Tangled Up in Blue by Rosa Brooks

 

This has been sitting n my shelf for a while, I figured I'd read it. The author is a professor at Georgetown Law, and she went through a program the Washington DC Metro Police (hereafter MPD) have that allows people who are probably (at least arguably) old enough to know better to become unpaid part-time police officers. The author eventually ends up being certified to operate alone, which apparently is kinda a big deal. She brings, well, not exactly a gimlet eye to things, but she has a background (professional and as it happens personal) that gives her a distinctly outsider POV on what goes on in the MPD, both during training and on the job. She has a clear sense of the broader structural flaws and of how the individual police officers think about--and rationalize--what they do, what their jobs are. There are some officers who come off not entirely well, here, they'd plausibly recognize themselves, though the author has anonymized them, but the book portrays the larger problems as systemic, a combination of mixed and perverse incentives alongside (maybe, at least in the now) unintended consequences. There's a thread about the author's family, especially her mom, being skeptical about the police thing, but that at least seems to have worked out more or less all right for everyone. Interesting and pretty informative.