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Rating: 
Summary: One of his better books
Review: because it DOESN'T t read like fiction; it's a true story with Wambaugh applying his direct understanding of how cops behave & what happens when they act out because of stress that returns night after night & can't be eased. There's the usual Wambaugh mix of booze, women, blurs between right & law. As usual, there's no insight or development for female characters, who are cardboard cutouts. But this time, instead of playing with character & language, as in other books, he projects his insights into those he depicts, without modifying their character. It's docudrama, despite its gunslinger theme, like Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood," a form Wambaugh is good at, maybe because it relieves him of tense necessity of creating a plot. Oddly, this book isn't cynical, even when describing disappointed moral objectives; but it does prove what Aristotle said, "We become what we do repeatingly." A police department that sends men to work in Hell shouldn't be surprised if they turn into devils.
Rating:
Summary: Impressive But Curious
Review: I'm both in awe and suspicious of this book. It purports to tell the true-life story of a group of undercover police officers, most of Mexican descent, who work steathily to entice robbers preying on the heavy illegal alien traffic flowing into San Diego County from Baja California into attacking them, then turning the tables on their would-be victimizers.I'm in awe because it reads like fiction, with deep insights into the professional and personal lives of each of the policemen who are part of the BARF (Border Alien Robbery Force) team. We find out how they spend their off-hours, drinking and cheating on their wives with the sort of abandon of the cheerfully doomed. We discover how much they come to dislike one another, and particularly their leader, a hotshot in disco chains named Manny Lopez. The action sequences are riveting, and you get a real flavor for the desolate highlands these officers probe, and the desperate characters, both deadly and vulnerable, that they come across. But it reads too much like fiction. These guys either opened up to Wambaugh to a degree few ever do, not even to a very good, empathetic writer who asks all the right questions, or else the writer went the New Journalism route and extrapolated a lot of the inner monologues each of these officers have from time to time. I wonder about the former approach (cops are notoriously taciturn, even with each other or someone like Wambaugh who's obviously skilled at drawing them out) and question the validity of the latter, if used. Despite the numerous offenses against man, society, and God cataloged here, Wambaugh apparently didn't leave these guys so much out to dry that they got angry. It wouldn't be a good idea angering these guys, but how did he manage it, given the story we have here? I just wish there was some Author's Note explaining the access issue. All we have is the firm statement at the outset "This Is A True Story." Yes, sure, but are these the real characters? Did he do one of those magazine-writer tricks of folding in multiple characters to create fictional hybrids? Did he use pseudonyms? I'd love to know. The dialogue is brilliant, the writerly asides masterful and witty, and a crisp narrative pulls you through quickly while asking the question of when a good impulse (protecting aliens who are being savaged by gangsters while trying to illegally enter your country) become a really bad practice. By the final third of the book, the cops are strung-out adrenaline junkies probing into Mexican territory and looking for conflict, not the sort of characters you want representing your country in a sensitive border region. Was this really what they were like? And what happened to them after the book was published in 1984? I'd love to know.
Rating: 
Summary: True Cop Flavor
Review: Mr. Wambaugh as always, is able to catch the true flavor of what it was really like to be a cop and be a man. How hard is/was to "keep" a marriage, capture the essence of another culture and still tell a story as if we were all sitting in a bar listening to the ones who saw it all. The Seventies were ripe with blurried lines of two countries, two cultures forever linked in land of sometimes chaos. Those guys were the cowboys of the Seventies. It wasn't just a "Mexican" thing,... it was a Cop thing.
Rating:
Summary: An Absolutely Unnecessary Situation
Review: The philosophical setting of this book is littered with "ifs." If the United States government would protect the US from invaders, as it is charged to do, this book never would have been written. If other nations were governed by constitutions conceptually similar to that of the United States, establishing freedom and individual rights everywhere -- such that people would not feel it necessary to flee their home governments, and seek freedom in the United States -- this book never would have come into being. If, if, if. This excellent book is a well-written tragedy about good law enforcement people who took the initiative to overlook one crime (illegal immigration) and proactively fight other crimes -- robbery, assault, battery etc. The story is compelling and riveting. It is good guys versus bad guys. Unfortunately, both sides lost.
Rating:
Summary: An Absolutely Unnecessary Situation
Review: The philosophical setting of this book is littered with "ifs." If the United States government would protect the US from invaders, as it is charged to do, this book never would have been written. If other nations were governed by constitutions conceptually similar to that of the United States, establishing freedom and individual rights everywhere -- such that people would not feel it necessary to flee their home governments, and seek freedom in the United States -- this book never would have come into being. If, if, if. This excellent book is a well-written tragedy about good law enforcement people who took the initiative to overlook one crime (illegal immigration) and proactively fight other crimes -- robbery, assault, battery etc. The story is compelling and riveting. It is good guys versus bad guys. Unfortunately, both sides lost.
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