An Inconvenient Cop is a book authored by long-time NYPD officer and whistleblower Edwin Raymond along with professional writer Jon Sternfeld. Raymond served fifteen years in the New York Police Department. He rose to the rank of lieutenant, but his time with the NYPD was contentious. The book is a memoir that tells the story of Raymond’s career and offers his perspective on policing and police reform.
Raymond’s biography. Raymond is the son of Haitian immigrants. He grew up in East Flatbush, a predominantly Black neighborhood in Brooklyn. His mother died when he was just two years old. His father struggled to raise Raymond and his brother, eventually succumbing to health problems of his own. Many of Raymond’s childhood friends got involved in gangs and criminal activity. Raymond didn’t, instead working at a grocery store as a teenager. Nonetheless, he had several unpleasant, demeaning experiences with police officers. Eventually, encouraged by his father and inspired by a family friend, Raymond became a cop himself, hoping to lead change within law enforcement.
He was a shooting star at the NYPD academy. He finished in the top 10 of his class and even made an aggravated assault arrest on his lunch break while still in training, which earned him a special award at graduation. Because of the award, he was allowed to choose his first assignment. He chose to work in Brooklyn for the NYPD Transit Bureau – the arm of the NYPD that polices the city’s 850 miles of subway tracks.
His experience with NYPD. From the very beginning, Raymond disagreed with how most of his fellow officers worked. Other Transit Bureau officers frequently hid inside a storage room, hoping to spot a young person jumping the turnstile to ride the subway without paying. The officers would leap out, stop the person for “theft of service,” and check to see whether they were carrying a gun or had an outstanding warrant. Raymond believed that it was better to be visible in the subway stations and thereby to prevent theft of service and other crimes.
In Raymond’s view, the NYPD was led astray by the broken windows theory of policing, which the Department interpreted as supporting a zero-tolerance policy for minor transgressions. He also disagreed with the Department’s use and implementation of CompStat, a data-driven approach to policing that led supervisors to push officers to meet de facto quotas or maintain expected levels of “activity,” i.e., stops and arrests. Raymond argues that the ultimate burden of these policies fell most heavily on low-income Black and brown citizens, and that they ultimately undermined public safety because they pulled young people unnecessarily into the criminal justice system.
These views predictably led Raymond into conflict with some of his supervisors. Some liked him and supported his approach to policing, others counseled him to “play the game” and conform to the Department’s priorities, and still others viewed him as a troublemaker and gave him negative performance evaluations. The book details Raymond’s attempt to navigate these challenges, including sometimes by making surreptitious recordings of his interactions with higher-ups.
At the same time, Raymond pursued advancement within the agency. He scored in the top 10 of all those who took the sergeant’s exam, and eventually won promotion. Later, he scored in the top 30 of more than 1,000 takers of the lieutenant’s exam and subsequently was promoted to that rank. Meanwhile, he took his criticism of the Department public and even joined a lawsuit against it, alleging that the NYPD’s performance management system amounted to an unlawful quota system and that the Department unlawfully retaliated against officers who resisted it.
The lawsuit was largely dismissed in Raymond v. City of New York, 317 F.Supp.3d 746 (S.D.N.Y. 2018). The remaining claims were dismissed a few years later. Raymond subsequently resigned from the Department and currently works as an advocate for police reform. His website has more information about his current activities.
Discussion. Overall, I liked the book. Raymond seems like a deeply thoughtful person who stands up for what he believes in. Of course, his free-thinking ways and his determination to do what he thinks is right made him a challenging fit for a hierarchical, paramilitary organization where policies and priorities are determined at the top.
If there’s broader value in the book, it is in Raymond’s ideas about police reform. He’s certainly compelling in arguing that the NYPD overemphasized “gotcha” policing of minor offenses and pushed its officers too hard to meet activity targets. He contends that similar policies exist across the country, writing: “When I speak of the ills inside the NYPD, I am speaking of all U.S. policing.” And at least some officers in very different departments have found his thinking persuasive, as reflected in this positive Washington Post review by a police officer in Savannah, Georgia. But I’m not so sure how representative Raymond’s experience is. It is the nature of a memoir to be anecdotal, and some of the stories Raymond tells about the Transit Bureau don’t strike me as especially indicative of how, for example, an officer investigating a sex offense in a small jurisdiction in North Carolina agency may operate.
One insight that I do see as more broadly relevant is Raymond’s description of a good officer as being “like a Swiss Army knife” in that depending on the situation, the officer must “protect, assist, mediate, communicate, connect, encourage, monitor, discourage, respond, de-escalate, facilitate, prevent, and sometimes enforce.” I know from talking to officers across the state that the duties assigned to law enforcement are vast, variable, and ever-increasing. The Swiss Army knife analogy highlights the importance of training and equipping officers to deal with the full spectrum of situations to which they will be dispatched.
Conclusion. Raymond ends the book with an appendix listing suggested reforms, including enhancing legal protections for police whistleblowers and addressing implicit bias. One suggestion that stood out to me was that “immersion should precede criticism.” Raymond argues that those who seek to critique policing should learn as much about it as possible first, through ride-alongs and citizen police academies. He notes that policing “is a technical job that requires significant exposure and experience.” It follows that police reform should be based on realities in the field, not on how police are portrayed on TV or on knee-jerk reactions to highly publicized events. Over the past few years, police reform has been a hot topic and it is good to bear in mind that everyone is entitled to have an opinion about it but that some opinions are better informed than others.