Memoirs of a Black Cop: Reading Zohran Mamdani’s Newly Appointed Sheriff, Edwin Raymond

Last week, on May 29, New York City Mayor Mamdani fired New York Sheriff Anthony Miranda and appointed Edwin Raymond as his replacement.

This caught my eye for a few reasons, the first being that Raymond is the author of a book called An Inconvenient Cop: My Fight to Change Policing in America. (It  was published by Viking  in 2023 and garnered praise from writers as diverse as the controversial writer Shaun King to Toluse Olorunnipa, the Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice.) An Inconvenient Cop is one three memoirs by Black police officers I critique in my new book, The Overseer Class: A Manifesto.

Second, how many people knew that on top of the NYPD, with its 33,000 officers and budget of nearly six billion dollars, that New York also had a sheriff’s department? (It was actually founded in 1626.) The office of sheriff is widely known in the United States as the only elected law enforcement position. Often chosen at the county level, sheriffs are responsible for unincorporated areas of counties (that aren’t part of cities), and matters of courts. Falling within the the Department of Finance in New York, the NYC sheriff executes civil warrants for courts, is appointed by the mayor (rather than elected), and has, compared to the NYPD, a modest budget of approximately $16 million.

Third, Raymond was immediately framed in the press as a “whistleblower” from within the NYPD, and a “critic” of the department, from which he retired in 2023. Mamdani’s own press release uses many of the tropes I have come to view suspiciously as marks of an “overseer”: a person placed in a position of power not to help people like them, but to amass power by (metaphorically, but sometimes literally) cracking the skulls of their own. The press release highlights that Raymond is “the child of Haitian immigrants” and that he’d worked in “New York State Attorney General’s Office as the nation’s first social justice liaison.”

But in response to Americans in general (and New Yorkers in particular) becoming more critical of policing structurally, “first narratives” and markers of identity are often used to create overseers to police the boundaries of our imaginations, and to dilute calls for the defunding or abolition of police.

Mayor Mamdani has made three major criminal justice appointments or re-appointments so far: Jessica Tisch, the first white woman to head the NYPD (and a holdover from the Eric Adams administration); Stanley Richards, a Black man and the “first formerly incarcerated person” to head the New York City Department of Corrections; and now Raymond, a Black man and “the nation’s first social justice liaison” to be sheriff.

A major way copablanda has expanded in recent years is in memoirs by Black cops. There are so many they’ve become a subgenre of sorts.

But none of these people will rein in the scope of New York policing; in fact, they expand it in intimate ways. (I invite readers in New York to join me at BAM Film’s retrospective “Black Cops, Spies and Overseers” from June 5 to 11, to consider how the figures of the Black cop, woman cop, and the gay cop work to police our imaginations and to expand policing’s scope.)  For viewers of the show Severance, in which workers’ “innies” have no idea who they are outside of work, and  their “outies” have no idea what they do when they’re at work, Commissioner Tisch, Commissioner Richards, and Sheriff Raymond remind me of a dynamic at the Lumon Corporation. In Severance, there are only two characters who can move between the “severed floor” and the rest of the world with their consciousness intact: Mr. Milchik, a Black man played by Trammel Tillman, and Harmony Cobel, a white woman played by Patricia Arquette… and they use their race and gender to intimately survey their charges.

This is what diverse policing does, it creates what I call “copablanda,” or Black cop copaganda, and “copagalda,” or copaganda done by and for women. A major way copablanda has expanded in recent years is in memoirs by Black cops. There are so many they’ve become a subgenre of sorts. A close reading of three of them reveals this: An Inconvenient Cop is a typical “I alone should have been able to fix it, but couldn’t” narrative, written by (newly minted Sheriff) Raymond with Jon Sternfeld in 2023; the dubiously titled, awkwardly long-subtitled Standing My Ground: A Capitol Police Officer’s Fight for Accountability and Good Trouble After January 6th by Harry Dunn and Ron Harris, also released in 2023; and Matthew Horace’s generic sounding 2018 book The Black and the Blue: A Cop Reveals the Crimes, Racism, and Injustice in America’s Law Enforcement, which not only practically shared a title with Nicholas Alex’s 1969 study (and much better book) Black in Blue, but also actually shared a co-author with Harry Dunn’s book (Ron Harris).

While we will briefly explore their particularities, these books share common themes. Though informative about how Black cops narrate themselves to the world, they’re all poorly (co)written and feel like a cop hasn’t necessarily arrested you, but he’s grabbed your arm and is telling you his life story and, seeing his gun in his holster, you decide it’d be better if you listened. They all express an anger that each Black policeman (they’re all men) experienced from their fellow cops and express a grievance that they were not allowed to police the public as freely as their white peers. They all express inflated delusions about their own importance in society and see themselves as the individual standing between a racist police structure and a lawless band of Negroes running rampant across the nation. They co-opt ideas from the Civil Rights Movement (as Dunn’s subtitle co-opts SNCC activist and congressman John Lewis’s “good trouble”) and even the words of James Baldwin to justify and expand the role of police. And, while they all admit there are structurally racist issues in policing, they stop short of the analysis of abolitionists: that policing itself is racist and, thus, cannot be reformed. They just keep asking How can policing do better? and How can policing do better for me, so that I can continue to benefit from it as a worker, without questioning the work itself? and never ask What would a world look like where policing was not necessary, because everyone had their needs met?

In An Inconvenient Cop, Edwin Raymond narrates his life, as described in the book’s jacket, as “the highest-ranking whistle-blower in the history of the New York Police Department” and “one of the country’s leading voices against police injustice.” These are tall claims, given Raymond evokes both Adrian Schoolcraft, whose 200 hours of police recordings are featured in my former Village Voice colleague Graham Rayman’s infamous 2012 newspaper series and his 2013 book The NYPD Tapes, as well as his supporter Frank Serpico, whose whistleblowing led both to the 1970 Knapp Commission Report on Police Corruption and to the 1973 Oscar-nominated Sydney Lumet film Serpico starring Al Pacino.

Photographed in stoic profile on the cover, Raymond wears both the patch of the NYPD and long, flowing dreadlocks pulled back under his police cap. He wastes no time getting high on his own supply, writing on the first page that

No role in society is more divisive than that of the cop. Feared and respected, insulted and embraced, viewed as both the glue keeping it all together and the force breaking it all apart, the heart of our civilization and the soul of its disruption.

He quickly refers to Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1981 painting The Irony of the Negro Policeman, which he calls “oxymoronic,” but which I would call damning; Raymond seems to riff on DuBois in thinking about the painting, reading it as “the double life of someone who sees himself one way and is seen by the public in another.”

I don’t view being a Black cop who carries a gun and can kill anyone at any time as being the kind of situation which double-consciousness was theorized to address.

(While many Black cops from sociological studies, like Nicholas Alex’s excellent 1969 Black in Blue: A Study of the Negro Policeman, to sources who have appeared in my own reporting over the decade seem to complain about a feeling “double consciousness,” for years I have observed Black police, fictional and real, articulate their dilemma of being stuck between the police force and their Black communities in a way which obscures how W.E.B. DuBois popularized the term in Black Studies. While double consciousness is believed to have been first used by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1842, most people know it due to how DuBois wrote about it in 1897 in The Souls of Black Folk, as “a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

Frantz Fanon developed a similar concept concerning coloniality in Black Skin, White Masks in 1952, and José Esteban Muñoz queered it in Disidentifications: Queers Of Color And The Performance of Politics in 1999. I read DuBois, Fanon, and Muñoz and consider double consciousness as the weight of viewing oneself as a whole person, while being aware that you are being judged as less-than in the society in which you live that is racist, colonialist, and homophobic. I don’t view being a Black cop who carries a gun and can kill anyone at any time as being the kind of situation which double-consciousness was theorized to address, no matter how much the cop might resent that other Black people see him as a sellout, snitch, and overseer. But, I do understand how falsely narrating their identity as a perpetual victim under attack is useful for the police officer to maintain their illusion of being victimized in society… and cops do this as well when they cry that being a cop is the most dangerous job, when it is not even among the top twenty most lethal professions in America.)

Raymond narrates himself as the happy rebel (“I had no problem being isolated, marching to my own drum”) and eventually blows the whistle, like Schoolcraft, on the NYPD’s racist “stop-and-frisk policies,” which the department used to justify stopping hundreds of thousands of Black and brown men a year. He became a plaintiff in Floyd v. City of New York, the successful lawsuit that forced the NYPD to rein in this practice. But Raymond is never critical of the racist practice outright. “Stop and Frisk,” he writes, “is a useful tool if it’s coupled with reasonable suspicion.” But this is impossible; even though stops and frisks dropped to about 100,000 a year under Mayor Bill DeBlasio in 2019 (after a high of more than 600,000 a year under his predecessor, Michael Bloomberg), 80 percent were still of Black and Latino New Yorkers, and most of those were young males, according to data from the New York Civil Liberties Union.

The racism of stop and frisk isn’t a racist mindset; suspicion requiring police intervention is racialized in the United States, and so the practice of stopping and frisking anyone whose only offense is being “suspicious” will always be racist, whether it’s done to 10 people a day or 2,000.

Something else Raymond does is make broad claims on behalf of others about police. Without interviewing him or citing his words, he claims that Colin Kaepernick, a onetime San Francisco 49ers player who was ostracized from the NFL for taking a knee during the national anthem, “was not anti-cop, and certainly not anti-troops or anti-America, he was pro-justice.” Raymond also claims that “When US sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised their fists on the podium at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, they weren’t hating on their country. They were asking for it to be better.” These sentiments do not line up with my own reading of these athletes’ actions, but they do line up with Matthew Horace’s assertion in Black and Blue that “Despite claims to the contrary, Black Lives Matter is not anti-cop, just as the women’s movement is not anti-men, and the Civil Rights Movement was not anti-white.” Large swaths of the Women’s Rights movement are anti-patriarchy (and some even anti-men), a good portion of the Civil Rights Movement is anti-whiteness, and a huge chunk of BLM is abolitionist, anti-prison, and, yes, anti-cop. (Recall Mariame Kaba’s 2020 New York Times op-ed, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police: Because reform won’t happen”!)

An Inconvenient Cop was no call for the end of policing; in fact, it has won its author a great deal of policing power.

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Adapted and excerpted from The Overseer Class: A Manifesto. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins. Copyrighted © 2026 by by Steven W. Thrasher. Featured image courtesy the Seattle Municipal Archives.