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2 internautes sur 2 ont trouvé ce commentaire utile :
5.0étoiles sur 5
Street-wise, heartfelt and thoughtful, Mai 23 2004
With nine years as a cop in the Bronx, where he also lives, Harvard-educated Conlon puts his heart and soul into this impassioned, detailed portrait of the Job, in all its warts and glory. From housing-project patrol to gold-shield detective, from chasing junkies to sifting through 9/11 rubble at Fresh Kills landfill, Conlon reveals the daily round of a cop's life. His maternal great-grandfather was a New York City cop, his father was FBI and his uncle was a cop, as were the fathers of many of his friends, so the career choice might not seem so odd for this Bronx-born Irish kid with a couple of small-time arrests in his hell-raising youth, to go along with his Harvard diploma. But his rakish forefather had left his wife and kids. The cop life - with its air of graft and glad-handing - was not in good odor among his mother's gentle family. His father came from a big, brawling Bronx family. He knew a lot of cops and wanted something quieter and more lucrative for his son. But the Job, which encompassed so many different personalities, "offered entry into a drama as rich as any in Shakespeare. And I didn't want to hear the story as much as I wanted to tell it, and I didn't want to tell the story as much as I wanted to join it." Conlon started out with ambitions as a writer and was an English major at Harvard. But reading this book with its rich, articulate prose and vivid anecdotes, its soul-searching arguments and sharp insight, its sprawling grasp and its seamless organization - what comes to mind is adrenaline. Cops, you realize, become cops for the rush, the hunt, the intensity. Conlon starts out patrolling the projects in the South Bronx, a place synonymous with crime, but filled with ordinary families just trying to get by. Not that Conlon sees a lot of those people, except in passing. His encounters are with people at their most desperate; criminal or victim. He might jump from disarming an abusive husband to arresting a drug-peddling junkie to saving a bedridden, half-starved old woman with maggots living in her bedsores, or rescuing two mentally ill tenants from their truly deranged and suddenly vicious cat. The last two (the first horrific, the second hilarious) are among the Aided calls Conlon describes - the most frequent type of call, in which assistance is what's required, not arrest. Arrests, though desirable, at least to Conlon, are tricky and time-consuming, given the atmosphere of distrust. Paperwork and butt-covering are a necessary hindrance in Conlon's view, a subject to which he returns often in the course of the book. But this early section, before Conlon moves on to the more exciting (for him, not necessarily the reader) street-drug squad, is full of the groping and learning that goes on in a young cop's mind. Conlon shows us how cops learn to read people; the nuanced psychology that becomes almost automatic in response to a wide range of potentially explosive, tragic or just messy situations. The drug stuff, in contrast, is a round-robin dance between cop and criminal, in which cops collar street-dealers, keeping them off the street for an hour or so and disrupting the block's drug trade for somewhat less than a minute. Conlon argues for the work, but the squandering of hours in waiting for transport or pushing paper seems to underscore the waste of vast amounts of money in a toothless street-level drug policy. Even the occasional deal for a bigger score almost always peters out in a waste of time for everyone concerned. Conlon sets the Job in context, giving us a cop's eye view of an anti-social Serpico and an overzealous Knapp Commission, the shock of the Abner Louima abuse case and the tragedy of the Amadou Diallo killing, compounded, in his view, by political abandonment at the top. His account of combing the 9/11 remains at Fresh Kills (originally published in the "New Yorker," as were several other pseudonymous pieces on the cop's life) conveys the shock, and the gut-wrenching, tactile and olfactory sense of being there. His own ambitions he treats with both self-deprecating humor and pride. Offered a promotion that sounds like a desk job, he's afraid to refuse. "Like a lot of outer-borough street cops, I believed in some inconvertibly primitive place in my heart that there was a catapult on the roof of One Police Plaza, and that if you crossed someone who was influential, they launched you through the air to Staten Island, where you landed on the pavement in a uniform that was too small, and you spent the remainder of your career on a corner, watching empty buses pass." And later: "In spite of everything, I learned how a case broke: someone said something, someone left something, someone saw something. None of these occurred at the behest of the detective. Few perps were as accommodating as the man who choked and robbed a woman on the street and was trying to drag her into an alley when a Good Samaritan intervened, driving him off. The perp dropped some papers, which included a snapshot of himself, and a note with his address that said, 'Directions to my house.'" But the meat of the book is the camaraderie of team work, the rush of a successful collar, the disappointment of a DA's dismissal of same, the good bosses and bad, the never-ending, oft-resented, sometimes contradictory rules, and the personalities that drive it all - perps and cops. Conlon unabashedly thrives on the drama, while aware that the Job can take over the man (or woman), which might not be such a good thing. Big, funny, sad, horrifying, street-wise and thoughtful, this is a stirring portrait of a man, an institution, and a calling.
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