Adam Plantinga, a San Francisco police sergeant and author of 400 Things Cops Know, defends policing’s reality in The Ascent, a Detroit thriller set amid post-George Floyd tensions, where his "Mickey Spillane" protagonist solves crimes violently—a stance he argues reflects systemic challenges. Rejecting Hollywood’s cop stereotypes (like detectives leading SWAT raids), he insists policing demands high-skill versatility, from mental health crises to niche regulations, while criticizing racial bias myths and Hollywood’s portrayal of officers as villains. His novel, optioned by Universal despite industry backlash risks, blends his 23 years on the force with research at San Quentin, offering a rare conservative-leaning success in publishing. Plantinga’s next Argento book arrives in early 2025, continuing his mission to recalibrate public perception of cops amid shifting politics like San Francisco’s new DA, Brooke Jenkins. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey, it's Andrew Clayman with this week's interview, which is with Adam Plantinga.
He's a San Francisco police sergeant.
He wrote a nonfiction book called 400 Things Cops Know.
The Wall Street Journal called it the new Bible for crime writers, and I have used it a lot of times.
One Amazon reviewer, he tells me, called it kind of interesting, but maybe a little overpriced.
However, he has written his first novel, The Ascent, and I have been reading it, and it is really good.
I would not kid you.
It is well written.
The hero, you will love the hero.
And I can't wait to talk to him.
Adam, thanks for coming on.
Thanks for having me.
I appreciate it.
So I have to ask you, before we start talking, I want to talk to you about the novel.
I want to talk to you about 400 Things, which is just a terrific book.
You know, last week I was talking about my friend Otto Penzler, who's one of the great, I don't know if you've met him yet.
I'm sure you will eventually.
Oh, I know the name.
Yeah, he's one of the great mystery editors, and he got canceled at BoucherCon for untoward opinions, basically, and for asking some untoward questions.
You do not strike me as a person who kind of keeps your opinions to yourself.
You have always seemed to me to be fairly blunt and outspoken.
You've written to me about my books, and you've shown up here, which will be the end of your career, of course.
So I'm wondering.
I'll go down swinging.
Was it difficult to get The Ascent published?
You know, it came out at sort of an interesting time.
You know, when I was talking to folks in the book business, this was a little after George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, you know, a time of protest and sort of upheaval.
And I got the sense that maybe a novel with sort of a two-fisted cop hero might not necessarily find a home.
But I had an idea of the kind of book I wanted to write, and I wasn't really interested in writing a sort of a message book.
I wanted to write a thriller that entertained people.
Yeah, I think that sort of pendulum has swung back a little ways toward the understanding that, look, police aren't the bad guys.
But yeah, I had to navigate a little bit of that terrain.
Because the story really does take place.
I mean, it seems to take place in a sort of post-George Floyd world where this guy is being your cop.
The hero is being completely disrespected.
He's disgruntled with the work.
He talks like a lot of cops.
I've talked to talk about that.
So it's very realistic.
It takes place in Detroit, but it's still a very realistic portrayal of that situation.
And they've supported, I mean, this is from Grand Central, which is Hashed, if I recall.
And so that's a major publisher, but they didn't want you to soften that or anything.
You know, it was interesting when we were shopping the book, I talked to someone in the book world who's sharp and knowledgeable.
And that person told me, look, you're trying to find a home for this book.
The editors that are going to be reading it probably live in Brooklyn, listen to NPR, maybe have a coexist bumper sticker on their car.
And that's all fine.
But just know that those are the folks that need to sort of green light your book.
So you may want to just be aware of that and pay some sort of, have some sort of nod towards sort of the current political climate.
And there is some of that in the book, but I think it's, I sort of try to thread it in a little.
And I might have done that anyways.
Again, I didn't want to write a message book.
There are people that are writing message books that are nonfiction.
And the folks who want to read that, they can certainly find them.
But I wanted to write a cop who's a good guy that's put in a bad situation and is heroic.
So that was my goal.
Yeah, he's a very cool character, really well-drawn.
Really, you know, kind of a rare throwback to the old sort of Mickey Spillane tough guy.
I mean, he is really a hard-boiled guy.
You know, I so enjoyed your book, The Identity Man, with Shannon as the hero.
And I like to think that maybe he's got a little bit of that DNA.
It's kind of an old school, you know, solves a lot of problems by punching people in the face.
Although, you know, a lot of the situations he's in don't have a diplomatic selection.
So I mean, I didn't want to apologize for that.
That's what I wanted to do.
So how long have you been a police officer?
You're now a police sergeant, but you started out.
I've been in this.
Yeah, I started out in the city of Milwaukee as a cop, and I've been in the business about 23 years.
And you're now in San Francisco?
Yes.
So when I was researching the Weiss Bishop trilogy, it was right around the turn of the century, right, 2001, something like that.
I went up to San Francisco and interviewed two homicide detectives and spent the day with them.
And they were very disgruntled.
Now, I don't want you to bite the hand of Fiji or anything like that, but they were basically telling me that they were having a hard time being able to enforce the law and they predicted some of the things that would happen in San Francisco.
Now I'm starting to hear that people in San Francisco are getting a little bit tired of not enforcing the law.
Do you foresee things getting better there or is it going to remain a tough situation?
I think there's been some positive signs.
We had an ultra-progressive district attorney, Chessa Bodine, who I don't think was good for the city.
He was recalled.
So that tells you something right there.
The district attorney who replaced him, very competent, very sharp woman named Brooke Jenkins.
So that's huge right there just for morale.
And people have the sense that crimes, even quality of life type crimes, there's going to be some teeth behind those.
With a lot of cities, fentanyl has sort of changed the game in San Francisco.
So that's a battle that we have.
But the voters in San Francisco have been much more supportive of the police, have passed some measures that may give us a little more leeway in terms of chasing felony vehicles.
So yeah, I think we do feel more support.
And again, that's great for morale for us.
Yeah, it really is important.
It's kind of surprising coming from San Francisco because we all think of it as a very, very left-wing city, but it's actually got a fairly solid population mixed in there.
So it'd be nice to see that turnaround.
So I want to talk to you about your book, 400 Things Cops Know.
But the first thing I'd like to know is you're writing nonfiction and then you move to The Ascent, which is straight up thriller novel.
I wrote novels and then started to write nonfiction, and it was really a hard transition.
I'm wondering if you found it difficult going the other way.
You know, so I wrote the two nonfiction books about police work and I sort of felt like I had said everything I wanted to say about the job.
And, you know, this is my debut novel, but it's not the first novel I've written.
I've got five in sort of a deep desk drawer, five novels that I've written over the last 20 years that are unpublished.
And for the sake of readers everywhere, should probably remain that way.
So I think I had to kind of get those bad books out of my system before I could write a halfway decent one.
But, you know, the main character is a cop.
So that's a world I obviously know.
So I felt pretty comfortable.
You know, I wasn't going to try writing a sweeping Victorian romance.
I mean, I don't have the kind of range that a lot of authors do.
So I sort of stuck to what I knew.
And yeah, I mean, I'm proud of the book.
I'm happy for it.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, you should be.
It's really, it's really good.
Being a police officer, has it changed over the years when you first went into it?
You wrote, I believe, that you went into it because you thought it had various and kind of adventurous experiences.
How has that panned out?
You know, overall, the job has been good to me.
It puts some city miles on you.
But, you know, it's a job that I think it's an important job.
I mean, the mark of how important a job is, I think, is if you imagine society without anyone doing that job.
I think without the cops, we'd have chaos.
So I like doing something that seems worthwhile and that I feel like I'm halfway good at.
I do think that sort of these days, more is asked of police officers than maybe in times past.
We have to be sort of more so counselors and social workers.
And to a certain extent, I think that's okay.
But sometimes I do think that cities are asking a bit much of us, especially with our current staffing situation, which is not great in San Francisco or other cities.
So if you know anyone who wants to sign up for the San Francisco Police Department, send them our way.
Good luck.
We could use them.
Yeah.
I mean, I remember the, I think it was the Dallas police chief who quit saying we just can't do everything that they're asking us to do.
I mean, because of my writing, and I've talked to a lot of police officers through the years.
You have this book, 400 Things Cops Know.
What is it you would want people to know about being a cop?
What does it think people get wrong?
Leaving Hollywood out of it for a minute, what do you think that ordinary people get wrong about being a cop?
You know, I think, for one, people don't have a great idea what cops do all day.
I mean, I think most folks contact with the police might be reporting a theft or getting pulled over for a traffic stop.
But I think what people don't understand about the job is how varied it is, how many skills you have to draw on.
I mean, again, you have to be a boxer.
You have to be a counselor.
You have to be good at tactics.
You have to be able to talk someone down as a mental health crisis.
You have to learn and know about everything from gunshot wounds to the city regulations on horse-drawn carriages.
I mean, you have to sort of be a Renaissance man.
So to do it well, you have to be sort of pretty good at a lot of stuff.
Yeah, I would say one of the things I've noticed is that police officers are a lot smarter than they are depicted on television.
I mean, most of the officers I've spoken to are well-spoken, you know, thoughtful, interesting.
You know, they have a take on life that you find among highly intelligent people.
So it is very different that way.
What are depictions of cops that you think are legit?
You know, I mean, I think the wire is the gold standard for not just cop shows, but any shows.
Couldn't be more impressed with that show.
Beam Dream Helps Sleep00:03:05
Yeah.
I think the author Richard Price, who wrote Clockers, who wrote Lush Life, his most recent book was The Whites.
That guy gets it.
I mean, he's so in tune to cop culture that I, you know, sometimes I think he understands cops better than I do.
So I don't know if he does write-alongs or if he has friends, but he's very much comfortable in that world.
Because, you know, there's a lot of TV, there's a lot of TV shows and movies that I can't watch without pointing at the screen and saying, that's not how it is, you know?
All right.
Give me a couple.
Give me some.
All right, you got it.
Yeah.
So the cops are doing some sort of search warrant or raid on a place.
And first of all, the main detective is leading the raid.
And he's got his little police jacket on and maybe a handgun.
And then the SWAT team is all in back of him.
Like he has to lead the SWAT team in.
I've noticed that.
The other way around.
Which is not the way it goes.
I mean, SWAT clears the space and then the detective kind of comes in when all the dust has settled.
But then they go in to clear a room and they clear it in about five seconds.
And I think, you know, there's about 42 places in that space that you haven't cleared yet.
You got to do that closet.
You got to do under the bed.
There might be someone hidden behind the drywall.
There could be a guy in that oven.
So these are all places where we found suspects before.
But they got a fast track.
That's Hollywood.
You know, I know the slow stuff.
My wife, whenever I watch cop shows, my wife walks around the background shouting, clear, clear.
You do clear those rooms very quickly.
Yeah.
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Dealing with Predetermined Situations00:13:36
One of the things that always gets me about the job of the police is that crime is really a political matter.
I mean, the crime goes up and goes down, not according to what the police do all the time, but really according to what policies are being enacted.
And people don't seem, you know, cops are the last guy to have to deal with the criminal.
You know, the passage that that guy took into criminality is not something, you know, you're not there at the beginning when social policy affects his life.
Right.
So you're dealing with a predetermined situation.
And one of the key things, and of course, one of the most controversial things is the question of race.
That there's this idea that, well, black people are being put in prison so much, we should put fewer black people in prison.
So even if they've committed a crime, they should get a pass.
Is there some Having worked so long as a police officer, do you have an opinion about how the racial makeup of cities in America should be handled?
Is there something that is not being done at the policy level that would make your life easier?
You know, I think that's sort of the question of the day.
You know, I've, in 23 years, my experience has been that the vast majority of cops do the job the right way.
They arrest people because of their behavior, because of the crimes they've committed, not because they're a certain race.
I think the thing that I sometimes find frustrating is we might go into a neighborhood and do some enforcement, and someone will say to us, you're only doing this because I'm black or because I'm Hispanic.
When in fact, those are the neighborhoods that often call us the most.
Those are the neighborhoods that have the most need and the most crime.
To the point where I've been in, for instance, a predominantly black neighborhood, and someone said, well, you're only arresting me because I'm black.
And I said, you know, show me a white guy should be arresting in this particular neighborhood.
I mean, so much of it just boils down to demographics.
So, you know, are cops racist?
I mean, we all have our own sort of entrenched bias.
And if you notice that, you got to try to root it out.
But I see a lot of, you know, I see a lot of fair play with the folks that I work with.
So I don't have any easy answers to that solution.
I think that efforts to sort of root out racism are noble ones.
But at the end of the day, treat everyone like you'd want to be treated.
That's the golden rule.
And I think that goes a long way.
Do the people, I mean, obviously we go into a black neighborhood, the criminal is going to be black, but so is the victim.
Do you encounter the sort of thing you see on TV all the time where you can't get people to talk to you, where you're distrusted, where even the good people don't want to testify or give you information?
Is that a real thing that happens outside of television?
No, I think it is in cities, not just San Francisco, but all over.
I mean, you need citizen cooperation to make a case.
I mean, if someone saw a shooting, in order for that case to have legs, they have to be willing to not just talk to you on scene, but to potentially testify.
And I mean, we're asking people to put themselves in a tough position sometimes because maybe the shooter is someone that lives in their same building or down the block and they fear retaliation.
I mean, if you're living in a crime-ridden neighborhood, your day-to-day life is stressful enough without having to worry about someone retailing against you because you're willing to be a witness against the shooter.
So, you know, I get that and I empathize with it.
But the fact remains, a lot of these murder cases you cannot make without citizen cooperation.
So we have to sort of, I mean, it's our job to try to earn people's trust.
That's all we can do.
So the ascent takes place in a, it's a supermatch, right?
It's in a high security prison.
People don't realize that police don't really go to prisons very much.
They have a jail.
No.
Did you go to a prison or did you just research it?
No, I did two things that I thought was kind of clever.
I talked to a former prison warden, a guy named Jim Latole, who's a first-rate crime author himself, and just got the lowdown on all sorts of things about prison life and security procedures and the kind of weapons that inmates use.
And then I went and visited San Quentin.
I took a tour of San Quentin And that was very informative in terms of, because like you said, you know, police officers don't get into state prison much when inmates in state prison, our job's pretty much done with them.
So, I mean, just seeing how that place operated.
I mean, there were some people that, you know, gave accounts of their crimes and seemed generally remorseful for their crimes, which, you know, I found kind of striking.
But I don't have a lot of those kind of inmates in my book.
My book are mostly the unredeemed.
So they really test the hero's metal.
Yeah, I have to say, every time I've researched prison and gone to a prison, I've sworn to myself I would never write a book that took place in prison again because I find them the most depressing places on earth.
It's a horrible place.
Yeah, I'm with you on that.
There seems to be sort of this combination of boredom and then just barely repressed anger, like violence could break out at any time, has that kind of aura to it.
And just living in a place where everybody can tell you what to do all the time, just a nightmare.
Well, my wife does it anyways.
There are similarities.
I can't remember whether I mentioned that this has been optioned, the Ascent has been optioned by Universal, which is incredibly exciting.
So now this is another thing.
I'm asking this because a lot of the people who listen to me or follow me are either aspiring writers or want to know about or other kinds of artists.
And a lot of people are very, very concerned about being locked out because of their conservative approach or because of their opinions or because they're a white male or anything like that.
Now, this was a pretty quick option.
I mean, that's really good.
I mean, it's really great to be grabbed up like that.
And there's an option for television.
But you're not experiencing this.
You're not experiencing the kind of like get out of town that I do know people who have experienced that for their ideas and also because they're white males.
Yeah, I mean, I was pretty fortunate.
My literary agent connected with a TV and film agent who, you know, he went out and did all the work while I just sat in a deep corner and made sarcastic comments.
So I wish that's the way more things could operate.
I think, I don't know.
I mean, I know, I guess I was just trying to tell the best story I could.
And then, you know, if something happens with it, great.
I don't always know how to sort of control the other end of it.
I think you just write the best book you can and then just stand behind it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So let's talk a little bit about 400 things cops know.
If you had to mention, what's the first one you would mention that cops know that you think people should know?
I think that one of the things I think is helpful for people to know is sometimes there'll be someone who's resisting arrest or fighting with the police.
And there might be three, four, six cops trying to detain that person.
And some will come up to me or to another officer and say, why did it take six people to take that lone suspect into custody?
And what I usually tell them is, look, the more cops there are, the better it is for that suspect, right?
Because each cop can kind of take a limb.
You know, one can take an arm, the other can take an arm, a leg, and a leg.
We don't want that person to hurt us.
And we don't want to hurt that person.
So the better we're able to wrap them up, the better it is for them and the better it is for us.
To the point where if someone says, you know, why did it take six cops to take that one suspect into custody?
We say something like, because we didn't have seven that day.
I think people sometimes think the more cops there are, that's sort of de facto proof of police brutality.
But it's, I mean, it's the exact opposite.
Yeah, so it's funny.
We succeed because we use good teamwork.
Yeah, no, it's funny.
I've explained that very thing to people because it's very violent to look at.
It's very, you know, it causes dismay when you see it to see that many people kind of ganging up on somebody.
But obviously, if it were you alone, you'd have to strike him in pretty dangerous ways to bring him down.
And that would be much worse.
But it does look like that.
Yeah.
Yeah, you want to avoid the sort of the one-on-one protracted fights.
And, you know, if there's a group of cops around a person, I mean, we've all seen high-profile videos of cops acting wrongly.
But before you say, hey, this is police brutality, maybe look and see what the cops are doing.
I mean, nine times out of 10 or 99 times out of 100, they're going to try to subdue this person without trying to do any damage to them.
Yeah, it always seems that way to me.
Even some cops, you know, without mentioning names, even some cops who've taken the fall for things that have been shown on videos did not look to me like they deserved it.
It seemed to me that they were, you know, doing the best they could.
It's a terrifying thing to have somebody resist arrest.
And some of these people are, some of the bad guys are enormous.
And so it's like, it's not an easy thing.
You're not in an easy situation.
Yeah.
And the thing that is pounded into your head in the police academy is that anyone that chooses to fight with you as a uniformed police officer is automatically dangerous because there's always a gun in that situation.
Either they have a gun or you have your own guns that they may try to take with you that they may have tried to take away from you.
So you have to treat all those fights as inherently dangerous.
And you cannot lose that fight.
You have to do what you need to do to win.
One of the things that always strikes me when I'm listening to politicians talk about crime is this sort of notion of sympathy for the criminal.
And I have met some criminals that I have had sympathy for, but I've met a lot of criminals that I wouldn't even think about having sympathy for because I think it would just be dangerous.
Is there a way, do you ever try to communicate to people what it is you're dealing with on the street?
I've often thought we often talk about police officers in terms of the danger that they're in, but I think the worst thing we ask of police officers is they deal with the worst people among us.
And I think that's got to take a toll.
Am I right about that?
Is that a fair assessment?
Yeah, I mean, you know, you have a job where you're often called to meet with people on the worst day of their life.
I mean, they may have been a victim of a serious crime.
And in terms of the people you deal with on a regular basis, there's this, I think I wrote about this in the book.
There's this 90-10 rule where 90% of people are decent in the ways that count and 10% are just rotten.
As a cop, you deal with that 10% 90% of the time.
And that can sort of skew your worldview if you're not careful.
Because again, the folks you interact with on a daily basis, they're kind of the minority, but you get the sense that everyone's like that.
Everyone's dealing drugs.
Everyone is robbing people.
So that's why it helps to, when you're off duty, to sort of try to recalibrate yourself.
Because again, most people are decent in the ways that count.
And it's healthy as a cop when you're off duty to find those people and spend some time with them.
How do you do that?
I mean, because I know a lot of cops who have a problem with this.
I don't see the only thing I can compare it to in my life at all is covering crime when I was a reporter.
And there were days when you came back and it just thought everybody stank.
What do you do to keep your brain intact so you can actually relate to ordinary people?
Yeah, you know, I try to eat halfway decent, exercise, take care of myself.
I married well above my station.
So, you know, it's nice to be able to come home to a woman I love.
We have two daughters and that helps me sort of recharge for the next day.
And then again, just try to, you know, when I'm off, try to spend time among sort of healthy, well-adjusted people.
Nice to Meet You00:02:00
I think that's the trick.
Yeah.
It really is.
Obviously, it's a fascinating profession or it wouldn't be the subject of every other television show and most movies.
It's kind of, I used to, working in Hollywood, I used to laugh at the fact that people who have never done anything for anybody make $250,000 a week pretending to be a cop.
Doing those things, don't make anything like that.
So have you got a new book and will it have the same, I'm sorry, I've forgotten the name of your hero, Kurt Argento.
His name's Kurt Argento.
Yeah.
Is he coming back?
So he is.
He'll be back in another book in early 2025.
He gets into some more trouble because he finds it hard to relax.
So he's a character I'm quite fond of.
So I was pleased his punch to bring him back.
Well, Adam, first of all, it's great to meet you.
We've exchanged emails many times over the years, and it's really nice to meet you in person.
The book is really well written.
The character is really well conceived.
Doing violence is not easy.
It's really hard to make it both real and gripping.
And it really does all that.
And your timing is great.
So I wish you the best with it.
I think it's going to be a really good series.
And I hope they make it into a film.
I hope they make it into a TV show and you're not involved with that process.
Yeah, I know you've been down that road.
So that carries some weight, those words.
Yeah, you want to go out of your house with a fake mustache and possibly a hat pulled down over your ears until the whole thing about it.
So the book is The Ascent.
The author is Adam Plantinga, P-A-L-A-N-T-I-N-G-A.
Good luck with it, Adam.
And I really appreciate you coming on.
It's really nice to meet you.
Thank you so much.
Good book.
Really is.
The Ascent.
Maybe it'll be a TV show, but you should read it before that happens.