Cops often perceive bourgeois citizens as sheltered, and when given the chance will regale them with stories of atrocities and mayhem. Most of the space in the book is given over to either stories of crimes or cop's profiles of criminals, and the result is a consistently grim picture of inner-city violence. It may leave you feeling like everyone you know ought to be carrying a gun. The lack of journalistic perspective comes to be a felt absence as the crimes become more grim and officers' perspectives become more hostile and authoritarian. From the officers' perspectives, these kinds of things are happening all the time, indiscriminately.
Society is defined in terms of the crimes it commits.
It's difficult not to feel more at risk having read this book than not. What little journalistic commentary there is, though, is aimed toward heroizing the cops, even when documenting civil rights abuses by officers. The book leaves me wishing for a little more acknowledgement that issues of authority are more complex than her interview subjects tend to admit. You can certainly see where the impetus for broader powers of surveillance, property siezures, no-knock warrants, field interrogations, curfews, and gang intelligence come from. Law enforcement has only one tool, and in this book it is vindicated no matter what the context.