NYPD

Just the Facts: a sprawling, often dramatic account of the New York Police Department that explores the relationship of criminality, corruption, and law enforcement to the developing metropolis.

Lardner (Fast Forward, 1987) and Repetto (a former Chicago detective and longtime president of NYC’s Citizens Crime Commission) take an alluringly long view in considering this alternately romanticized and vilified institution. They begin with a muscular evocation of the developing 19th-century underworld that recalls Luc Sante’s Low Life (1992) in portraying how the depredations of early gangs and the oft-violent strife of immigrant life necessitated the professionalization of the archaic, quasi-voluntary system of “roundsmen” and “constables” that had survived from the colonial era. The rapidly solidfying NYPD was forced to adapt such “modern” measures as uniform investigation and firearms codes, usually in response to large-scale provocations like the Draft Riots of 1863. Ironically, the growth of “professional” policing was always accompanied by entrenched systems of patronage and corruption; the NYPD was Tammany-controlled well into the 1900s. Much of the narrative here demonstrates this unique urban drama: the approximate 20-year cycle in which such corruptions of law enforcement are publicly rooted out, usually in the context of greater political clear-cutting, evidenced by such grisly dramas as the 1970 revelations of Frank Serpico. But this is a colorful rather than a dry civic history: the authors have a fine feel for the textures and minutiae of police drama, conveying the relevance to the NYPD’s development of such long-gone cops as Thomas Byrnes (the 19th-century pioneer of the detective squad), Joseph Petrosino (murdered in Italy while investigating the pre-WWII Mafia), and Sam Battle (the first African-American cop, who responded to his travails with almost unsettling dignity). The authors also successfully evoke the glories and terrors of city life (particularly the eruptions of chaos that periodically raged in Gotham between the 1960s and the 1990s) and the grim emphasis on maximum policing that has followed—leading to notoriously increased friction between the NYPD and the city’s dense minority communities.

A most well-written and evenhanded book on a large and slippery subject, one that officers and civilians alike should find informative and thought-provoking.