Boot: An L.A.P.D. Officer's Rookie Year.

• Author: McNamara, Joseph D.

WILLIAM DUNN'S TALE OF HIS rookie year in the Los Angeles Police Department is an unabashed revisionist depiction of a police department that continues to resist calls for reform. Dunn, who began his training in 1990, four months before the Rodney King brutality, discounts the King beating as an aberration. He calls it "ten powerful seconds of uncontrolled baton swinging on a man lying almost prone on the ground." The author, like many of his colleagues, is furious about what the incident did to the reputation of the LAPD. Yet no anger is expressed toward the police officers who assaulted King, nor is any thought given to the underlying police attitudes that caused the brutality. Instead, Dunn complains about "perfectly coifed anchor persons grimacing with disgust and anger as if they, not King, had been beaten," and writes that "no matter how you view the beating, calling King a motorist is a stretch" In asides, Dunn describes himself as a nice white kid from the suburbs who had an African-American best friend in high school, proving that he is "not a bigoted man"

Dunn's account begins after his graduation from the police academy. The recruit's experiences--highspeed chases, a dead body, a gay quarrel, and petty arrests--are stuff long familiar to fans of police dramas. The stilted language, on the other hand, is more suitable to police reports than a book. The book abounds with people "exiting" vehicles and rooms, fleeing perpetrators, "sharp-jawed" supervisors, cops with "forearms big, like a steelworker," or "built like a fireplug," another with "Popeye" forearms, and so on. Two hundred and seventy-four pages of this can glaze the eyes of even the most avid fan of police stories.

But the book does reveal police dogma. Dunn relates that his instructors warned the students that their training would not realistically prepare them for the streets. The same undermining of "official" training and indoctrination into the "real" police culture occurred when he and a group of fellow "boots" assembled for their first tour of duty. A lieutenant told them of the need to respect people in the community and to build an attitude of concern. When the lieutenant left, a field training officer remarked, "Lieutenant's gotta say what he said because of the bars on his shoulders.... Remember, most of the citizens you'll be dealing with fall in that category known as criminals." It reminded me of my own rookie days nearly 40 years ago in New York's Harlem...