Annal: 1995 Edgar Allan Poe Award® for Best Fact Crime

The opening scene is a doozy: Tom Bradley, the black mayor of Los Angeles, faces an angry crowd just after the acquittals in the Rodney King beating trial. “Say what you gonna do,” a fat woman bellows. “It’s your police department. Say what you gonna do!” Little does the crowd realize the power of the LAPD. Joe Domanick goes back to the 1930s to find the roots of that power, and takes readers through the history of what he calls “a quasi-military organization … outside of the democratic system of checks and balances.” Domanick has a brisk, energetic prose…