If anybody but a cop had written this book, few would believe the stories it contains — at least few white people. “The Black and the Blue” has enough accounts of police atrocities to launch a thousand Black Lives Matter marches.

There are the familiar cases of Michael Brown and Laquan McDonald, young black men gunned down and then treated, in death, more like criminals than the white cops who killed them. Matthew Horace’s analysis is well researched and cogently presented, even if his ideas are not particularly new or creative. His thesis is that the problems of policing minority communities are systemic: Cops do not have adequate training for predictable situations they encounter, such as dealing with addicts and the mentally ill; they are given the impossible task of addressing problems that stem from structural race and class inequalities; and the sociology of policing encourages a warrior “us against them” mentality.

What’s different about “The Black and the Blue” is that it’s a cop on the force for 28 years making the case for change — an African-American cop.

Horace uses his insider status to get a number of police officers to tell tales out of school, including out of the police academy. One, Tony April, was a rookie Alaska state trooper whom white officers tried to get kicked off the force, simply because he was black. April went on to become Trooper of the Year.

It’s these new stories that are most horrifying because Horace presents them as everyday police work. Brian Mallory, a New York police detective, was questioned by a Latino kid whom he ordered off a street corner. As Mallory tells it himself, “I get out of the car with my night stick and club him until he drops.” This happened in 1983, and Mallory seems almost nostalgic when he observes that an officer would not get away with this today.

“The Black and the Blue,” co-written by Ron Harris, a Howard University journalism professor, does an exemplary job of indicting the system, but sometimes what people want is the indictment of an individual officer. After more than 200 pages, the reader is not told whether Horace thinks Officer Darren Wilson did anything wrong when he shot Brown in Ferguson, Mo. His critique of Jason Van Dyke, the Chicago police officer who shot McDonald 16 times, is less muted.

Still, it’s not police conduct that inspires the level of emotion that Horace calls his “personal reckoning.” Rather, it’s the tragic execution-style shooting of four teenagers in a suburb of Newark, N.J., as part of a gang initiation. Horace trots out the tired canard that “if black lives matter, all of them must matter,” not only the ones who are victims of police violence. This is the same false dichotomy espoused by the likes of Rudy Giuliani and President Donald Trump. No one in the movement for black lives excuses any taking of life. Indeed the movement’s platform proclaims the need for a holistic response to the broad spectrum of violence that black people face.

Still, between the black and the blue, Horace seems mainly to side with the black, because like most African-American men, he has had his own set of experiences with the cops, including having a police dog sicced on him and, while working undercover, having a white cop put a gun to his head.

Throughout the book, African-American officers are presented as people at the tragic center of a swirling vortex. In reality, the intersection of black and blue is more nuanced and more fraught.

“The Black and the Blue” is an important contribution to a growing body of work about minority police officers. Horace’s authority as an experienced officer, as well as his obvious integrity and courage, provide the book with a gravitas that might convince some readers apt to turn a blind eye to the activists and scholars who are the primary critics of racialized policing. All these voices are needed to hasten the day when neither the police officer’s spouse nor the African-American parent has to issue the warning: “Be safe out there.”

Paul Butler, a Georgetown University law professor, is the author of “Chokehold: Policing Black Men.”