Tangled Up in Blue Quotes

“policing is not a malevolent conspiracy; most police officers take seriously their role as public servants. The widely publicized incidents of police violence and abuse often lead us to forget that the vast majority of police officers spend the vast majority of their time helping people who ask for their help. Americans call 911 both in genuine emergencies and for trivial reasons, and police officers don’t get to choose whether to respond.”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City

“When you have more crimes, you need more cops—and when you have more cops, you find more ways to use them. (In the US, for instance, we consider it normal to have armed police officers enforce compliance with traffic regulations, even though most traffic violations don’t constitute criminal offenses. It’s the equivalent of routinely sending armed police to enforce IRS regulations or municipal building code regulations. It makes little sense, and increases the number of police-citizen encounters with the potential to go badly wrong.)”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City

“What if instead of telling officers they have a right to go home safe, police training focused on reminding officers that members of the public have a right to go home safe? What if we reminded officers that they are voluntarily taking a risky job, and that if someone dies because of a mistake, it’s better that it be a police officer who is trained and paid to take risks than a member of the public?”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City

“For the most part, America’s criminal justice system isn’t deliberately cruel. It’s just indifferent to the ways in which it breaks human beings. Few police officers want to contribute to mass incarceration or aid in the destruction of poor minority communities. But the absurdities and injustices are inherent in the system. Often, by the time the police get involved, the only available choices are bad ones.”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City

“For better or for worse, police officers spend most of their time serving as medics, mediators, and monitors.”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City

“Over-policing is driven in part by the law of supply and demand—police go where people ask them to go. To put it a little differently: Police don’t operate in a vacuum. They are paid by taxpayer dollars; they respond to the directives and incentives created by national, state, and municipal laws, policies, and political pressures; and in a day-to-day sense, they respond to whatever calls happen to come in over the 911 lines, whether those calls involve complaints about armed robberies or about disorderly conduct.”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City

“Violence is a puzzle. We all say we oppose violence and want to reduce it, but no human society gets by without it.”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City

“High Visibility Patrol. Other item of note: Units observed a female having a panic attack in the middle of Bladensburg Road NE due to a spider on the inside of her windshield. Officers removed a spider from woman’s car in traffic and she was very relieved. —MPD Reserve Corps Newsletter”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the Nation's Capital

“inside”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the Nation's Capital

“On Law & Order and CSI, female cops look svelte and sexy in their uniforms. I look like the Michelin Man, only armed, and less graceful.”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City

“the first law enforcement death in the United States—like so many that came later—involved complex elements of race and arose out of conflict between the haves and the have-nots.”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City

“If I grew up with the distinct sense that our mother admired the masculine and viewed the feminine as contemptible, my brother tells me he grew up with an equally strong conviction that she viewed masculinity as toxic and dangerous. Both of us are probably right.”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City

“We tell ourselves that a central project of law and political institutions is the reduction of violence, but this is mostly a fairly tale. Law and politics play a role in structuring violence, but rarely “reduce” it.”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City

“American society asks police officers to use violence when needed to enforce the law, but we also ask them to serve as mediators, protectors, social workers, mentors, and medics. But it’s very difficult to play any one of these roles well—and it’s almost impossible to be good at them all.”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City

“anthropology”
― Rosa Brooks, Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the Nation's Capital