Policing Mean Streets
How New York detectives keep order.
Robert Jackall, Street Stories: The World of Police Detectives, Harvard University Press
This book is about New York City detectives: what they do, how they think, and the criminals they catch. It was written by a sociologist at Williams College who spent several years working with detectives–long enough to understand every aspect of their work, but not long enough to lose an outsider’s perspective. In this book, Prof. Robert Jackall does two things: He tells detailed stories about the gritty work of solving crimes, and draws larger conclusions about the nature of police work–and he does both very well. Street Stories was written 10 years ago, but it is still a first-rate introduction to a profession that, aside from glamorized movie portrayals, is completely unknown to most of us.
Most of the action is set in the 1980s and 1990s, when New York was about 40 to 45 percent white (it is now down to 36 percent white), but detectives, then as now, had an overwhelmingly non-white clientele. Prof. Jackall notes that in 1990, at the height of the plague of subway robberies, there were 1,002 reported cases of robbery by wolf packs, or groups of young people. In all but two cases, the criminals were described as black or Hispanic, and the other two descriptions were “ambiguous.” Only 10 percent of older subway robbers were white. ...
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