The Choirboys

Blurb

The Choirboys, a novel, is a controversial 1975 work of fiction written by Los Angeles Police Department officer-turned-novelist Joseph Wambaugh. In 1995 the novel was selected by the Mystery Writers of America as Number 93 of The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time.
The Choirboys is a tragicomic parody about the effects of urban police work on young officers, seen through the exploits of a group of Los Angeles police officers in the Wilshire Division of the Los Angeles Police Department.
A group of ten patrol officers on the nightwatch conducts end-of-shift get-togethers they euphemistically call "choir practices". These "choir practices" almost always involve heavy drinking, complaints about their superior officers, and war stories. They hold the choir practices in MacArthur Park because it is in another division's territory and "one does not shit in one's own nest."
Each of the officers is disillusioned, to varying degrees, that many of the people they're paid to protect are not unlike the suspects they arrest, and that the ridiculous regulations of their department are onerously enforced on them while their commanders indulge themselves hypocritically.