asks police officers to use violence when needed to enforce the law, but we also ask them to serve as mediators, protectors, social workers, mentors, and medics.
> I found that mention of Donald Trump’s presidency offered a fairly reliable test of mental alertness. Otherwise-stuporous people could be jolted quickly back to consciousness—often irate consciousness—by mention of Trump’s name, and the test worked even if you didn’t name names … “Great, you’re doing great. Just one more question,” the medic told her. “You know who the president is?” For a moment, her eyes fogged over, but then they snapped back into focus and she jerked herself upright. “That . . . white . . . motherfucker!” “Yeah, she’s good,” said the medic, jotting a note on his tablet. “Fully oriented to time, place, and person.”
> ACCUNK stands for “Accident with Unknown Injuries,” for instance, while THRTPER stands for “Threat—In Person” and BERGMACHRPT stands for “Burglary of Machine, More than 30 Minutes Ago.”
> In Britain, there are only 6.6 guns per 100 people; in Germany and France, there are roughly 30 guns per 100 people. In the United States, there are somewhere between 88 and 112 guns per 100 people. The per capita US homicide rate also far outpaces other developed countries: it’s roughly three times higher than in France, four times higher than in Britain, five times higher than in Germany, and 13 times higher than in Japan. The United States’ violence problem has obvious implications for American police officers and how they think about their on-the-job encounters
August 3, 2023
A very good book, kind of a 4.5 for me, although it has a few limits. Brooks is a law school prof and former DoD employee who became a reserve police officer in her 40s to get a better sense of what that was like. As an academic, I don't quite believe that she joined up just out of curiousity and with no intention of writing about it; we academics are always looking to write about things, so I'm skeptical. Still, it's interesting to see these worlds collide in the form of her memoiristic account of life in the police, and she has a lot of important insights. It's also interesting that her mother is the noted left-wing journalist Barbara Ehrenreich; you could see how Brooks was engaging in her own form of rebellion against her already rebellious mom.
Brooks narrates the training, police culture, and the day-to-day life of police officers. She shows a few important things. One is that policing really would grind anyone down: you engage on a daily basis with human misery, dysfunction, violence, and mental illness. You are usually the first one on the scene when someone dies, even when it is non-violent. You get screamed at, lied to, and threatened, and you are supposed to remain polite and professional at all times. This doesn't excuse police misconduct, but it helps explain why many of them become cynical and a little calloused; you just need that armor against the crappiness of the world. Whenever we criticize the police (and in a democracy defined by the rule of law, we shouldn't hesitate to do so), we should keep these realities in mind.
However, Brooks also notes how police culture has negative long-term effects in a number of ways. Most importantly, from the first day of training, recruits have it pounded into their heads that this is an incredibly dangerous job. It is, although it ranks somewhere in the teens in terms of deadliest jobs in America. In training, Brooks discusses how recruits are indoctrinated into thinking that any person could pull a gun on them at any time and told horror stories of seemingly innocent people attacking cops with guns and a variety of random weapons. Of course, there is nothing wrong with vigilance and safety training, but when we look at cases of cops shooting people pulling cell phones out of their back pockets, we can see how this culture of vigilance might backfire. Brooks notes that at no point were police recruits given statistics about the likelihood of dying or even being shot at on the job (quite low for both, especially if you are in a good district). Why not give them these stats along with the safety and awareness training to try to create a different culture and different behavior?
This speaks to a larger problem Brooks identifies with average police officers: they are well-meaning and capable people, but they don't usually think systematically about what policing is for. We have put so many jobs onto the police besides enforcing the law: dealing with domestic disputes, mental illness, drug issues, and other social problems. We require them to police quality-of-life offenses and then criticize them for arresting too many people. In a broad sense, police misconduct is the fault of legislators and voters who ask them to do everything and be everything. But getting police to think more seriously about what policing should do, as well as its checkered history, would be a big step toward lowering distrust, violence, and other problems. Brooks ends the book by talking about a program she set up at GW to invite police fellows to learn and discuss about these issues at the academic level, which I think is a great start.
A few other issues: Brooks is on the friendlier side toward police, which is understandable. She levels a convincing critique at Michelle Alexander's New Jim Crow thesis, not denying it entirely but arguing that class has become as important as race in explaining hostile police-citizen relationships, over-incarceration, and other issues. But Brooks only really looks at "normal" policing, not more controversial issues like police militarization, the blue lives matter phenomenon, police relentlessly protecting their own in most cases, and special police units like gun task forces that often run roughshod over the law and damage relations with citizens. These are some of the darker sides of policing tackled by people like Radley Balko, Stuart Schrader, and Alexander, and I would have liked to see more engagement with their work. Nonetheless, this is a balanced and fair-minded look at policing that deserves to be read by people interested in these issues.
Brooks narrates the training, police culture, and the day-to-day life of police officers. She shows a few important things. One is that policing really would grind anyone down: you engage on a daily basis with human misery, dysfunction, violence, and mental illness. You are usually the first one on the scene when someone dies, even when it is non-violent. You get screamed at, lied to, and threatened, and you are supposed to remain polite and professional at all times. This doesn't excuse police misconduct, but it helps explain why many of them become cynical and a little calloused; you just need that armor against the crappiness of the world. Whenever we criticize the police (and in a democracy defined by the rule of law, we shouldn't hesitate to do so), we should keep these realities in mind.
However, Brooks also notes how police culture has negative long-term effects in a number of ways. Most importantly, from the first day of training, recruits have it pounded into their heads that this is an incredibly dangerous job. It is, although it ranks somewhere in the teens in terms of deadliest jobs in America. In training, Brooks discusses how recruits are indoctrinated into thinking that any person could pull a gun on them at any time and told horror stories of seemingly innocent people attacking cops with guns and a variety of random weapons. Of course, there is nothing wrong with vigilance and safety training, but when we look at cases of cops shooting people pulling cell phones out of their back pockets, we can see how this culture of vigilance might backfire. Brooks notes that at no point were police recruits given statistics about the likelihood of dying or even being shot at on the job (quite low for both, especially if you are in a good district). Why not give them these stats along with the safety and awareness training to try to create a different culture and different behavior?
This speaks to a larger problem Brooks identifies with average police officers: they are well-meaning and capable people, but they don't usually think systematically about what policing is for. We have put so many jobs onto the police besides enforcing the law: dealing with domestic disputes, mental illness, drug issues, and other social problems. We require them to police quality-of-life offenses and then criticize them for arresting too many people. In a broad sense, police misconduct is the fault of legislators and voters who ask them to do everything and be everything. But getting police to think more seriously about what policing should do, as well as its checkered history, would be a big step toward lowering distrust, violence, and other problems. Brooks ends the book by talking about a program she set up at GW to invite police fellows to learn and discuss about these issues at the academic level, which I think is a great start.
A few other issues: Brooks is on the friendlier side toward police, which is understandable. She levels a convincing critique at Michelle Alexander's New Jim Crow thesis, not denying it entirely but arguing that class has become as important as race in explaining hostile police-citizen relationships, over-incarceration, and other issues. But Brooks only really looks at "normal" policing, not more controversial issues like police militarization, the blue lives matter phenomenon, police relentlessly protecting their own in most cases, and special police units like gun task forces that often run roughshod over the law and damage relations with citizens. These are some of the darker sides of policing tackled by people like Radley Balko, Stuart Schrader, and Alexander, and I would have liked to see more engagement with their work. Nonetheless, this is a balanced and fair-minded look at policing that deserves to be read by people interested in these issues.
August 19, 2022
Okay, honestly this book was much better than I anticipated. I knew the topic would be interesting but I do struggle more with books that aren’t fiction. I thought Rosa made this book easy to read and it truly made me questions both of my thoughts regarding police and discrimination. While I think there are many things that can change in the police system, I do feel more sympathy and understanding to the challenges and danger the police face after reading this book. Excited to talk to book club about it!
February 23, 2023
i think brooks could have don’t a better job at incorporating her new ideas throughout the book instead of just throwing it at you in the epilogue. i was very frustrated with her at times while she was patrolling, but i understand how hard it could be at times in these types of situations. very eye-opening and explanatory for why most police officers act the way they do
June 27, 2021
Brooks recounts her experiences serving as a sworn, armed reserve police officer with the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department and offers a thoughtful, insightful, revealing look at the realities of urban policing.
May 6, 2025
The book explored the role of a part time police officer seen through the eyes of a distinguished author and law professor. Rosa Brooks seems like an unlikely candidate for a reserve officer of the DC Metropolitan Police Department but showcases the strength, resilience, and compassion to serve the city. It’s an interesting story of her experience and the ways she wished policing could change in this country.
December 20, 2023
An interesting perspective. A little more personal detail/memoir than I would have preferred, but I found her descriptions of the training and patrol duty fascinating. I couldn't help but feel that including volunteers in the police force is a really bad idea but I did enjoy learning about her experiences with it.
May 25, 2021
Nonfiction that takes me into a world I know little about has always been very appealing, and this quick-reading book ticks that box. In it, the reader rides along with a middle-aged female law school professor who goes through the full training to be a police officer in Washington, DC and serves as a volunteer officer with full powers of arrest. As someone who grew up in the city during its time as "Murder Capital" in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and who has worked for the city for more than ten years, the book holds extra resonance.
The author is the daughter of author-activist Barbara Ehrenreich, and the early chapters toggle back and forth about her initial interest in this volunteer officer training program and having to explain/justify herself to her ardently anti-police mother who spent her formative years being tear-gassed while protesting. In doing so, she is, of course, also explaining herself to the demographic most likely to pick up a book like this.
What unfolds is a pretty straightforward recounting of the MPD (Metropolitan Police Department) training academy program and her progress through it with a cohort of fellow volunteer candidates. As a civilian, I found it to be a pretty interesting glimpse under the hood of the details of police work. Most of her supervised street training takes place in 7D (the police district that comprises about half of the city below the Anacostia River and south of Good Hope Rd / Naylor Ave), an area I've spent plenty of time driving around in. There are plenty of anecdotes and stories shared that illustrate the constraints and contradictions that uniformed patrol officers find themselves confronted with every day.
It's not until the very end that she offers any larger thoughts about how policing might be different. One major point she raises is that the training emphasis for police focuses on officer safety to a degree both disproportionate to the risk and without any acknowledgement that, like joining the military, one is electing to enter a field where a certain degree of risk is implicit. I won't reveal the book's final feel-good turn, but it involves a DC government training initiative that I took part in several years previously and it was gratifying to see the connection and success that grew out of it. All in all, there's nothing particularly revolutionary here, but readers interested in a clear-eyed, first-hand account of policing in an American city should definitely check this out.
The author is the daughter of author-activist Barbara Ehrenreich, and the early chapters toggle back and forth about her initial interest in this volunteer officer training program and having to explain/justify herself to her ardently anti-police mother who spent her formative years being tear-gassed while protesting. In doing so, she is, of course, also explaining herself to the demographic most likely to pick up a book like this.
What unfolds is a pretty straightforward recounting of the MPD (Metropolitan Police Department) training academy program and her progress through it with a cohort of fellow volunteer candidates. As a civilian, I found it to be a pretty interesting glimpse under the hood of the details of police work. Most of her supervised street training takes place in 7D (the police district that comprises about half of the city below the Anacostia River and south of Good Hope Rd / Naylor Ave), an area I've spent plenty of time driving around in. There are plenty of anecdotes and stories shared that illustrate the constraints and contradictions that uniformed patrol officers find themselves confronted with every day.
It's not until the very end that she offers any larger thoughts about how policing might be different. One major point she raises is that the training emphasis for police focuses on officer safety to a degree both disproportionate to the risk and without any acknowledgement that, like joining the military, one is electing to enter a field where a certain degree of risk is implicit. I won't reveal the book's final feel-good turn, but it involves a DC government training initiative that I took part in several years previously and it was gratifying to see the connection and success that grew out of it. All in all, there's nothing particularly revolutionary here, but readers interested in a clear-eyed, first-hand account of policing in an American city should definitely check this out.
April 5, 2021
I have so many mixed feelings on this book. It was definitely an interesting memoir about policing in Washington, DC, a place I used to live. It was pretty easy for me to see things from the author's perspective, because she's a middle-aged white lady like me. I understand how patrolling with the police would make you sympathetic to the individual police officers you spend your time with. I was relieved at the end of the book when she brought her multiple expertises together to try to enact meaningful change. But, at the end of it all, I just don't believe that policing, as it is conceived and executed in the United States of America, can be reformed. I do believe that individual officers are good people, and that the majority of police are trying to do the right thing, but the entire justice system is built from our original American evil, and it simply cannot be made better. (Brooks even titled one chapter "Baked Into The System.") The more I learn, the more I think the only way to solve the problem is to defund the police and put all that money into reducing poverty. When you start to research any part of this, all roads lead to poverty, and only a robust social safety net can make things better.
There's an article in my local newspaper today about how a prison in a town in my state is going to be shut down soon, and how the mayor and many citizens of that town are loudly complaining because it will devastate the local economy and eliminate jobs. How can we stand for an entire town's economy relying on a prison? How can we stand it that police officer or correctional officer is sometimes the only reasonably-paying job people can get, and those jobs depend on exacerbating a cycle of violence? Take a look at your local municipality's budget, and look at how much money goes to police versus how much goes to combating homelessness. It just makes no sense.
Anyway, if you know any middle-aged white ladies who are starting to feel uncomfortable about the carceral state but aren't quite ready for Angela Davis or Mariame Kaba, this is probably a good book to give them.
A NOTE ON FORMAT: The endnotes in this book were the worst of all worlds. Endnotes, but no superscript notes in the text. Most notes were citations, but a few were explanations, so at the end of each chapter, you had to flip to the endnotes to see if you missed anything. The audiobook just flat-out skipped the notes altogether.
There's an article in my local newspaper today about how a prison in a town in my state is going to be shut down soon, and how the mayor and many citizens of that town are loudly complaining because it will devastate the local economy and eliminate jobs. How can we stand for an entire town's economy relying on a prison? How can we stand it that police officer or correctional officer is sometimes the only reasonably-paying job people can get, and those jobs depend on exacerbating a cycle of violence? Take a look at your local municipality's budget, and look at how much money goes to police versus how much goes to combating homelessness. It just makes no sense.
Anyway, if you know any middle-aged white ladies who are starting to feel uncomfortable about the carceral state but aren't quite ready for Angela Davis or Mariame Kaba, this is probably a good book to give them.
A NOTE ON FORMAT: The endnotes in this book were the worst of all worlds. Endnotes, but no superscript notes in the text. Most notes were citations, but a few were explanations, so at the end of each chapter, you had to flip to the endnotes to see if you missed anything. The audiobook just flat-out skipped the notes altogether.
February 16, 2021
While The New Jim Crow is a powerful book, it left a lot out about the current state of being a police officer. This book is a terrific complement that fully understands and acknowledges the sins in our policing and criminal justice system while also acknowledging the daily realities officers on the ground face. It is heartening to hear about a program the author helped start that is trying to reform policing from within. I will need to also read The Rise of the Warrior Cop to learn more about the militarization of the police as well and Policing the Open Road to better understand the role of the car in the current state of traffic policing.
May 11, 2023
In a million years I would never have chosen this book. I just joined a new book club, and this was our first book. As someone who grew up in th DC suburbs, I had hopes I might like this, might even find some of it relatable, but nah. The parts describing the training and actual calls were interesting, but the social justice preaching was not for me. That should not be construed as me disagreeing with some of the author’s points; it’s just that when I pick up a book, I want to be entertained or learn something new. Shoving your political agenda at readers will always turn me off. Likewise, I found it odd that a 40 year old woman was still worried about what her mother thought.
May 16, 2021
Rosa Brook, a journalist, anthropologist, lawyer, decides to become a DC police officer. She works about 3 years and finds respect for officers and discovers what their work is like. She also has compassion for the people they police. An interesting account of what’s it’s really like to be an officer.
May 26, 2021
I felt compelled to read Tangled Up in Blue after hearing Rosa Brooks describe herself as a cop and a journalist on an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher a couple months ago. As a cop, but not a journalist, this intrigued me. On the show she explained how cops are basically expected to do 10 different jobs within a 12 hour shift, and do them all perfectly. Medics, therapists, social workers, bouncers, traffic control, etc. This resonated with me, and is not an opinion often shared in the media.
The book was good. It definitely humanized the policing experiencing. However, I'll say that Rosa was a reserve cop, which means that she only went through a part time academy, and worked on a volunteer basis only several hours a month. Additionally, she wrote this book after about a year, meaning that she "worked" as a cop about 1/8 of a year, for only one year. With that being said, it's better than most books on policing these days which are written by academics with NO police experience. Rosa certain does everything she can to really walk the walk, before talking the talk. My other criticism is that Rosa spends a lot more DETAIL on the negative experiences, than the positive ones. She make a point to say that most cops are good, and most cops do the right thing, etc. but she saves her "show not tell" skills for the negative, not the positive.
Overall, I recommend this book for someone who is curious about policing and what it's like to really have "boots on the ground". If you're looking for a book sympathetic to cops, this isn't it. But conversely, if you're looking for a book to eviscerate cops, this isn't it either. More, I would say this is some type of therapeutic experience that Rosa goes though - as she tries to understand her conflicting emotions between her upbringing as a radical left wing activist and the wife and supporter of the US military. Read this book if you're interested in memoirs and understanding someone elses story of understanding. Don't read this book if you're looking to be persuaded one way of the other about policing, or if you're looking to have your views reinforced.
The book was good. It definitely humanized the policing experiencing. However, I'll say that Rosa was a reserve cop, which means that she only went through a part time academy, and worked on a volunteer basis only several hours a month. Additionally, she wrote this book after about a year, meaning that she "worked" as a cop about 1/8 of a year, for only one year. With that being said, it's better than most books on policing these days which are written by academics with NO police experience. Rosa certain does everything she can to really walk the walk, before talking the talk. My other criticism is that Rosa spends a lot more DETAIL on the negative experiences, than the positive ones. She make a point to say that most cops are good, and most cops do the right thing, etc. but she saves her "show not tell" skills for the negative, not the positive.
Overall, I recommend this book for someone who is curious about policing and what it's like to really have "boots on the ground". If you're looking for a book sympathetic to cops, this isn't it. But conversely, if you're looking for a book to eviscerate cops, this isn't it either. More, I would say this is some type of therapeutic experience that Rosa goes though - as she tries to understand her conflicting emotions between her upbringing as a radical left wing activist and the wife and supporter of the US military. Read this book if you're interested in memoirs and understanding someone elses story of understanding. Don't read this book if you're looking to be persuaded one way of the other about policing, or if you're looking to have your views reinforced.
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