Hollywood Crows: A Novel
by Joseph Wambaugh
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Book Summary Information
Author: Joseph WambaughEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-10-01
ISBN: 044650582X
Number of pages: 431
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Book Reviews of Hollywood Crows: A Novel
Book Review: Fighting the Consent Decree
Summary: 4 Stars
I'm a big fan of Wambaugh and have spent many years working with police departments in Southern California--as a researcher, but not a police officer. So I know these guys--including some mentioned specifically in Lines and Shadows. In this book and its near-companion book, Hollywood Station, Wambaugh re-visits his beloved LAPD. However, coming back after a hiatus of many years, Wambaugh is confronted by the consent decree the LAPD is under because of "just one little mistake" (it would seem from Wambaugh's telling). As in previous books, Wambaugh provides the cop's point of view in a frustrating world of criminals, lawyers and police administrators who are both spineless and feckless. As usual, the results are a miasma of psychological cripples staggering through life the best they can trying to enforce the law.
As the voice of the frustrated cop, Wambaugh finds new reasons to rant about the consent decree that ripped the formerly pristine proactive department asunder. However, you see the same kind of rants in most of his novels and in non-fiction books as well. At the same time that Wambaugh finds endless fault in the consent decree, he's the same guy who introduced us to Roscoe Rules in the Choir Boys. If there ever was a reason for a consent decree, it was Roscoe!
In one of Wambaugh's best books, The Onion Field, he served up Irving Kanarek (a real person) as the most impossibly frustrating defense attorney ever. But with Wambaugh's own sense of convoluted fairness, he points out that Kanarek was doing what a defense attorney was supposed to do and doing it darned well. (Compare the treatment Kanarek received by a fellow attorney, albeit a prosecutor, in Helter Skelter.) So while Wambaugh rants and raves about whatever cops rant and rave about, he does so with a certain eye to fairness. Wambaugh overlooks the faults of fellow cops because he understands the world they live in, but then he acknowledges some outer limit--Roscoe Rules being a composite of the line on the other side of those limits. The Crows (Community Relations Officers--CROs) live in a world between "Real Cops" and social workers (from the cops' perspective.). Their work takes up a lot of slack of the annoying non-criminal activities that routinely are expected to be handled by the "Real Cops." Wambaugh weaves a wonderful tale in this amorphous world between service and enforcement.
Summary of Hollywood Crows: A Novel
Seduction, black-market booze, burglary, and murder-not your ordinary fare for a division of peacekeeping officers, butLiterature & Fiction Books
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