Read by Matthew Horace

During his 28-year career, Matthew Horace rose through the ranks from a police officer working the beat to a federal agent working criminal cases in some of the toughest communities in America to a highly decorated federal law enforcement executive managing high-profile investigations nationwide. Yet it was not until seven years into his service- when Horace found himself face down on the ground with a gun pointed at his head by a white fellow officer-that he fully understood the racism seething within America's police departments. Through gut-wrenching reportage, on-the-ground research, and personal accounts from interviews with police and government officials around the country, Horace presents an insider's examination of archaic police tactics. He dissects some of the nation's most highly publicized police shootings and communities to explain how these systems and tactics have hurt the people they serve, revealing the mistakes that have stoked racist policing, sky-high incarceration rates, and an epidemic of violence. "Horace's authority as an experienced officer, as well as his obvious integrity and courage, provides the book with a gravitas." -- The Washington Post "The Black and the Blue is an affirmation of the critical need for criminal justice reform, all the more urgent because itcomes from an insider who respects his profession yet is willing to reveal its flaws." -- USA Today Matthew Horace spent three decades working in law enforcement and is a nationally recognized security expert. He has also served as a contributor to CNN and The Wall Street Journal. Ron Harris is a former reporter and editor for the Los Angeles Times and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Currently, he is a professor at Howard University. "A black cop's frank look at tensions between police, communities of color.... The Black and the Blue is an affirmation of the critical need for criminal justice reform, all the more urgent because it comes from an insider who respects his profession yet is willing to reveal its flaws." -USA Today "The Black and the Blue is an important contribution to a growing body of work about minority police officers. Horace's authority as an experienced officer, as well as his obvious integrity and courage, provides the book with a gravitas." -The Washington Post "Who polices the police? Matthew Horace asks this in TheBlack and the Blue....[P]lenty of [stories] are about times when black lives didn't seem to matter, others are about blue lives, too, as police officers-white and black, men and women, good and bad-talk honestly about life on the street."-New York Daily News "Horace's experiences, from his childhood in Philadelphia to his work on the streets and in police training classrooms, will be revelatory to many readers who have not felt the sting of racial prejudice.... [S]olid reporting and trenchant analysis [gives] Horace's readers a poignant understanding of how it feels to be both a black man and a black policeman. Reading The Black and the Blue will help all of us better understand the formidable challenges that big-city police officers confront every day-and how those challenges are exponentially more difficult when the police officer is a black man."-Philadelphia Inquirer "The hidden dysfunctions in American policing are laid bare in this searching exposé.... Horace and coauthor Harris write sympathetically of the dilemmas of policing, but are uncompromising in their indictment of abuses. Horace's street cred and hard-won insights make this one of the best treatments yet of police misconduct."-Publishers Weekly (starred review) "The heated debates surrounding the relationship between police and African Americans have tended to overlook one crucial part of the story: people who belong to both communities. Matthew Horace is a keen observer of the racial dynamics of policing, the often shameful history that contextualizes it and the implications for our current circumstances. A great dea

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