Robert Kuttner: Congratulations on the publication of Tangled Up in Blue. Your day job is a law professor at Georgetown. Among other things, you study the criminal justice system. You spent a couple of years as a reserve officer with the Metropolitan Police Department in D.C., which is one of the few police departments, as you explained, which allows people to do that part-time. Why did you do this?
Rosa Brooks: I think it was curiosity more than anything else. When I found out that D.C. had a program where anyone can volunteer to be a part-time police officer and go through the police academy and get a badge and gun, I was flabbergasted. I immediately thought, that would be fascinating. Policing is such an opaque world. It seemed like an incredible opportunity to see what it looks like from the inside.
Like other lefties, I’ve been critical of policing. But I’ve always thought if you want to change something, you need to understand it first. And this seemed like a pretty amazing way to understand it better.
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