It is always a bit unnerving to revisit my own earlier work. I find myself pacing through the text almost holding my breath, dreading embarrassment but still scrutinizing every detail, examining every word-hunting out the small errors and subtle missteps. It is not possible for me merely to re-read my work; I constantly re-write it as well, if only in my mind. The text is haunted, or I am haunted, by the side-shadowing questions of what I might have done differently.
Surely, were I writing it today, Our Enemies in Blue would be a somewhat different book. It's not that there is anything in the book that I specifically regret or am tempted to recant And it is not, unfortunately, because broad social changes have created a new context and thus demand a radical reassessment. It is just that Enemies was my first book, and I hope that I have become a better writer in the three years since it was completed.
So I have resisted the temptation to substantially rewrite the text. Those who have read the original 2004 edition will recognize this as very much the same book. I've corrected some typos and similar mistakes, and made a few stylistic changes, but the arguments and the evidence are the same as in the original. This is not an "updated" edition.
Not that there isn't more that I could have added. I could have, for instance, included new sections on the police infiltration of the anti-war movement, on the recent use of agents provocateurs against anarchists, on the "Miami Model" of crowd control, or on the shifting politics of immigration enforcement. likewise, I could have brought in new material on the aftermath of the Greensboro massacre and on the Schwerner-Goodman-Chaney murders. And I could have updated the statistics on the use of force, workplace deaths, racial profiling, the prison population, and so on. But all of that - important though it is - really remains at the level of detail. In a couple of cases, I have added notes explaining that unforeseen developments complicate some point in the text. But overall, recent events fit neatly within the narrative I was building, and do not demand any serious reworking of the original argument.
It's disappointing, really, that so little has changed.