Nation: POLICE: THE THIN BLUE LINE

He is facing, daily and nightly, people who would gladly see him dead, and he knows it. He moves through Harlem, therefore, like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country, which is precisely what, and where, he is.

—Nobody Knows My Name, by James Baldwin

THE soldier of the cities is the cop, I his front line the American ghetto. Harlem, Watts, Roxbury, Hough, Hunters Point, the South Side, Dixie Hills, Bedford-Stuyvesant: these are the battlegrounds whose names are inscribed in rubble and resentment and fear of worse...

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