THE GANGS OF ZION

Mormon Crips? Yes, courtesy of the collision of suburban ennui and “gangsta” culture via West Coast rap acts.

“I inhabit two identities that most people view as contradictory: I am both a Black man and a cop.” So writes Stallworth, whose improbable adventures as a Colorado detective yielded the book and film BlacKkKlansman. Of this episode he writes, modestly, “I wasn’t put in narcotics because I was exceptional. I was put in narcotics because they needed a Black face to penetrate Black environments.” After running afoul of higher-ups, Stallworth went to Arizona, agreed with Public Enemy’s assessment of the place (they hated it), and moved north to Salt Lake City, where he discovered a thriving Mormon subculture of Crips and Bloods. In that milieu, Stallworth did prove himself exceptional: he was able to make sweeping busts largely because the other cops were blissfully unaware of or wanted nothing to do with the problem. It may seem a surprise that Mormon Utah should be a hotbed of gangbanging and drug-trade turf wars, but by Stallworth’s account the land of the Saints is awash in crack, meth, and various other non-caffeinated substances. One surprise for Stallworth was the relevance and lure of gangsta rap, which, growing up in the ’60s, he wasn’t especially attuned to. He soon became an adept, with a perhaps surprising understanding of why a song like “Fuck Tha Police” should resonate—and why the rappers had a point. “The more I learned and lectured, the more I defended the artists’ freedom of expression,” Stallworth writes. That didn’t dampen his enthusiasm for getting the job done until, once again, he ran athwart of the suits upstairs, about which he writes at length and with considerable—and understandable—frustration.

A provocative memoir that illustrates, as if there were any question about it, how strange the world is.