New Jersey

New Jersey is both a professional landscape and a point of departure in the book: Roy Freeman’s years in law enforcement there are set against the pressures facing local police departments, while Frank Spoel’s childhood in the state precedes his estrangement from his family and his later movements elsewhere.

Police Work and Institutional Setting

Freeman entered policing in 1969, joining the force straight out of college and becoming one of the first New Jersey detectives to do so. He had wanted to be a police officer since childhood. The work offered relatively good pay, but his position carried additional pressures: he was African American, and other officers resented both his college background and his place in a predominantly white department. Freeman rejected the idea that racism had largely disappeared from small-town policing by the mid-1970s, describing a gap between the roles Black actors might play in films and the realities of police institutions.

After a decade with the Princeton Police Department, Freeman transferred in 1979 to the West Windsor Township Police Department in Mercer County. The agency had been established only a few years earlier. In the early 1980s it had around fifteen officers, most about forty years old; it employed one woman, a recent recruit, and one Hispanic officer, José Mendez, while the other officers were white. These details make the department’s small scale and limited representation concrete rather than abstract.

A Difficult Regional Climate

Freeman recalled the early 1980s as a grim period for New Jersey and the surrounding region, when the crack epidemic had begun. Princeton was not at the center of the wave, but that did not make police work there easy. The account therefore resists treating a relatively sheltered town as insulated from wider social pressures: the department’s local setting was connected to a broader period of strain, even where the epidemic was less concentrated.

Origins and Departure

New Jersey also figures in Spoel’s early life. He was born and raised in Bergen County. At fifteen, he left high school and began associating with men who ran an arcade, working for them as an errand boy. Two years later, his family moved out of New Jersey, and he never saw them again. The state is thus presented not as the scene of his later criminal career, but as the place he left at the point when family separation became a lasting fact. His subsequent path carried him away from that childhood setting and, after his release from a psychiatric hospital, into the Midwest.