I’m making a nasty joke here, folks. The actual title of
this book is Detective: The Story of a
Trail-Blazing Cop Who Wouldn’t Quit. But I have a whole lot of issues with
this book, not the least of which is the incredible bias of the author,
followed by her self-indulgence. While her story is an interesting one, and
covers many important issues of the NYPD, I found that her incredible
bitterness ruins it.
Kathy Burke became a
New York City cop in the late 1960’s. It was right at the time where the women
officers were going from the job of matron, who booked and searched women
suspects, to doing real police work. According to Burke, there were a sizeable
number of women detectives in the department, and the main reason is that the women
were needed as bait. She ends up masquerading as a college student, drug user, high
school kid, and other characters in order to catch drug dealers. The problem is
that the men who were supposed to be watching her goofed off, and she get
stabbed. Several lessons were learned that day; first, the women were
disregarded, and second, the worst thing you can do is let your colleagues get
in trouble. But that incident had one advantage - it got her a detective’s
shield!
Ironically, Burke
was facing far more dangerous work than any of the male detectives. She didn’t
have any advantage of size, wasn’t a skilled fighter, and was in the type of
undercover work that could get her killed. In her 20 years in the NYPD she
dealt with dealers, bank robbers (including a six-foot-ten that she collared
twice) and others. Unfortunately, she dealt with a lot of sexual harassment
from her supervisor, and that led to her suing the NYPD over withheld
promotions. She won the lawsuit, and soon afterwards the NYPD stopped using the
terms patrolman and policewoman, opting instead to call them
all police officers regardless of gender.
My problem with
her story is that she has annoying prejudices against the people she’s dealing
with. In the earlier part of her career, she went undercover to bust a lot of
teenage drug dealers, usually going into the schools, taking advantage of her
youthful appearance. A lot of the teens she found dealing were from
well-connected families; one of them was the daughter of a district attorney.
But then she starts saying that she despised these teenage dealers, and it’s
clear that she still does. I would like to know why she despises the kids, not
the parents who let them do it? She also writes about how the patrolmen who
arrested her would make lewd remarks about her in the car. Why doesn’t she
despise those men more than the teenage pot dealer?
The ending of this
book takes the cake. She and her colleague get shot while doing surveillance of
a Mafia gambling operation; he dies, she gets blames by everyone for her his
death, and the mob gunmen who did it are acquitted. Everyone (including the
prosecutor) makes her out to be a pushy woman getting above herself, and she
leaves in a big huff. The problem with this is that there are too many
unanswered questions. Firstly, a cop doesn’t normally get the blame for
another’s death if she too gets shot, so why was everyone so quick to blame
her? Secondly, she says that she was harassed by cops who wanted her to drop
the charges against the men who shot her, and that doesn’t make sense. Lastly,
when I looked up this story online (including the book’s reviews) I found so
many cops who disputed her version of the story. They all say she fled in the car
and left the other cop to die. If they are in fact wrong, what incentive do
they have to say those things? One of them suggested that her husband, a
high-ranking NYPD captain, helped cover things up. Someone here is not being
truthful, but who?
I don’t know how
to categorize this book. Should I call it a woman’s memoir of the NYPD? The
change in the NYPD’s attitude to women officers? A book about sexual
harassment? I hope things have changed in the department, at least in
comparison to what she went through. Other than that, there isn’t really much
to learn from this book. There’s another autobiography by a former decoy
detective named Mary Glatzle, AKA “Muggable Mary,” with similar stories of
working undercover, yet the latter was a lot more enjoyable. Also, Detective
Glatzle doesn’t have the huge prejudices that Burke has of her days in the
department.