“Mostly, my partners wanted to be somewhere else, doing something more interesting,” she writes. Brooks explores how much this shaped her own desire to be an officer, and her self-awareness gives her insight into the practical, adrenaline-hungry tendencies that may attract people to police work. Brooks makes this part of the story, nesting in a book on policing a beautifully written mini-memoir about growing up the daughter of a famous activist and writer, who disdains the police but also values a certain toughness. Her style recalls the work of immersion journalists like George Plimpton, Ted Conover and Barbara Ehrenreich - who happens to be Brooks’s mother. Between the talk of defunding and the “ thin blue line” American flags, it’s not even clear that we agree what the problems of policing and crime in America actually are, much less how to solve them. Six years later, policing has drifted even further from a policy dilemma to a full-blown culture war. The officers acted politely, at least in the presence of a white reporter, but the residents told me they felt harassed and under siege.

They were earnest about wanting to serve the public, but they also seemed a little bored, stopping cars and checking them for guns and drugs. Most of them responded with the same word: “tactical.” They wanted to be on a SWAT team, or something like it, handling shootouts and other high-risk situations. I asked each officer the same question: What do you want to be doing in 10 years? I assumed one might say “detective,” another “chief.” Louis, not far from Ferguson, where the year before an officer from a different department had shot and killed Michael Brown, sparking protests and a nationwide debate about law enforcement. In late 2015, I interviewed several young police officers over lunch in the middle of their patrol shift. WE OWN THIS CITY A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption By Justin Fenton TANGLED UP IN BLUE Policing the American City By Rosa Brooks

We own this city fenton