Book Review: The Calling

Hot off the presses for 2007 comes Lt. Dan Marcou’s work The Calling: The Making of a Veteran Cop. Marcou retired recently as a highly-decorated SWAT veteran, and has taken an interesting approach to law enforcement writing. The Calling is billed by its author as a novel, and essentially Marcou has taken what he knows about being a L.E.O. and has crafted it into a fictional story about a character named McCarthy. The book has been picked up by two Wisconsin academies as required reading material for recruits, and not without good reason.

The Calling isn’t exactly the best story-telling I’ve seen in a book. Not surprisingly, it reads much like a sequence of lengthy police reports. These reports detail the first five years of Officer Dan McCarthy’s job at the LaClaire P.D. McCarthy’s work brings him across the path of several very polarized characters like the bitter Brockman, the fatherly Compton, the brotherly Stammos, and the dictatorial and inept Hale. He lives through a wide variety of situations to which he always reacts with clear thinking and a positive attitude, occasionally returning home to his family to make big-hearted observations about how great his life really is.

The book is designed not for developing its characters and telling a story, but for using its characters and situations to send a message to its readers. Even though McCarthy himself can be annoyingly straight-forward and almost automaton-droidish in his upbeat approach to things in the book, Marcou is really trying to tell us something. McCarthy’s conversations with people like Brockman and Stammos often resemble some kind of weird police television commercial.

Stammos: “Gee McCarthy, sometimes I feel like leaving this job.”

McCarthy: “But Stammos, why would you ever do that? Do you not like it here at this wonderful Police Department?”

Stammos: “Yes, McCarthy. I really do like it here. But sometimes it is tough, you know? But then I remember how good it actually is, and that other places have bad things, too.”

McCarthy: “Gee Stammos, I am glad you have decided to stay here with me. We work great together!”

Both smile with thumbs up at the camera

Anyway, like I said before, the point is that Marcou is trying to teach lessons to young officers. Several of those lessons are about dealing with cynical and bitter coworkers, handling critical incident stress, maintaining a healthy family life, working with oppressive bosses and smug, arrogant detectives, and other things of that nature. The book shows that the going often gets tough, but if you maintain the proper attitude (see my review of Gilmartin’s book) you’ll make i through. Overall the book is a quick, entertaining read and does very well at pointing out some realities of police work.

Book Review, the Sequel

Today’s title is Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement by Kevin M. Gilmartin, Ph.D. This book was recommended to me by a police officer buddy of mine, and he told me it was absolutely essential reading material for anybody working in the field or wanting to. After reading it, I have to agree.

Gilmartin was an officer himself for many years and has devoted himself to the special study of police psychology. The premise of the book is that departments spend vast amounts of resources teaching their employees “street survival” skills, but almost completely neglect the necessity of teaching officers how to emotionally thrive in a job that has a suicide rate three times higher than that of the general population. The book accurately describes how and why police officers become cynical, unmotivated, self-perceived victims, and goes on to give strategies for overcoming this tendency.

As I mentioned in my review of Conlon’s book, after reading Emotional Survival I went back through and saw to my amazement that Gilmartin had very accurately described Conlon’s first few years on the job. Conlon’s personal life is girlfriend to girlfriend and he finds himself rooming with and spending the majority of his personal time with other cops. He has epic struggles with oppressive, unjust, and incompetent superiors that take every ounce of joy and motivation out of him. He finds himself assigned to sifting through the wreckage of the World Trade Center day after day, with no end in sight. Conlon deals with these things in his own unique way, but Gilmartin traces the symptoms of failure to thrive emotionally and shows us that Conlon clearly could have benefited immensely from some training in emotional survival.

Emotional Survival is an easy read thanks to Gilmartin’s conversational style and contains information that I would consider vital to any person desiring to work or currently working in Law Enforcement. His analysis is legitimate, extremely practical, and uncannily accurate, and even as a recruit without any time on the job of my own I gleaned a great deal of valuable information that I hope to put to good use some day soon.

Book Review: Blue Blood

I picked up Edward Conlon’s Blue Blood in the first few days after becoming interested in law enforcement as a career. I was interested in picking up anything related to police work that looked good, and to do so I went straight for the local Barnes & Noble to see what they had lying around. In addition to seeing Dennis Smith’s book Report from Engine Co. 82 on the shelf in its third edition (which made me very happy), Blue Blood stood out from the rest and made me pull it from the shelf.

Blue Blood is the memoirs of Edward Conlon, a New York City street cop in the late 90s and early 21st Century. One of the reasons the book appealed to me off the bat was because that’s what I really want to be. Conlon goes on at length about his family history and about his experience with the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in NYC. He sticks devotedly to narrative, refraining from giving much analysis or insight of his own into police work as a whole. The story of Conlon’s early career captures the essence of the devoted rookie police officer tackling crime in one of the seediest districts in the United States – New York City’s South Bronx.

The book itself is excellently written and is overall a great read. I was expecting the work to be more focused on police work than it actually was. I was also looking for some more analysis, but Conlon lets you make your own judgments about what happens in the book. Conlon’s early career perfecly captures life as a young police officer, with the hyper-devotion to the job, the deterioration of the personal life off the job, the camaraderie with the squad, and the oppression of superiors. Since I was looking for material specifically dealing with law enforcement, I sometimes found myself skipping through the chapters about Conlon’s childhood and ancestors.   There are however plenty of war stories and detailed descriptions of the ups and downs of the job for the reader to enjoy.

Due to the fact that I read the book before I knew much if anything about what being a police officer is like or what it means, I found myself looking back at it later and re-assessing some of what Conlon describes – especially after reading Emotional Survival for Law Enforcement by Gilmartin, which will be my next review. In summary, Blue Blood makes a great addition to the discerning police recruit’s (and, I assume, officer’s) library.