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Book Review: Gina Gallo, Armed & Dangerous: Memoirs of a Chicago Policewoman Tom Doherty Associates LLC, 2001; 335 pp.; ISBN# 9780312878900 Reviewed by: Aaron Ferriola Armed & Dangerous written by Gina Gallo, a second generation cop and sixteen-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department, gives her first-hand account of what it was like to be a policewoman in a time where woman cops did not roll off the tongue easily. Gallo spends most of her time in Chicago’s West side, district twelve. A district filled with high-rise housing projects and controlled by gangs. Gallo breaks the book up into two parts, each with fifteen different stories to be told from her point of view. Unlike most books, Gallo does not follow one plot and each chapter builds upon the plot until the book is read in its entirety. Instead, Gallo organized each chapter as its own short story allowing the read to focus on each individual chapter instead of trying to remember what took place throughout the entire book. In the first couple of chapters, Gallo describes her time at the training academy for Chicago’s finest. She describes how it was like to run several miles, go to class, run a few more miles, participate in defensive tactics, and end the day with a final run. Gallo also tacked on morning and evening workouts along with several other female recruits who were unable to make it over the obstacle course wall, which was about six and a half feet tall. The rule was simple, if you cannot make it over the wall you will not graduate from the academy. After the new recruits finished the academy, they are assigned a Field Training Officer (FTO) who shows the rookies the ropes of the streets. On Gallo’s first day on the job, she learned quickly that politics run deep in the department when she pulled over a family member of the

local doughnut deliveryman for the department. Several minutes after writing the ticket, Gallo and her partner are called into the station and are chewed out by the watch commander. Gallo’s FTO, Vaughn, was a man who did not like going out and looking for trouble, he had his daily route and stuck to it. Vaughn also loved not being the first on scene; he always managed to find an excuse to why he was late to a call. This particularly annoyed Gallo because she did not sign up to run from everything like her FTO. This all changed after Gallo and Vaughn were involved in a serious wreck on their way to a call. After both officers recovered from the incident, Gallo noticed a change in Vaughn’s demeanor. Towards the end of Gallo’s on the job training and right before graduation, Vaughn and Gallo are sent to a domestic call in the heart of gang-controlled territory. Gallo ends up in a foot pursuit chasing the suspect until he gets out of sight. She circles back to the scene when she is attacked from behind, long story short Gallo winds up putting a bullet into the suspect’s chest. Not a year out of the academy Gallo had to take someone’s life to preserve her own life. The time graduation form has involved the police academy rolls around Gallo is involved in more incidents than her fellow classmate’s. This was just the beginning of her career she has many more years to go before retirement. When Gallo’s arrives to her district for her first day at her new district, she receives mixed greetings from her fellow male counterparts. As the years go by Gallo learns society as a whole is broken and people do not care to fix what is broken. She also realizes not matter how much she said she was never going to change Gallo has inevitably changed and understood the “us versus them” mentality. The toughest part of the book was not reading about the countless death and gruesome child abuse it was when Gallo brought up her relationship with her kids and how her son drew a picture for school. The picture was of Gallo’s

lying dead in a pool of her own blood. Her son stated he was not sure when his mother was not going to come home. It is stuff heard of in mystical legends within the department about finding the perfect partner. Officers usually find one they can tolerate and deal with that they can trust enough to get the job done, but Gallo is one of the few lucky ones who finds the perfect partner. Diane was Gallo’s soul partner, their partnership happened by mistake. Diane was new to the district and Gallo was the only one without a partner at the time so they were partnered up. Diane and Gallo started out on patrol and eventually wind up on the tactical plainclothes unit by having to play the game with department politics. No, they did not have to go to bed with any rank; they had to have more arrest in one cycle (28 days) than the uniformed officers. Diane and Gallo surpassed the uniformed officers and were assigned to the plainclothes unit. Gallo has subdivided her book into two parts; the first part is fifteen chapters long and includes stories of her rookie days and her realization of the cop mentality. The second part is the latter part of her career. Each chapter is an individual story of an adventure or tribulation Gallo experiences throughout her time as one of Chicago’s finest. Being that each chapter is its own story, the chapters do not flow together making it confusing and frustrating at some points. Gallo does such a good job at sucking the reader into each chapter she either has to write and entire book on each individual chapter giving the reader all the details, or giving the reader the general idea and bigger picture of the story. Because Gallo went that direction, it leaves unanswered questions in some of the stories she tells. At the beginning of each chapter, the reader will read a conversation between the dispatcher and a unit. This conversation is the outline of the entire chapter, but the conversation is not finished until the last few pages of the chapter were the reader learns what the dispatcher

and the unit were talking about. At the beginning of the book, it becomes slightly confusing having the dispatcher dialogue, but as the book progresses it becomes easier to read and understand. Gallo’s dialogue in the book matches the dialogue she used and the people she dealt with while working in her district. She did not refrain from using expletives and used phrases that made the reader feel like they were standing next to Gallo listening to the same things she witnessed. Gallo’s did a phenomenal job describing what it was like to be a female cop in one of the toughest departments all while keeping it short, sweet, and to the point. The stories Gallo tells are depressing, funny, just outright bizarre. All the stories Gallo told give the reader an idea what it is like to be a cop not just in Chicago but also all over the World. Armed & Dangerous is a necessary read for any one, especially women who are interested in becoming a police officer....