Life & Wisdom Quote by Joseph Wambaugh

Wambaugh delivers his complaint with the dry credibility of someone who has worked both sides of the courtroom’s food chain. The line isn’t a grand ideological attack on “justice”; it’s a veteran’s weary shrug that lands because it smuggles in a résumé: cop, then repeat defendant. That pivot is the point. He’s not just criticizing the system from the safety of the press box; he’s admitting he’s been in the ring, taken hits, and thrown a few back.

“I took some licks at the system” reads like locker-room language, a casual metaphor that frames institutions as something physical and bruising rather than abstract and noble. It also signals a particular Wambaugh move: anti-reverence. Trials and lawyers are not presented as guardians of truth but as a machinery you survive. The phrase “in general” widens the target, suggesting his satire (or skepticism) isn’t about one bad attorney or one crooked case; it’s about professional habits, incentives, and performance.

The tell is “defendant in defamation cases.” That’s the writer’s occupational hazard sneaking into the cop’s worldview: facts don’t simply win; narratives do, and narratives get litigated. Wambaugh’s subtext is that law is less a moral compass than a procedural battlefield where reputation, liability, and technique matter as much as what happened. Coming from a crime writer whose work feeds on institutional friction, the intent feels less like bitterness than an insistence on earned cynicism: he’s seen enough to know the system doesn’t need villains to become punishing.