72. The Blue Wall: Street Cops in Canada by Carsten Stroud

I found this at a wonderful little corner of an otherwise quite depressing place: the used bookshop/fundraiser at mountain-side entrance of the Montreal General Hospital.  I discovered it a few years ago after suffering from a basketball-caused case of Mallet Finger.  It was a miracle that I got in at all to see a specialist (though once I did, he was excellent and I got a full recovery) and a double miracle that there is this little corner crammed with english paperbacks and hardbacks mostly from the 70s, 80s and 90s.  The only problem is that it is open at limited hours, probably because it is staffed by volunteers.  I don't know if they get regular donations of books or if they have some single source because the shelves are stuffed and the few times I have come back, they seem to get restuffed.  Wherever the books come from, it is a pretty strong representation of late-twentieth century mainstream book-buying taste.  There is a heavy emphasis on big best-seller fiction, the Canadian literary establishment with a smattering of genre and British popular stuff.  I made no major finds, but a few unknown gems were lurking in there and The Blue Wall is one of them.

Though it started off a bit too wordy and descriptive for me with a geographical overview of Vancouver, once it gets into it's bread and butter the actual daily (nightly, actually) police work in various cities across Canada, it becomes eminently readable, thought-provoking and informative.  There is some implicit bias here, given that Stroud seems to have worked as a cop but he is mostly up front with his perspective and makes a real effort to think the issues through in a fair way.  In particular, there is zero mention of race other than First Nations (which both he and the cops mention treat with s surprising amount of sympathy and awareness of history; one of the cops goes on a rant about how Canada is basically enacting a slow-moving genocide), nor of corruption.  There are a couple of simplistic straw men, particularly a Haligonian college girl from money and hyper-naive socialist ideals.  There is a long and well-researched (he goes deep into the history of the gun) narrative on an officer who got killed in a bank robbery that turned into a hostage situation. He is of course a good cop with a family and it is really sad, but also plays into the classic narrative of the police officer sacrificing his life for the public.  How many innocent Canadians were also killed by police in this time and what about their long narrative?

Overall, though, this a rich portrayal of the lives of street cops in Canada in 1980 with lots of interesting context, like the history of gun laws in Canada.  He sat with the cops working the beat on Davie Street (which is a nice complement to Vancouver Vice), the badass armed robbery squad in Montreal (with a wild breakdown of how they stop bank robbers), cops in First Nations country in northern Ontario (really sad), Toronto squad cars, Winnipeg beat cops, back to Vancouver for the drug squad taking down low-level heroin dealers and addicts with little tidbits in between.  There is a small but powerful section where he interviews early women in the police force that both reminds the reader of how insanely sexist things were (though maybe still are given some of the recent shit in the Canadian military) and how strong these women were.  The ending is an excellent essay on the demise of the street cop and the growing separation between the police and the public.  This essay begins with an explanation on the difference between the values of a Canadian police officer compared to an American one, another distinction which I suspect has narrowed today with our massive increase in police budgets and culture of militarization.  According to him, Canadian cops were way less likely to go to force or violence and considered it a failure if they ever had to use their guns.  

This book really stands the test of time.  It is an excellent read just for enjoyment if you are into the culture and work of street cops.  It could also be a solid reference for anyone writing about crime in that period. It is also an informed and intelligent look at police work in the 1980s and thus a valuable sociological text for those who study policing and how it has changed.  Seek it out.