June 10, 2024
Riding One More Wave:
A Blue Legacy of Honor and Duty
Bradley Carpenter
Aviva Publishing (2024)
ISBN: 978-1636183183
New Novel Features Police Officer Fighting Drugs in 1980s California
Riding One More Wave: A Blue Legacy of Honor and Duty by Bradley Carpenter is a look back at an honorable police officer who went above and beyond to keep the streets of Oakland, California safe in the 1980s.
The novel opens with a Prologue by the author who discusses how his good friend, Officer Bobby Jackson, lost his battle with melanoma. When he died, Carpenter took his friend’s diaries and turned them into the following novel about his experiences as a police officer in Oakland, California.
The reader quickly realizes that Officer Bobby Jackson truly cares about the people he is on the streets to protect. The police do not always have the best reputation these days, but reading this novel made me really appreciate the work they do, how they put themselves in danger every day, and how officers like Jackson think outside the box to make at least their section of the world better.
The novel takes place in the early 1980s when drugs were becoming a major concern in California. Officer Jackson and his fellow policemen have their hands full trying to fight crime in the area. The drug dealers go to extremes to protect their territory. I could not believe the horrendous things they did, including burning to death a woman who had informed on them—which her children witness—or throwing people out of apartment windows to their death. The situation was so bad that even the ambulances would not go into East Oakland because the paramedics would be easy targets.
Officer Jackson spends a lot of time just trying to chase down the dealers who are selling cocaine on the street corners. As soon as they see him, the dealers scurry off like cockroaches, only to reappear on another corner, earning them the name “cokeroaches.” The residents not involved in drugs are frustrated that the police don’t do more to protect the streets. As one mother, who fears for her daughter’s life after her children find a drug user’s needle they use to play doctor, says to Jackson, “Why can’t you do anything?”
Carpenter sums up Jackson’s response this way:
“Jackson was out of answers. He couldn’t help the residents on his beat and felt ashamed. He knew the department was receiving fewer calls and using that statistic to claim ‘crime was down over the past two years.’ Police administration and city leaders thought the cops on the street were winning the war. What they refused to see was the residents of East Oakland were refusing to call the police from fear of retaliation or their belief the department was too inept to catch criminals.”
His eyes opened, Jackson decides to take matters into his own hands. He doesn’t do this by going off on some vigilante crusade. Instead, he starts playing basketball on the weekend in the park. First he asks some of the drug dealers if he can play in exchange for buying them lunch if his team loses. Before long, he has gained trust in the neighborhood. When he recruits some of the Black police officers to play with him, the children in the neighborhood begin to see positive role models of their own color. Rather than wondering if they will even live long enough to grow up to be anything, the children start to ask how they can also become police officers.
But Riding One More Wave is not just a fuzzy, warm feeling kind of story. Jackson’s best friend, Officer James Gaines, gets shot in the face and dies. One result of this tragic event is that the officers start wearing shirts with a verse from the biblical book of James on them when they play basketball. The shirts attract the attention of a local minister who then helps Jackson to create a type of neighborhood watch to help the police catch the drug dealers. The Black ministers complain that no one has listened to them in the past, but in Jackson, they find someone they can trust.
Many other stories of tragedies and tender moments fill the novel. It isn’t a feel-good book, but it does have feel-good moments. It also really helps you to understand how difficult it is to be a police officer, and I’m sure it’s as or more difficult today as it was forty years ago. The novel’s title refers to how Jackson used surfing as a way to relieve his stress. He even recruits several of his fellow officers to ride the waves with him, instructing them on how the ocean has healing abilities.
However, even surfing can’t remove all the stress and horror Jackson has seen, and at times, despite his best efforts, he’s done things that he wasn’t proud of in the line of duty. In the Prologue, he tells Carpenter in regard to the ocean, “I need the openness here to see the beauty in nature and ask for, or maybe even demand, answers I can’t get about why humanity is so dang evil to one another and how God allows some of this…. I have tried hard to walk the right path; I have never struck a suspect after the fight is over. I’ve never planted guns or dope. I’ve never accepted bribes. I have never lied in court. But I have walked in the shadows of probable cause, and I have killed men in both Mexico and California—can God forgive me for that? Does God give an exception to the sixth commandment, ‘Thou shall not kill’?”
Carpenter later tells Jackson, “Yes, we live in a fallen world and evil does exist, but men like you were placed on earth to deliver us from evil.” Delivering the world from evil seems like a monumental task to take on, but I admired how Jackson tried and also held it together during the day. At night he might experience nightmares and night sweats, but during the day, he is a hero, trying to protect people. Nor is he without mercy and sympathy. One of the most moving moments in the novel is when he convinces a criminal’s mother to help him. He prays with her for her son and shows compassion for the conflict she feels in deciding to help the police catch him.
If you’re a fan of crime and police shows like Hill Street Blues or Chicago P.D., or you simply want to contemplate the evil in this world and be convinced that there is still good in it, you will enjoy Riding One More Wave. It gave me a new appreciation for what the police face each day, and it makes me grateful that there are people like Officer Jackson in this world.
For more information about Bradley Carpenter and Riding One More Wave, visit www.RidingOneMoreWave.com.
— Tyler R. Tichelaar, PhD and award-winning author of Narrow Lives and When Teddy Came to Town
