Police Stories

First book still going strong: Trooper Down! Life and Death on the Highway Patrol

My first nonfiction book, full of anonymous police stories, remains one of the most popular topics on my website. Police officers from around the country have contacted me since the hardback first appeared more than 20 years ago, to tell me it still conveys what it’s like to be a highway patrol officer on a day-to-day basis regardless of the state in which they work. And that was the purpose of writing a book about police stories – to incorporate one state agency (the North Carolina Highway Patrol) that exemplified officers everywhere, in all types of law enforcement.

Trooper Down! was republished in paperback (Pocket Books) in 1991 and has since been adopted by some criminal justice departments as required reading. In addition, sons and daughters of officers featured in the police stories that were considering a career in law enforcement say the book helped guide them in their occupational choices.

The Police Officers of Trooper Down!

All of which is very gratifying, but it is the police officers themselves who “wrote the book,” by allowing me entry into their world and sharing their true stories on the job. With a signed wavier in hand – I accompanied them at my own risk – I rode along day and night, from the mountains of western North Carolina to the seashore at the Outer Banks, listening, watching, learning, and never once forgetting that truth remains stranger than fiction. Their police stories are strange at times, yet very real.

The Sacrifices as Told in Trooper Down! police stories:

I interviewed families who had lost police officers in the line of duty: a mother who, when she heard the footsteps of someone at her door late at night, somehow knew that her officer son had been killed; the fiancée that learned just before her wedding that her soon-to-be-husband wasn’t coming home; the wife who never failed to tell her police officer husband that she loved him, just in case. As a widow, she said, those three words brought her comfort.

Did You Know?

Since this police stories book was published, some things have changed within the highway patrol organization and some things have not.

• James J. Kilpatrick, syndicated Washington columnist and grammarian, wrote the foreword for Trooper Down! Considered a strong advocate of police officers, he also appeared on “60 Minutes,” and his news stint was eventually parodied on “Saturday Night Live.”
• As of 2006, only 2.3 percent of the NC Highway Patrol police officers were women, compared with less than one percent when Trooper Down! was first published in 1988. Yet their police stories still resonant with readers.
• In South Carolina, a mere 2.9 percent of highway police officers are female.
• In Virginia, 5.5 percent of police troopers are women.
• Nationwide, it is estimated that women comprise only 12 percent of all police officers – not a great deal of progress in 20-plus years.
• Among the worst years on record for police officers killed in the line of duty on the NC Highway Patrol: 1985 when Giles Harmon, Ray Worley, and Bobby Lee Coggins were all killed on routine stops within a six-month period of each other. Their police stories are grippingly told in Trooper Down! from which the title of the book was taken.
• U.S. Senator Terry Sanford called Trooper Down! a police officer book that merits a read by anyone who cares about how our civil liberties are protected through “one of the nation’s most elite law enforcement agencies.”