Cop Speak by Tom Philbin

The passing of time can be cruel to books -- and sometimes even to the ones that you don't expect to be touched. Cop Speak is a lexicon of law enforcement and criminal language originally published in 1996 -- that's only twelve years, so things can't have changed that much, right?

But the last dozen years have seen the continued flood of cop shows on TV, from reality shows like Cops (already nearly a decade old when Cop Speak was published) to CSI, Law & Order and all of their derivatives. And those shows all turn their watchers into experts --as far as those watchers know, at least -- in the minutiae of police procedure and criminal behavior.

That's minor, though, compared to the effect of the Internet. We don't have to know more about everyone else now, but we can find out nearly anything about nearly any subculture or group. So when Cop Speak's author, Tom Philbin, comes out with a Sgt. Friday-esque definition like "Cross-dressing is not illegal, but police make themselves aware of it as part of the profile of a given individual because it may impact on an investigation in some way," (defining transvestite, of course) the reader mostly wonders how many PDs still bother to do anything like that. Philbin has a lot of similar side comments about police keeping track of "abnormal" people -- but, these days, we're less likely to buy into the implicit assumption that those people are a tiny, easily delineated minority.

Cop Speak is mostly about those standard police and criminal terms -- cuff, bounty hunter, horse, grilled, Mafia, stiff, and so on. And most of us already know, at least vaguely, what most of these terms mean. (Philbin does have impressive lists of street terms for various drugs, though, and I'm sure we'll all learn something there.) Philbin defines them all pretty well -- sometimes flatly, but usually in that pseudo-tough-guy voice -- and some of them (like "death fart") are things I hadn't heard of. But you'd need to be pretty innocent of the world of cops and criminals to find Cop Speak particularly eye-opening.

So Cop Speak, despite not being all that old, still feels like a time capsule. It's a book that could have been published, in virtually the same form, in 1966, or '76, or '86. But the last decade -- even though it hasn't made that huge a difference in the way police do their jobs -- has made a difference in what we know, about each other and about the cops and criminals of the world. If you're interested enough to want to read Cop Speak, there's not much it could teach you.