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The Cop Shop: Covering Crime on the Streets of Chicago
With all the outrageous detail of an Elmore Leonard novel, a firsthand account of the biggest urban crime spree since the days of Al Capone. Blau's memorable cast of cops, criminals, and crime reporters comes to life in a sad and funny dispatch from the front lines, rich in truths about big city life today. Blau is an investigative reporter for The Chicago Tribune.
- GenresTrue Crime
252 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 1993
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 17, 2022
Not bad. Some of the stories were interesting but not as well written as the Edna Buchanan's or other Chicago cop books I've read.
November 16, 2024
The book was well written;however, I didn’t realize it’s based on information from 1980-1990s.
June 2, 2009
Robert Blau, formerly a Chicago Tribune reporter, details the nature of police reporting. I thought this was an interesting book, worth reading, but I kept wishing that it would go into more detail at times.
Blau goes into the nuts and bolts of crime reporting: how information is tallied and disseminated by the CPD, how reporters build up rapport with cops, their techniques for getting interviews, etc.
Parts of this book are pretty dry but not without interest. Blau is a decent writer and keeps things going. Some of this book was fascinating. The material on the rise and fall of the El Rukn gang was especially good. The Rukns, which grew out of the old Blackstone Rangers, had gone from heroin-dealing thugs to pseudo-Muslim thugs with ties to the Libyan government. They had convinced Qaddafi that they were poised to make the move into terrorism, and the Libyan dictator graced them with weapons. Ultimately, the Rukns overplayed their hand and were broken by Chicago police and federal authorities.
The problem I had with this book was that it didn't go into a lot of detail. The good stuff, like the stories about the El Rukns or the failure of the CPD to recognize a growing crack epidemic, got as much coverage as paperwork procedures in the press room.
I also thought that the book needed to go into more detail of the individual officers, and what their experience was at street-level. There is some of that but, again, not enough.
An overarching theme worth discussing, was the decision-making process that determines what crimes get newspaper coverage, as well as the level of that coverage. Basically, crimes against white, middle-class people got more prominent coverage than incidents of black-on-black crime. If the story had an ironic hook, there was more interest. Blau doesn't cite any overt racism; instead, it's more a function of the frequency of crime having a numbing effect. As they say, dog bites man is not news, whereas the converse is.
All in all, not a bad book, but it could have been much better.
Blau goes into the nuts and bolts of crime reporting: how information is tallied and disseminated by the CPD, how reporters build up rapport with cops, their techniques for getting interviews, etc.
Parts of this book are pretty dry but not without interest. Blau is a decent writer and keeps things going. Some of this book was fascinating. The material on the rise and fall of the El Rukn gang was especially good. The Rukns, which grew out of the old Blackstone Rangers, had gone from heroin-dealing thugs to pseudo-Muslim thugs with ties to the Libyan government. They had convinced Qaddafi that they were poised to make the move into terrorism, and the Libyan dictator graced them with weapons. Ultimately, the Rukns overplayed their hand and were broken by Chicago police and federal authorities.
The problem I had with this book was that it didn't go into a lot of detail. The good stuff, like the stories about the El Rukns or the failure of the CPD to recognize a growing crack epidemic, got as much coverage as paperwork procedures in the press room.
I also thought that the book needed to go into more detail of the individual officers, and what their experience was at street-level. There is some of that but, again, not enough.
An overarching theme worth discussing, was the decision-making process that determines what crimes get newspaper coverage, as well as the level of that coverage. Basically, crimes against white, middle-class people got more prominent coverage than incidents of black-on-black crime. If the story had an ironic hook, there was more interest. Blau doesn't cite any overt racism; instead, it's more a function of the frequency of crime having a numbing effect. As they say, dog bites man is not news, whereas the converse is.
All in all, not a bad book, but it could have been much better.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews