In
The Job Steve Osborne tells tales from this 20+ years working as a policeman in New York City. While the book was interesting enough to keep me reading until the end I was left with the sense that if this is what police are like then I’m not surprised there are so many who are “bad.” The author, who seems nice enough, displays a combination of excessive machismo, worship of the profession to the exclusion of even granting value to other jobs, and a total us against them mentality. If his fellow officers think & feel the same then it’s not surprising that bad actors are shielded from consequences and everything is perceived as an attack or a threat. It looks to me like the best reform the police could undergo would be to break individuals from the group think they seem to be mired in (based --- I’ll confess solely on my impression from this book).
An interesting book worth the read both for its anecdotes and for its picture of how our police think.
