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  • Tangled Up in Blue

  • Policing the American City
  • Written by: Rosa Brooks
  • Narrated by: Hillary Huber
  • Length: 12 hrs and 42 mins
  • 4.8 out of 5 stars (5 ratings)

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Tangled Up in Blue cover art

Tangled Up in Blue

Written by: Rosa Brooks
Narrated by: Hillary Huber
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Publisher's Summary

Named one of the best nonfiction books of the year by The Washington Post

Tangled Up in Blue is a wonderfully insightful book that provides a lens to critically analyze urban policing and a road map for how our most dispossessed citizens may better relate to those sworn to protect and serve.” (The Washington Post)

“Remarkable.... Brooks has produced an engaging page-turner that also outlines many broadly applicable lessons and sensible policy reforms.” (Foreign Affairs)

Journalist and law professor Rosa Brooks goes beyond the "blue wall of silence" in this radical inside examination of American policing

In her 40s, with two children, a spouse, a dog, a mortgage, and a full-time job as a tenured law professor at Georgetown University, Rosa Brooks decided to become a cop. A liberal academic and journalist with an enduring interest in law's troubled relationship with violence, Brooks wanted the kind of insider experience that would help her understand how police officers make sense of their world — and whether that world can be changed. In 2015, against the advice of everyone she knew, she applied to become a sworn, armed reserve police officer with the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department.

Then as now, police violence was constantly in the news. The Black Lives Matter movement was gaining momentum, protests wracked America's cities, and each day brought more stories of cruel, corrupt cops, police violence, and the racial disparities that mar our criminal justice system. Lines were being drawn, and people were taking sides. But as Brooks made her way through the police academy and began work as a patrol officer in the poorest, most crime-ridden neighborhoods of the nation's capital, she found a reality far more complex than the headlines suggested.

In Tangled Up in Blue, Brooks recounts her experiences inside the usually closed world of policing. From street shootings and domestic violence calls to the behind-the-scenes police work during Donald Trump's 2016 presidential inauguration, Brooks presents a revelatory account of what it's like inside the "blue wall of silence." She issues an urgent call for new laws and institutions, and argues that in a nation increasingly divided by race, class, ethnicity, geography, and ideology, a truly transformative approach to policing requires us to move beyond sound bites, slogans, and stereotypes. An explosive and groundbreaking investigation, Tangled Up in Blue complicates matters rather than simplifies them, and gives pause both to those who think police can do no wrong — and those who think they can do no right.

©2021 Rosa Brooks (P)2021 Penguin Audio

What the critics say

“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...to bone-dry observations.... [Brooks’] style recalls the work of immersion journalists like George Plimpton, Ted Conover and Barbara Ehrenreich - who happens to be Brooks’s mother. Brooks makes this part of the story, nesting in a book on policing a beautifully written mini-memoir about growing up the daughter of a famous activist and writer, who disdains the police but also values a certain toughness.” (New York Times Book Review)

Tangled Up in Blue is a wonderfully insightful book that provides a lens to critically analyze urban policing and a road map for how our most dispossessed citizens may better relate to those sworn to protect and serve.” (The Washington Post)

“Rosa Brooks’ 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.... But Brooks’ book is also about more than just policing as an institution, or even her own experiences as a cop: It is a deeply personal family memoir, and a meditation on questions of race, class, gender, and family inheritances.” (New Republic)

What listeners say about Tangled Up in Blue

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Enjoyed the Story but not the Narration.

I felt the author did a good job of capturing many aspects of police recruit training. I felt there were a lot of stories that described "actual" or "regular" police calls but I felt there was too much description of the call itself and not enough of the author's thoughts about the conflict between a possible "old school" vs "new school" mentality of police. I liked where the story ended and how the author had used this experience to build bridges and hopefully leave a policing system better than she found it. I think I would have liked to be partnered up with Rosa Brooks, if for no other reason than because of her humbleness. My one complaint about the book was the narration. I found it sounded robotic and I found that it was a big distraction as I listened to it.

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