The scene is Portland, Ore. A largely African-American community has been laid-off, bulldozed and forgotten, its neighborhoods awash in poverty and drugs. The police, even according to one of its own officers, are “an army of occupation.” In the bigger picture, both cops and citizens are powerless, political pawns in the rigged game of capitalism.
This is the world of Kent Anderson’s recently reissued novel, “Night Dogs” (Mulholland Classics), which takes place not in the contemporary, gentrified Portland of Ted Wheeler, the housing crisis and Black Lives Matter, but in North and Northeast Portland circa 1975. Union Avenue was not yet Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, and the neighborhood was still reeling from both the loss of shipyard jobs and the Albina District decimation. As James Crumley wrote in his introduction to an earlier edition of the book, “The rich are getting richer and more self-righteous, the poor more desperately poor, and no one seems to remember the losses or the lessons of the Vietnam War.”
It’s worse now, Anderson writes in the re-introduction to “Night Dogs.”
“I’d kept in touch with friends on the department, and when I wrote that introduction things on the street were getting more impersonal even then. The protocols observed by cops and citizens, that could often resolve problems without violence or arrests, were breaking down. At that time I could not have imagined the polarization and chaos of 2019.”
A Vietnam veteran himself, Anderson went from the U.S. Special Forces to the Portland Police Bureau, where he served from 1972 to 1976.
“We moved there, and I applied for a job as a cop, the only kind of work I could find after the war,” Anderson said. “I won my first NEA grant after I’d been on the department for four years, and they granted me a leave of absence to go to graduate school. Two years later, after I graduated, I decided to resign and try academia.
He received his Master of Fine Arts at the University of Montana. (“He may be the only person in U.S history to have been awarded two NEA grants as well as two Combat Bronze Stars,” Anderson’s author biography says.) First published by a small press in 1996, “Night Dogs” is a sometimes overlooked entry in the Portland literary canon. Critically acclaimed at the time, it also turns up on more than a few “the best crime novel you haven’t heard of” lists. As genre fiction, it is firmly in the cop novel tradition of Joseph Wambaugh or James Ellroy, but with a single tarnished-knight main character a la Raymond Chandler or Dashiel Hammett, and lush, descriptive prose.
Most of all, though, “Night Dogs” is both a work of social anthropology and a psychological/existential study of its anti-hero, Hanson. Contrary to the book’s original author’s note disclaimer (“all characters, events and dialogue are products of my imagination”), the Portland street cop is basically Kent Anderson.
“My books are memoirs crafted into novels,” he told Street Roots.
Like any cop fiction protagonist worth his salt, Hanson is a rebel and a mess who plays by his own rules, which, depending on the situation, can mean he’s both more compassionate or more violent than the rules say he should be. He sees himself as a good cop but a bad person, and the two things just might be related. The book takes its title – pet-lover trigger warning – from a (presumably not at all fictional) game the North Portland officers played every year, keeping count of how many wild street dogs they put out of their misery after hours. But Night Dogs also starts out with Hanson rescuing a blind mutt from the home of its dead owner. It’s his most important relationship.
Last year, Anderson and Hanson returned with “Green Sun,” which finds the character – again mirroring his creator – back on the police force, this time in Oakland in the 1980s. Like “Night Dogs,” it feels utterly contemporary, in part because it’s full of brutal, racist truth.
“We are spread way too thin out there to hesitate,” one hardass training sergeant says. “If Tyrone forces you to kill him to save your own life, the department will back you up.”
Hanson, while still no saint, is mocked by his superiors as a “constitutional scholar” who’d be better off working for the ACLU.
Anderson, on the other hand, returned to police work, taking a job with the Oakland (Calif.) Police Department.
“I couldn’t do academia very well, and decided to go back to a job where I had to deal with real life and death,” he said.
He had left Oakland prior to the tenure of Danielle Outlaw, who was deputy chief at Oakland prior to becoming chief of the Portland Police Bureau in 2017.
Anderson is now in his 70s and living in New Mexico, but he has been back to visit his old district.
“More than 10 years ago, I was in Portland, and my old police partner, Jim Bellah, took me on a tour of what had been our district, 562, which covered Fremont to Killingsworth, Union Avenue to the freeway,” Anderson said. “White people were drinking wine at sidewalk tables on the corner of Mississippi and Shaver, which used to be the brutal heart of 562. I wondered where the black people who once lived in the area might have gone, having been displaced by people who, I imagine, never give it a thought.”
FURTHER READING: Portland community members at risk of displacement brought into the planning process
The character of Hanson is kind of skeptic and a rebel but has a bit of a bleeding heart. In the newer book, he’s even called a “social worker.” Police work changes everybody who goes into it, Anderson said, “often for the worse, but the job transforms each person differently.”
The social and political climate has changed, too, which shape public attitudes toward police. The politics warping everyday life seem different than when he was a cop, he said.
“The street clashes suggest that we’ll always have war because young men of a certain age just want to kick ass, no matter what philosophy they claim to be fighting for. I’m a fan of Chief Outlaw who, from what I read, seems to be doing a heroic job in an impossible situation. Who would want to be a cop now?”
There’s a passage in the book where Hanson talks about feeling real empathy, and even an unspoken bond with “winos.” As a Vietnam vet with a drinking problem, he knows that could just as easily be him. I asked him about the conditions on the streets today, resulting in treating a social-services issue with law enforcement.
“It feels worse now: the growing numbers of homeless, the workload and cover-your-ass paperwork for the cop on the street and, again, the increasing lack of time for non-confrontational human connection between cops and citizens,” Anderson said.
I mentioned to Anderson how his dual lives between police work and academia are reminiscent of Gustav Flaubert’s saying: Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
“I’ve lived most of my life on the edge of disaster,” he said.
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