Reflections on Policing in an American City
If you support Black Lives Matter you probably see the police as an oppressive occupying force unconstrained in its use of lethal force on the minority population, particularly its males. If, on the other hand, you counter by insisting that Blue Lives Matter, you no doubt see the BLM protesters as destructive radicals who insult “our nation’s finest” who daily put their lives on the line to serve America. And if you seek to avoid these antagonistic alternatives by asserting that All Lives Matter, the former will likely claim you are a hidden racist, flattening out their justified critique of the White oppressors, while the latter may similarly claim that you lack the guts to defend the police from those hateful and insulting attacks. At least, that’s the way current popular dialogue often seems to devolve into mutual incomprehension and name-calling.
I don’t know if a more nuanced and constructive conversation about policing in America is possible these days, but if it is, Rosa Brooks’ recent publication strikes me as a remarkable contribution to its possibility. Tangled Up In Blue may not change anyone’s ideological predispositions, but, speaking only for myself, it gave me the feel of an honest, intimate, and very personal introduction to the reality of policing a minority community in a generally disadvantaged urban district. It was almost as if I was there, watching Rosa from a safe distance as she navigated her initial police training and then her patrolling the neighborhood. I don’t think i will ever look at the police and their relation to their community in the same way again.
What Rosa presents is a detailed, nuanced, personal account of her four-year experience as a volunteer police officer with the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington DC. In this context she went through the complete training of all new police recruits, and then functioned – for 24 hours a month – with all the responsibilities and capacities of a full-time MPD officer. One may wonder what a highly accomplished 40+ year old white woman, former human rights activist and official, and now a well respected Professor of Law at Georgetown University is doing signing up to serve as a volunteer police officer in one of the most dangerous minority areas of Washington DC, but one cannot but admire the courage, determination, dedication, and sense of decency she brought to her effort. As well as the intelligence, comprehension, concern for justice, and outrage at injustice, that pervades her reporting, and the conclusions and actions she draws from her four year police experience.
Her writing is simple, direct, without complicated language or theories. She doesn’t try to oversell the significance of what she went through, encountered, or learned from her experience. She simply reports it directly, as it happened. And offers comments on how it seemed to her. I found myself totally engaged by her experience, and moved by the stories she tells, with their simplicity, honesty, directness, sometimes pathos, and occasionally humor. I think that everyone who is concerned about the issues of policing, and particularly, the role of the police in minority communities, regardless of their political or personal location in these contested debates, can benefit from reading this book. And we are all in Rosa’s debt for having undertaken, first the experience, and then the personal testament that is this engaging and revealing book.