“Automobiles are complex but not complicated; humans are complex and complicated.”
– The Author
Complicated means the parts can be figured out if you work hard enough. Complex means the parts interact in ways you can’t fully predict.
“Law is complex but not complicated; enforcing the law is complex and complicated — it involves humans.”
– The Author
Now imagine taking “complex and complicated” to the edge of absurd.
Picture this: a 23-year-old man joins the Philadelphia Police Department. Instead of being broken in by veterans, he and his fellow cadets are sent straight from the Academy to a district where all the veterans have been expelled. Expelled from a district where corruption had been described as “… ongoing, widespread, systematic, and occurring at all levels…”
Hollywood has mocked up versions of what this might look like. What I lived was stranger — because it was real.
The first complication was the department’s: never-before-attempted, boldly conceived experiment to strip a corrupt district of its veterans and hand it over entirely to rookies fresh from the Academy.
The second complication was mine: Asperger syndrome. No one knew what it was, and I didn’t know I had it. But it shaped how I processed everything — from the danger to the absurdity to the unwritten rules that never made sense to me.
Put the two together, and you had something no movie could quite capture: a real-life collision of institutional risk-taking and personal unpredictability.
When people hear about Rookie Police Experiment, they sometimes ask, “So…is it a novel, or a memoir?” The answer is both simpler and messier than that. The events really happened. The names, the details, and sometimes the order have been nudged to protect people (and, in some cases, their families). But the core — a corrupt Philadelphia police district stripped of veterans and handed to rookies — is 100% true.
What’s harder to explain is how it felt. That’s what I tried to capture: the absurdity of a 23-year-old rookie cop with undiagnosed Asperger syndrome suddenly responsible for patrolling one of the roughest neighborhoods in the city. The humor, the danger, the disconnect.
Memoir demands honesty. Storytelling demands shape. This book is a bit of both. Think of it as my way of saying: this happened, this is what it was like, and here’s why it still matters.
If you come away shaking your head and muttering, “What could go wrong?” — then I’ve done my job.