num_pages: 352
description: Cops know things other people don’t. They know that most murderers want to confess. They know that child molesters sometimes marry single women with kids for the sole purpose of molesting those kids when they reach the right age. They know that the person who discovers a murder victim is usually the murderer, and that many rapists expect their victims to fall in love with them. They know that organized crime hit men like to borrow the victim’s car to avoid dirtying up their own trunk with the victim’s body. They know that the best con is the simplest con and that whores know more about what’s going on in the street than anyone.Cops are the great storytellers of our time. They fashion stories out of their encounters with a reality the rest of us can only guess at, spiking these stories with the acid commentary and gallows humor that is pure cop. Their stories often go beyond the recounting of what happened in particular cases. Especially in stories about victimized children or senseless/depraved murders, cops talk about what seeing the dark side of human life does to them.A tour de force of oral history, WHAT COPS KNOW, in which cops share their hard-won reflections and stories, gets to the very core of what cop dramas show only glancingly and at a remove-- what cops, by virtue of their street experience and criminal expertise, have learned about crime, criminals, and human nature.WHAT COPS KNOW is a dramatic distillation of police life and lore, based on more than one hundred cops’ actual experiences. Chicago journalist Connie Fletcher interviewed the men and women of an area in Chicago known throughout police circles as a microcosm of crime. The cops in this book include beat cops, homicide detectives, an FBI profiler, sex crimes and organized crime specialists, robbery and prostitution decoys, the masterminds behind infiltrating large narcotics rings, and the men and women who do the harrowing work of undercover buy/bust operations on the street. What cops told Fletcher is given straight in chapters on the Street, Violent Crimes, Sex Crimes, Property Crimes, Narcotics, and Organized Crime.Blending cop humor, anecdotes, and full-scale police war stories, WHAT COPS KNOWcomes across with the gritty realism of top-notch docudrama, along with the poetry of street talk. This is gripping reading on a subject that is always hot.
language: English
title: What Cops Know: Today's Police Tell the Inside Story of Their Work on America's Streets
titlecomplete: What Cops Know: Today's Police Tell the Inside Story of Their Work on America's Streets
genres: Biography, True Crime, Sociology, Police, Crime, Collections, Nonfiction, Law
ratings_count: 514
publisher: Pocket Books (NY)