Howard Rahtz, Race, Riots, and the Police

Howard Rahtz joined the Cincinnati Police Department in 1988, after a career in alcohol and drug rehabilitation, and served for nineteen years, retiring with the rank of captain. He has published four books, the first two in-service and the third – Drugs, Crime and Violence: From Trafficking to Treatment – in 2012. Race, Riots, and the Police is an analysis of one hundred years of race riots in America as a symptom of the ‘fissure between the police and the African American community’ and advances a selection of methods to bridge that fissure (p.1). This is an ambitious aim to achieve with a slim volume and my main criticism of Rahtz’s often compelling writing is the lack of structure that is evident from the very beginning and continues all the way to the end, inhibiting the solutions selected from coalescing into a coherent strategy.