rstood and secretive culture, Crank explores the growing resentment of police over the decades of the 20th century, from welcome dinner guests in community homes to brutal, racist enforcers often as corrupt as those they police. Crank provides an unbiased account that demonstrates the situation from the law enforcement perspective, such as how funeral rites are rituals that underscore police values and promote solidarity. However, some of those values are questioned in an extensive section on racism in police work. Crank calls this aspect of law enforcement, “an astonishingly polarizing topic. The debate is played out in national politics: The ‘Mark Furmans’ of the world are weighted against the ‘Willie Hortons’, the bad cop versus the bad black” (205).
Before pointing out the complexities of the race issue in law enforcement, Crank does a good job of showing how social changes began to change the perspective with which citizens viewed law enforcement officials. Increasing development of urban, heavily minority neighborhoods helped increase the division between police and communities. From a time in the 1930s and 1940s when law enforcement officers were looked upon as a welcome dinner guest to contemporary times with its “us” against “them” mentality (in citizens and law enforcement officers), Crank explores the growing separation between law enforcement officers and the communities they serve: “[His] attitude reflects the inevitable convergence of values that mark the current national climate supportive of harsh law-and-order crime policies, the ‘we-them’ fostered by heavy-handed law enforcement tactics, and the presence of geographically bounded populations of economically ravaged minority groups” (205).
Among his arguments, the author supports the idea that the change to heavy-handed law enforcement tactics and punishment tactics with respect to fighting crime has widened the gap between the ...