WHICH MATTERS MORE, THE BEHAVIOR OF THE COP OR THE CROOK?

By Edwin Cooney

I recently read two books I feel compelled to share with you. Both authors  passionately hate crime. Norm Stamper examines the nature of crimes while Joe Kenda writes about the motives of criminals and the reasons why “trigger men,” especially, do what they do. 

Stamper was a cop for 33 years in San Diego, California and in Seattle, Washington where he was Chief of Police. He's written a book called "Breaking Rank: A Top Cop's Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing.” (For readers who use BARD to download books, the book number is dbc15779 and it reads for 13 hours 55 minutes and 13 seconds.)  Chief Stamper writes of his teenage attitude about cops and about serving as a policeman. Even more, he writes about how his outlook and attitude shifted as he advanced through the ranks. Believing that the community is best served by a police department absent of racial and gender stereotypes, Stamper writes of crime, punishment, and unhealthy vs healthy police procedures using himself as Exhibit A.

Stamper's covers topics such as capital punishment (the coward's way out), domestic violence (it ought to be punishable by life imprisonment) and racial attitudes within police departments across America.

"Killer Triggers" is by Joe Kenda, a homicide detective in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He passionately hates murderers and categorizes their motives as fear, rage, money, revenge, lust and occasionally madness. (For those who use BARD to read books, the number is db111259 and the reading time is 8 hours, 33 minutes and 29 seconds.) What's most interesting is that it's read by Kenda himself. You can be sure that I listened for hidden emphases that might indicate unintended feelings about his various topics. Detective Kenda doesn't offer his view on capital punishment, although it's hard for this observer to imagine that he opposes it.

Of course, crime exists everywhere and both law enforcement officers and citizen criminals must be protected from victimhood. What's especially fascinating is Kenda’s insistence that all communities, even gang-ridden ones, must be protected against criminals who reside in other gang-populated communities in and out of state. He doesn't go deeply into gang wars, but clearly they do exist and are antisocial.

Both books are loaded with anecdotes and stories that are gripping but ultimately too serious to be purely entertaining.

I haven't decided what, if anything, the revelations in these two books tell me or any reader about modern American society. Criminal elements have been a part of every society since the days that King Hammurabi found it necessary to write a law code for ancient Mesopotamia. Great Britain used its “criminal element” to settle both our territory of Georgia and, later, Australia and New Zealand.

I’m sure that both Stamper and Kenda take pride in their careers of service to the public.

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY