NEW YORK'S FINEST

Behind-the-scenes looks at key figures in the New York Police Department from the 1970s to the present.

Daly, a Daily Beast correspondent who also wrote for New York Daily News and New York Magazine, looks at the past four decades of New York’s police force through two principals. First is officer Steven McDonald, who was paralyzed from the neck down in a 1986 shooting, a moment that underscored the city’s beleaguered reputation. McDonald publicly forgave his shooter, a gesture that went some way to easing tensions between police and citizens. But perhaps more directly influential was Jack Maple, a transit officer whose rejection of the police’s bureaucracy and cliquishness led to the creation of stats-driven, proactive policing that was key to the drop in crime in the city into the 21st century. At least that’s how Daly frames it. Though he’s alert to moments when the NYPD disgraced itself (the Central Park Five, Amadou Diallo, stop and frisk), his approach is to suggest that those shortcomings were problems that a straight-talking technocrat like Maple could responsibly, if not completely, address. (Daly’s laser focus on the NYPD precludes him from exploring other economic and sociological forces.) The main problem, Daly writes, wasn’t within NYPD headquarters but at City Hall, especially during the rule of Rudolph Giuliani, who was buffoonish when he wasn’t meddling, installing inept cronies in key roles and unwinding successful efforts. He was, notes the author, “a stridently divisive figure whose rantings about zero tolerance had made him an intolerant zero. He took religious exception to a painting of the Virgin Mary in the Brooklyn Museum he had never seen and announced the formation of a ‘decency task force.’ ” Heaving various law enforcement sins onto Giuliani allows the main narrative to become occasionally hagiographic toward police, sometimes literally: When McDonald died in 2017, Daly reported on efforts to make him a candidate for sainthood.

Thorough, personality-driven reportage on policing, albeit tilted toward the police’s perspective.