Sometimes you're better off knowing next to nothing about your heroes.

Like a lot of people, especially those of us who live remotely close to Washington DC, I was obsessed with the news during the beltway sniper killing spree in October, 2002. I followed the story compulsively, and I got used to seeing Montgomery County Maryland's police chief, Charles Moose, on television.

Over the three weeks of the hunt for the sniper, I became a fan of Chief Moose. There was something about the guy that struck me as very genuine. I sensed a weariness about him whenever he gave statements to the press, and I had the impression that the guy was just living on the job, day and night, until the sniper was caught.

I remember seeing him tear up when he announced that the sniper had shot a child. That moved me. And I liked that he was willing, on more than one occasion, to chastise the press for broadcasting and/or printing stories that could have jeopardized the investigation. Charles Moose struck me as a no BS kind of guy. I liked him.

You can watch a short clip of one of his statements to the press at the beginning of this episode of the Charlie Rose Show:

So I was pretty enthusiastic when I recently bought a paperback copy of Moose's book, Three Weeks In October, his highly autobiographical account of the search for the Beltway Snipers. I read the book ravenously at first, and then with increasing distaste and unease as, over the course of the work's 300-or-so pages, Charles Moose revealed himself to be a real butthole.

Moose has had his detractors since the days when the manhunt for the snipers was still ongoing. I've always been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt with regard to his police work. For one thing, anyone leading that kind of investigation is just bound to be scrutinized beyond belief. Even if he'd handled the case perfectly, there would have been those for whom his work wasn't good enough.

What bothered me about the book ... and came to bother me about Moose himself ... was the book's focus on Moose's obsession with race. Moose is, unfortunately, apparenlty one of those guys who could find racism in a can of iced tea.

Now, when a black person makes a charge of racism, I'm inclined to give them some benefit of the doubt initially. I've never been black, I've never been a minority of any kind, and I don't know what it's like to be a victim of race-based oppression. Lots of black people have been oppressed over the years, and racism continues to be a serious problem in the world ... and in more ways than one.

But Moose talks about finding racism in every little inconvenience in the world. If he has to wait in line, he's a victim of racism. If someone cuts around him in line, he's a victim of racism. If someone chastises him when he shows up at the station out of uniform, he's a victim of racism. This is the kind of guy who makes Nat X look like a pussy cat.

And as I found out after I finished the book, by reading another review, this dude is seriously sue-happy, too.

And it gets worse. Moose's accounts of his actual police work left me scratching my head, too. Moose talks about posting police officers at schools, knowing full well that it wouldn't make any positive difference, purely as a matter of PR. Wouldn't that resource have been better used in the investigation itself? And when the two snipers, John Muhaamad and Lee Malvo, were finally arrested, Moose talks about how he took the calls with that information from his bed and chose to stay in bed. He justified that by saying that it would have been insulting to his force if he'd gotten up and came in during the arrest. Whatever. All I could ask myself was "How the HELL does the leader of that investigation just STAY IN BED when the arrest is finally made?"

Granted I'm not a cop, and I don't pretend to believe that I could have done a better job than Chief Moose. Still, I have to think that it speaks to a serious defect in his leadership that he worried about PR during the largest manhunt in American history. Finding out about his thought processes and legitimizations made me seriously doubt that he's the no BS guy I thought he was.

Later in the book, Moose devotes an entire chapter to his ruminations on the fact that the two snipers were black men. Moose has bought ... and even promotes ... the hype that black people are somehow mostly immune from the evil that causes people to become serial killers. It's not true, and a police chief should know better. Any one of us, regardless of race, religion, creed, etc ... might be capable of tremendous good OR unspeakable evil. It's part of the human condition.

If you're looking for a book about the demanding, exacting police work that eventually lead to the arrest of the Beltway Snipers, keep looking. Three Weeks In October is not that book. The book didn't satisfy any of my own curiosity about the case. Instead, it tainted my appreciation of a guy I'd once admired quite a bit.

Labels: Books, Media, News