TL;DR
Former Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best on 28 years of policing, becoming the first Black woman to lead the department and resigning in 2020 over budget cuts. Written as a leadership book as much as a memoir.
Carmen Best’s own daughter, a supporter of Black Lives Matter, told her she was part of the problem. Best tells that story in Black in Blue, along with how the two of them found some common ground. It’s a fair summary of the book: a Black woman who spent her career inside a police department, explaining it to people on both sides of the line.
HarperCollins Leadership published it in October 2021, about fourteen months after she resigned as Seattle’s police chief.
What is Black in Blue about?
Best joined the Seattle Police Department in 1992. She was often the only Black woman in the room, starting with her recruit class, and she writes about overhearing what fellow officers said about her. Her introduction is blunt that racism and sexism run through every part of society, policing included, and her advice for surviving it was to tune out the negative and keep working.
She rose through the ranks to deputy chief. The book covers the federal consent decree that reshaped the department, a reform effort she calls a national model, and her work as chief to diversify the force, including a large hiring class in 2019.
How does Black in Blue cover 2020?
Carefully and from the inside. Best describes approving the use of tear gas during the protests, a decision she says she dreaded, and looks back on it. She writes about asking neighboring agencies for help clearing the protest zone in Capitol Hill and getting a yes from only one. And she describes her conflict with the city council over the department’s budget. She says she was left out of the council’s deliberations on cuts and refused to be made the scapegoat for rising crime.
She resigned after the council voted to cut about 100 positions. Her argument was that the cuts would fall on the newest officers, who were also the most diverse.
Who is Carmen Best?
Best was born in Tacoma and spent 28 years with the Seattle police. She became interim chief in January 2018, was left off the first finalist list, then was named chief that summer after another candidate withdrew. She was the first Black woman to lead the department. She resigned effective September 2, 2020, and later worked as a television analyst and in corporate security.
How did Carmen Best become Seattle’s police chief?
Not smoothly. She became interim chief on January 1, 2018. When the city announced its finalists that spring, her name wasn’t on the list. Then one of the finalists withdrew, and in July she was named chief. The city council confirmed her in August 2018, and she became the first Black woman to lead the department.
That route matters in the book. Best writes as someone who was passed over and then chosen, who had to prove herself to the institution again after nearly three decades inside it. Readers who’ve been overlooked for a job they’d earned will recognize the feeling, and the leadership lessons she draws from it apply far beyond policing.
What Black in Blue shows a leader planning a book
Look at the subtitle: Lessons on Leadership, Breaking Barriers, and Racial Reconciliation. It’s a leadership book built from a memoir, and that’s the structure that lets a police leader’s book reach managers who’ve never worked in policing.
Best told one interviewer that writing it was cathartic, a way to look back at how much policing had changed. The hardest chapter of a career, the one that ended it, often becomes the reason the book gets read, and that’s true here. Seattle produced another chief’s book worth reading alongside this one: Norm Stamper’s Breaking Rank.
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