... fascinating.

Brooks has an anthropologist’s ear for the language of policing, jumping from the reports full of passive-voice bureaucratese to the darkly humorous, profanity-laden shoptalk. She zips from hilarious descriptions of going to the bathroom while overloaded with clunky gear to bone-dry observations.

... revealing and well-written.

The book questions the way policing is done, while illustrating how hard it is to do the job.

Rosa Brooks’s Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City promises without question to be the cop memoir for the late 2010s and early 2020s. An accomplished scholar, journalist, and author who has moved in the loftiest legal, nonprofit, and foreign policy circles, Brooks brings a distinctive perspective to the police memoir genre, which boasts few women’s voices to begin with.

Her sorrow, empathy, and frustration are evident as she describes routine police calls where she and her partners tried to mediate family disputes, serving not only as law enforcers but also as default social workers.

Through evocative storytelling coupled with research and analysis, she explores what on-the-ground policing in a low-income neighborhood looked like for her.

... a nuanced and revealing chronicle.

... provocative.