Applied Criminology

It is one of the ironies of the age that the works of fact we allegedly get in major newspapers read like fiction while some works of fiction, like Michael Crichton’s last novel, have more of a factual base. Into this latter category, put Michael P. Tremoglie’s A Sense of Duty..

In other words, don’t expect this novel to make any campus reading list anytime soon, at least on the required side. In A Sense of Duty, we follow Tremoglie’s hero, Michael Carr, through the Philadelphia Police Academy and onto his first eventful tour of duty.

“Eleven thousand people were scheduled to take the three-hour test the same day he did,” Tremoglie writes. “The exam consisted of three sections; Mathematics, English and Recall Skills.”

“The scores were mailed eight months after the tests were taken. His was a 94, placing him in the top three percent—still trailing 355 other candidates.” Tremoglie himself was one of Philadelphia’s finest.

“Many of those ranked ahead of him posted inferior scores, but enjoyed a ten-point boost denied others taking the exam,” Tremoglie writes of his hero. “The inequity was traceable to a federal court order demanding redress for past hiring discrimination against women and minorities.”

“Even this couldn’t obviate an excellent test score, leading to the latecomer’s inclusion in the first tier of candidates selected for academy training.” Therein lay a key assumption of affirmative action programs, that women and blacks are so incapable of mental work that they need a point-spread to make up the difference. Or, alternatively, that inner city youth need compensation for their even more blatantly racist entrapment in inferior public schools.

As for Tremoglie, the veteran cop-turned writer hints that the police department may make its most grievous errors when it goes politically correct, or adopts the remedies urged upon it by its most vocal critics—activists, academic and political, and their media mouthpieces:

• “It is the skill of the examiner, the type of questions, and the manner in which they are asked that determine the legitimacy of polygraph results,” he writes. “It is for these reasons that exams are excluded as evidence in court.”

• “Unfortunately, there wasn’t a way to screen out adolescents in adult bodies,” according to Tremoglie. “The psychological examination seemed focused on identifying religious fanatics rather than measuring the maturity or honesty of would-be officers.”

Then there is the delicious passage about cops undergoing sensitivity training at Temple, a university not known for its own compassion towards Christian and conservative students. The novel’s author, a past officer in the Pennsylvania Association of Scholars, tells me that he himself went through this drill.

Tremoglie also offers a fascinating twist on the reports of domestic physical assaults that get so much air time and fill so many newspaper column inches. He informed me that most of the spousal abuse cases he handled were of the wife-on-husband variety in which the latter was the victim and the former the assailant, not the image conveyed in most Women’s Studies courses, let alone on the Lifetime Movie Network.

“That’s correct,” he states. “Some were hilarious by the way, such as the time a wife was shouting at the top of her lungs at her husband about his lack of ability to perform a certain sexual act,” Tremoglie remembered.

“She did this after she threw him out of the house and was throwing his clothes out as well. It was about 4am if I recall correctly.”

As for the narrative of A Sense of Duty, it is well-constructed. The characters are also well-drawn.

If you have seen some of Tremoglie’s non-fiction in more conservative media outlets, you might be surprised at the depth he gives the nominal villain of the piece—Saladin Christian. Personally, after nearly overdosing on the printed inaccuracies of the professoriate all summer, I found this much more realistic novel a refreshing change of pace.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.