Two Badges: The Lives of Mona Ruiz

Never forgetting the words of her father, who said that police are Christ's soldiers on the rough city streets, Mona Ruiz spent her youth with gangs, married an abusive husband, then went from collecting welfare to preserving the welfare of others as a police officer in her hometown of Santa Ana. Ruiz tells her story with the objective eye of a detective who sees both the issues of necessity in joining a gang and the gang system's fatal vision of drugs and war. Informative and inspiring, Ruiz is one who made it out of the gangs, but never abandoned the streets.