TANGLED UP IN BLUE

A provocative account of a tour of duty with the Washington, D.C., police force.

“These fucking people.” So says a weary cop, pointing out to Brooks a particularly crime-prone denizen of the streets. Though she was in her 40s, “with two children, a spouse, a dog, a mortgage, and a fulltime job as a tenured law professor” (and the daughter of a disapproving Barbara Ehrenreich), the author decided to become a police officer, following the participant observation model to “understand cultures that might otherwise appear alien and incomprehensible.” The D.C. metro force has an unusual program that allows volunteers to serve, carry a weapon, and make arrests. To satisfy her interest in violence and its constraints, she enrolled in and passed the training course. “By any measure, policing in the United States is a breathtakingly violent enterprise,” she writes, particularly in a city like D.C., where so much of the business of crime and punishment is racially charged. The political left, she notes, holds that Black men are so often killed by police or hauled off to jail because the police are racist while the right contends that young Black men are inclined to crime. Brooks ably shows how the truth is much more complex, and the anecdotes she offers along her beat demonstrate the complicated relationships among authority, violence, gender, race, and other elements. Some of the officers she portrays are noble civil servants, others dead weight, others just this side of psychotic—very much like the people they both serve and combat. The author’s look at the Dickensian “secret city” is both revealing and appalling, and she delivers sometimes-surprising news along the way about racism, the harms of mandatory arrest, and the “overcriminalization” of everyday life in a thoroughly dysfunctional society.

A thoughtful book that offers abundant material to rile up—and edify—Blue Lives Matter and Defund the Police advocates alike.