Product Description

When those meant to uphold the law become a law unto themselves, where are we to turn? Are the gung-ho guys in uniform bending the rules to lock up those who pose a genuine risk, or are they bent on sadiwm, like the notorious Volpe and Schwartz? Jack Sargeant looks at notorious cases of good cops gone bad - and those who started out that way. Read about lone cops who couldn't take the pressure anymore and went on killing sprees, through to the corruption that spread through the Met in the 1970s. "Bad Cop, Bad Cop" also digs out the truth from the controversy surrounding the beating of Rodney King and looks at the current state of play in the LAPD. Ultimately, the book poses the question: would you be any better when faced with a job dealing with an increasingly lawless society.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #763235 in Books
• Published on: 2003-07-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 242 pages

About the Author
Editor Jack Sargeant has a huge fan base as a writer of true crime and cult cinema. He is the author of numerous published books on the subjects including Death Cults (Virgin), Born Bad and Deathtripping (Creation Books) He writes regularly for Headpress, Fringecore, and Bizarre magazines and is the film editor for Sleazenation. In addition to writing, Sargeant co-ordinates film screenings and is a university lecturer in film studies. The contributors to the book include published essayists and well-established true crime writers from the UK, USA and Australia, including Russell Gould and Mikita Brottman.

Customer Reviews

Kindergarten Kopstuff
There have been some intelligent, adult books published through Virgin's true-crime label -- LONE WOLF, KILLERS ON THE LOOSE and DANGER DOWN UNDER spring to mind -- but this isn't one of them. I managed to finish two pieces: the introduction, because it was short, and the essay on Gerard Schaefer, because that was short too and told a disturbing story without too much of the pretension and gnarled syntax evident elsewhere. The trouble was, it's a disturbing story that's been told so often you wonder why the writer bothered. Similarly uninspired was the general essay on police torture and brutality, which seemed to have been written by a not-too-bright 16-yr-old trying to be "transgressive" after two weeks on a creative-writing course. Lots of. Short. Sentences. And stuff. This lack of inspiration becomes even more frustrating when you think of the opportunities missed here. Any writer asked to write about police criminality has a wealth of material: Russia's ultra-corrupt torture-junkies; Italy's strutting and despised carabinieri; the swaggering racist thugs of South African apartheid; Mexico's uniformed gangsters-for-hire; South Korea's vicious robocop riot-police; China's martial-arts-trained dissent-suppressors; obscurer and even deadlier bribe-takers, rapists and torturers from police forces in central Europe, South America and Asia. Not one of these opportunities to expose and explore something new and unusual was taken. Instead, beside two dill-as-dutch-water essays on the Met, you get six essays on the US and one apiece on Australia and India, former British colonies one and all, and true-crime aficionados are likely to have come across almost every case many times before in print or on film. If you're an intelligent adult, buy one of the books mentioned above, because, as the unimaginative, US-obsessed teenagers who seem to have written most of it might say, this book sucks the big one. Mommy.