This was a frustrating book.
I came into this book hoping to learn more about how policing works from the perspective of the policed, and the underlying problems about policing and criminal justice in America.
There are really interesting questions in this area:
- How representative are police forces? How does that affect policing overall?
- Should police spend time optimizing for the perception of safety rather than safety itself?
- How much lattitude should police be given to enforce local norms?
The author sidesteps these questions and instead spends most of the book complaining. We get a simplistic explanation of how our criminal justice system is inherently biased due to race (duh), and that local govornments are responsive to the desires of affluent voters more than perceived riff-raff (duh again).
The author doesn’t really attempt to understand how policing works, admits to failing the basic training scenarios for training how police should operate, and at the end of the book waffles about whether he should report a theft happening in front of him to the police.
I learned more watching the wire, or dealing with the local police in my hometown, or by reading Ta Nahesi Coates. This was just some self-aware complaining of a reporter watching Ferguson from the sidelines, or recounting forgetting weed in his backpack.
Alternatives: anything by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Evicted, the Wire