A former Los Angeles peace officer presents a collection of first-person accounts involving the use of lethal force.

Retired LA County sheriff’s deputy Rangel (The Red Dot Club, 2014, etc.) takes another trip into the trenches of law enforcement, focusing on officer-involved shootings. Like his previous book, this sequel combines Rangel’s reminiscences with those of other police officers who, in many cases, faced death at the end of a gun, and some suffered horrific gunshot injuries. “We have a conscience and a reverence for life,” Rangel writes, but he also notes that “We understand to win in a life and death struggle we have to be more violent than those assaulting us.” The no-holds-barred testimonies of the author’s fellow cops evocatively detail what an officer feels and experiences, moment by moment, while in the line of fire; “How else can you understand the horror unless I take you there all the way?” Rangel explains. One officer describes a bullet striking a suspect in the skull, “like his head was smoking a cigarette”; another remembers the sensations of being shot: “you take a match and drag it across the striker on the side of the box….It was a thousand mile an hour fast red-hot zip tearing through me.” Certain common themes emerge—how time slows to a crawl, even though most gunfights last only a few seconds, and the incandescent rage that officers feel after being wounded: “I was in disbelief and offended that he actually wanted to kill me,” remembers one, while another says, “My mind screamed, ‘HOW DARE YOU TRY AND TAKE ME AWAY FROM MY FAMILY!!!’ ” Some readers may find the book’s oral history format somewhat repetitive, but Rangel does succeed in portraying officers’ emotions in unimaginably stressful circumstances. “Society almost expects the cop to be schizophrenic,” says a former El Segundo, California, officer. “You are supposed to be a robot and not a robot. It is the job that takes the most varied sets of skills there is.”

A book that vividly captures the experiences of cops as they make life-or-death decisions.

In his nonfiction debut, Rangel, a Los Angeles-area police veteran, shines light on the many factors that go into a cop’s use of deadly force.

What’s it like to have to shoot someone to defend oneself or others? The author combines his own firsthand experience with testimonies of other colleagues who found themselves embroiled in gun battles. While on duty in an unmarked car in the early 1990s, Rangel became the victim of an attempted carjacking as gang members opened fire on him and his partner. A shootout followed and Rangel was shot; he was later taken to the hospital in the same ambulance as his assailant. The incident made the author interested to hear about similar experiences from fellow members of the titular “Red Dot Club” of wounded officers. He relates the tale of Frank, a cop who had an off-duty encounter with some gangsters who shot him and his infant son in retaliation for a prior drug arrest Frank had made. In another story, Stacy Lim, a clean-cut Asian-American cop, had a gun battle with a young man after arriving in her own driveway; she managed to kill the shooter before passing out from her injuries. Another story tells of a robbery-in-progress in which perpetrators used assault rifles and hand grenades; eight deputies and highway patrolmen were wounded. Rangel’s voice is engaging and his discussion of physiological responses to life-threatening situations is fascinating. However, these stories of deadly police force often involve armed suspects who were practically baying for cops’ blood, so the author’s general claims of widespread media distortion and misplaced sympathy for victims of police violence seem less than convincing. For example, he supposes that if the media reported on his own shootout, the perpetrator would have been presented as just “a 12 year-old-boy on a bicycle,” which seems simplistic and disingenuous—especially in an era of dashboard cams and iPhone footage.

A vivid, gripping account of police fight or flight that highlights genuine heroism but fails to effectively address murkier issues.