The Black and the Blue by Matthew Horace

Does your son need a tutor? An after-school job? A place in summer camp? In Seattle, police are proactive, tracking the kids most at risk, and then dropping by their parents’ homes to offer help. Yet other officers, still on the job, describe a different world, where cops aren’t just law-and-order enforcers but overworked social workers, charged with diagnosing the mentally ill, treating overdoses, and counselling teens. ‘You two are very unconventional in what you do, but you’re extremely effective.’ That was it.” “I’ll remember what they said until the day I die. “One day we got called in by Internal Affairs,” he remembers.

Pimps were harder to stop, so they used their nightsticks and smashed up their Cadillacs. When he and his partner saw streetwalkers, they would steal their shoes, so they couldn’t work. Timely and provocative, The Black and The Blue sheds light on what truly goes on behind the blue line.When a teenage pot dealer cursed at him, he clubbed him unconscious. Horace provides fresh analysis on communities experiencing the high killing and imprisonment rates due to racist policing such as Ferguson, New Orleans, Baltimore, and Chicago from a law enforcement point of view and uncovers what has sown the seeds of violence. Using gut-wrenching reportage, on-the-ground research, and personal accounts garnered by interviews with police and government officials around the country, Horace presents an insider's examination of police tactics, which he concludes is an 'archaic system' built on 'toxic brotherhood.' Horace dissects some of the nation's most highly publicized police shootings and communities highlighted in the Black Lives Matter movement and beyond to explain how these systems and tactics have had detrimental outcomes to the people they serve. Yet it was after seven years of service when Horace found himself face-down on the ground with a gun pointed at his head by a white fellow officer, that he fully understood the racism seething within America's police departments.

Matthew Horace was an officer at the federal, state, and local level for 28 years working in every state in the country. Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 227-236).

The Black and the Blue by Matthew Horace