In this New York Times bestselling must-read, executive producer and host of Dirty Jobs Mike Rowe presents a delightfully entertaining, seriously fascinating collection of his favorite episodes from America's #1 short-form podcast, The Way I Heard It, along with a host of personal memories, ruminations, and insights that will leave you captivated.The Way I Heard It presents thirty-five mysteries for the curious mind with a short attention span. Every one is a trueish tale about someone you know, filled with facts that you don't. Movie stars, presidents, bloody do-gooders, and villains--they're all here, waiting to shake your hand, hoping you'll remember them. Delivered with Mike's signature blend of charm, wit, and ingenuity, their stories are part of a larger mosaic--a memoir full of surprising revelations, sharp observations, and intimate, behind-the-scenes moments drawn from Mike's own remarkable life and career.

Chicago has always had a reputation as a wide open town with a high tolerance for gangsters, illegal liquor, and crooked politicians. It has also been the home for countless black musicians and the birthplace of a distinctly urban blues-more sophisticated, cynical, and street-smart than the anguished songs of the Mississippi delta-a music called the Chicago blues. This is the history of that music and the dozens of black artists who congregated on the South and Near West Sides. Muddy Waters, Big Bill Broonzy, Howlin' Wolf, Elmore James, Tampa Red, Little Walter, Jimmy Reed, Otis Rush, Sonny Boy Williamson, Junior Wells, Eddie Taylor-all of these giants played throughout the city and created a musical style that had imitators and influence all over the world.

Drawing on six years of ethnographic research, this book critically examines police culture, exploring police behaviours, decision-making and actions.

Police officers, social workers, teachers, and many other street-level bureaucrats exercise discretion in dealing with clients. In so doing, they make policy as it is experienced at the frontline. Instead of puzzling at repeated public policy implementation failures and wondering why street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) don't behave the way policy-makers expect, we need to understand the world as seen from the ground. This short and practical text explores the value of interpretive analysis for researching street-level bureaucracy.

Using Michael Lipsky's (1980) idea of SLB and connecting it to contemporary debates, Mike Rowe argues for an approach to researching SLBs that focuses on dilemmas in practice, ones that change with each policy shift, each new target, with austerity, and with new technology such that no settled state is likely. He places emphasis on the need to understand the ways SLBs respond to pressures in order to work with them and to understand what policy becomes in practice. Street-level bureaucrats and their clients are engaged in a process of sense-making.

Researching Street-level Bureaucracy is not just an essential resource for teachers and students of Master's and Doctoral programs in Public Administration, Public Policy, Social Work, and Criminal Justice, it is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the structural pressures that bear on the individual and how any change to the dilemmas confronted might play out at the street-level.

Drawing on six years of ethnographic research, this book critically examines police culture, exploring police behaviours, decisionmaking and actions. Police culture is a concept widely used, often critically, to characterise the working attitudes and behaviours of (usually uniformed) police officers. It is shorthand for a workplace imbued with machismo, racism, sexism, a thirst for danger and excitement, cynicism and conservatism. Rather than looking for culture or identifying how culture affects behaviours, this book identifies factors that influence the decisions and actions, including technology, targets, training, timing, intelligence, geography and supervision, thus reassembling police culture much as Bruno Latour sought to reassemble the social.

The analysis develops a clearer and critical understanding of culture by explicitly connecting the debates about police culture to those about organisational culture. Offering a detailed ethnography of two shifts, it grounds the analysis of the idea of police culture in a 'thick description' of the day- to- day activities observed in the police station and the patrol car, rather than using brief illustrative extracts. The book dispenses with any assumption of the utility of the concept of police culture, not least because it is opaque, and reassembles our understanding of policing and, if it retains any relevance, of police culture.

An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of policing, criminology, sociology, law, politics and all those interested in the day- to- day lives of police officers.

Over recent years race has become one of the most important issues faced by the police. This book seeks to analyse the context and background to these changes, to assess the impact of the Lawrence Inquiry and the MacPherson Report, and to trace the growing emphasis on policing as an 'antiracist' activity, proactively confronting racism in both crime and non-crime situations. Whilst this change has not been wholly or consistently applied, it does represent an important change in the discourse that surrounds police relations with the public since it changes the traditional role of the police as 'neutral arbiters of the law'. This book shows why race has become the most significant issue facing the British police, and argues that the police response to race has led to a consideration of fundamental issues about the relation of the police to society as a whole and not just minority groups who might be most directly affected.

Police officers, social workers, teachers, and many other street-level bureaucrats exercise discretion in dealing with clients. In so doing, they make policy as it is experienced at the frontline. Instead of puzzling at repeated public policy implementation failures and wondering why street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) don't behave the way policy-makers expect, we need to understand the world as seen from the ground. This short and practical text explores the value of interpretive analysis for researching street-level bureaucracy.

Using Michael Lipsky's (1980) idea of SLB and connecting it to contemporary debates, Mike Rowe argues for an approach to researching SLBs that focuses on dilemmas in practice, ones that change with each policy shift, each new target, with austerity, and with new technology such that no settled state is likely. He places emphasis on the need to understand the ways SLBs respond to pressures in order to work with them and to understand what policy becomes in practice. Street-level bureaucrats and their clients are engaged in a process of sense-making.

Researching Street-level Bureaucracy is not just an essential resource for teachers and students of Master's and Doctoral programs in Public Administration, Public Policy, Social Work, and Criminal Justice, it is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the structural pressures that bear on the individual and how any change to the dilemmas confronted might play out at the street-level.

The book will explore the impact of the Lawrence Report since it was published in 1999. Upon publication, Home Secretary Jack Straw promised that the Macpherson Inquiry would lead to real change in the policing of minority ethnic communities in Britain. Several senior police officers made similar pledges and insisted that the benchmark against which their commitment should be judged should be the extent to which progress was made 'on the ground'. In the aftermath of the report a host of initiatives have addressed issues ranging from police liaison with victims, first aid training, to stop and search procedures and police complaints. As well as exploring the many ways in which the Lawrence Report has impacted on the police service and on society more widely this collection assesses the extent to which, in retrospect, the Macpherson Inquiry has led to significant changes to policing, and highlights areas where future efforts ought to be concentrated.