Customer Reviews

Society's Warrior Class: Inside A Policeman's Mind

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This is an aewsome book. I would like to become a police officer...so this is very inspiring. Italso gives detail on a police officer who everyday puts his life on the line and helps us. Good book!

It should be obvious from the first glimpse at the cover that the premise of the book is a bit shaky. If we want to read about real "warriors" we check out the books on the combat-arms military folks in Iraq and Afghanistan, not the civilian police guys who - wait a minute - like to refer to those outside their club as civilians. Today's police include far too many who are criminals themselves. Far from "just enforcing the law" we now know that the law enforcement agencies in the United States are overtly politically active and participate in drafting the laws for them to enforce, a sure sign that a Police State is not far away. But unfortunately, most Americans do not recognize the hazards of this conflict of interest. For some hard and discomfiting data, just check out the accounts under "bad cop" on youtube and the daily papers. Far from being the generally self-sacrificing and glorious types that this author wishes to portray, a significant number of city cops are simply overpaid, overweight, and over here. If you believe the hype about casualty stats, consider that convenience store employees are more likely than cops to be seriously injured in altercations with bad guys. It's time to adjust the public's misplaced hero-worship and reel in the misbehaving police in America, not make false saints of them. Amazon has some better books dealing with this subject matter. Check out "NYPD Confidential: Power and Corruption in the Country's Greatest Police Force" by Levitt. Or "NYPD Blue Lies: The Shocking True Story of Racism, Corruption, Cover-Ups and Murder in the NYPD" by Castro. Another quite good read is this one: "Friends of the Family: The Inside Story of the Mafia Cops Case" by Tommy Dades. If these are not enough, move on to the books about the psychiatrists who deal with the cops who never should have been cops, those who from an early age seemed to have teethed on truncheons, waiting for the day that they could become the bullies behind the badge.

Finally, prospective readers should bear in mind that this title is from a vanity or "self-publishing" press. That means that the author (or some other promoter) could not find a real publisher so he paid to have someone print his unpublishable little tome. In the case of Trafford Publishing, I understand that you can get your text published for somewhere around $700 to $2000 or so, and then it's up to you to figure out how to sell it. Readers should be aware of the source of their material. Mainstream publishers generally try to do a bit of fact-checking and editing prior to releasing a book to the public. Vanity or self-publishing activities are much less likely to do any sort of rigorous and professional fact-checking.