title: No Lights, No Sirens: The Corruption and Redemption of an Inner City Cop
author:  Robert Cea 
description: Virtually every clich in every noirish police melodrama ever filmed by Hollywood turns out to be the God's-honest truth, to judge by this pulpy memoir. Cea, a television writer who recently sold three network pilots, chronicles his former career as a NYPD officer during the 1980s, from his bushy-tailed academy stint to his soul-destroying ordeal in the "Badlands" of Brooklyn. His beat is a Dantean landscape populated by-in order of decreasing humanity-whores, crackheads, junkyard dogs, "scumbag" defense attorneys and Internal Affairs desk-jockeys who don't understand that you can't play by the rules when you're on the street. Cea soon finds himself "test-i-lying" to prevent perps from being sprung on technicalities and plying snitches with stolen heroin in exchange for information. The oft-scripted existential dilemma of law enforcement-"'to fight them, you have to BECOME THEM!'"-duly wrecks his marriage and sends him into a funk of paranoia and rage. Cea apparently has an exact recall of events and conversations from decades ago, but the lavish detail piles up more stereotype than gritty verisimilitude. He faithfully quotes every "yo" and "bitch" uttered by the trash-talking ghetto poets he encounters and arrests, and his reconstructions of his own lurid arias to the nihilistic honor of cops-"'a filthy toilet bowl full of maggots is what this city is....and the only ones who stand between the babies and the furnace are saps like me! ME!'"-go on for pages. Somewhere in here there's an intriguing account of gradual corruption and the weird psychological dynamic between cops and criminals, but it's buried beneath a hackneyed, overwrought screenplay-in-waiting. <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
zlib_text: > No Lights, No Sirens: The Corruption and Redemption of an Inner City Cop
  
  
  >
  
  
  > Robert Cea
  
  > HarperCollins (2012)
  
  
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  > Rating:
  
  
  ★★★★☆
  
  
  > Tags:
  
  
  Biography Autobiography, General  
  Biography Autobiographyttt Generalttt
  
  
  A New York Police Officer's relentless journey into the criminal netherworld,
  told with brutal truth and honesty. Perhaps Neitzsche described Rob Cea's life
  best, way before he was born: "Take care when chasing the animals; for you can
  very well become the animal you are chasing." No Lights, No Sirens is a
  sojourn so dirty and nasty it defies belief. Rob Cea starts off as an
  idealistic young cop, a true believer in the system for which he works
  tirelessly. He is sadly mistaken. The system he tried so hard to appease
  ultimately led to his downfall and the ruination of his life. What separates
  this from other cop—and—robber stories is the brutal authenticity from the cop
  himself. We will see and hear exactly what is discussed in a patrol car. We
  will see how 