Amazon.com Review
Jack Maple was a former NYPD transit cop who found himself appointed deputy commissioner in 1993. Upon assuming his new office, the erstwhile Don Quixote of urban crime led a charge to reform the way cops go about their everyday business--namely, busting the bad guys. Amazingly, Maple succeeded, and New York's crime rate--previously spiraling out of control--took a 39 percent tumble within two years of his ascension to policymaker, with murders alone falling an astounding 50 percent.
The Crime Fighter is the story of a regular beat cop with big ideas, and Maple's fast-paced, two-fisted tone helps punctuate an often madcap assortment of recollections. Maple's an unusual character to say the least, a somewhat rotund dandy who sports a bow tie and derby in public and nurtures a reputation as a gourmand. He takes the lion's share of credit for NYC's reduction in crime, but almost in an offhand, good-sportish way, rather than incessantly beating his own drum. He'd rather tell tales about the time he chewed out the chief ("I'll be damned if I'm going to start looking over my shoulder because of a guy down here wearing Ricky Nelson suits") or the time he played up his hemorrhoid problems to goad a prisoner into making a confession. Once he gets past his active days on the beat, Maple settles down into a steady rhythm, systematically laying out the obstacles he faced in trying to get his department to fight crime in an orderly, sensible manner, and then explaining the process whereby he went right ahead and did it. (The COMSTAT system he devised for storing and tracking crime information is now standard operating procedure in many police departments across the country.) The Crime Fighter never gets bogged down in its own grandeur--on the contrary, parts of Maple's look back read like good Elmore Leonard-type crime fiction, and several passages are so beautifully absurd that it takes a supreme effort of will to remember that, yes, a cop really wrote that. --Tjames Madison
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
With a mixture of autodidactic erudition and street smarts, Maple reflects on what he learned about effective policing in a career that started on the lowest rung of New York City law enforcement, as a transit cop patrolling underground subway tunnels. Maple worked his way up to deputy commissioner of the NYPD under Commissioner William Bratton in the early 1990s, and became a well-known fixture in the city. In 1993, Maple writes, he mortgaged his house and blew the money on $400 suits, fancy hats and bottles of Dom Perignon, which he drank over ice at the trendy restaurant Elaine's while formulating the four basic principles of policing that would guide the city's successful assault on crime (in two years, murder rates dropped by 50%). Maple favors military analogies, dropping names like Rommel and Sun Tzu as influences, but behind his swagger is an obsessive dedication and attention to detail. He offers a paddy wagon-full of examples from his career in New York, and later as a police consultant in New Orleans and other cities, of how police departments need to track data and of how cops often work against each other unnecessarily. Maple is at his most compelling when he illustrates his theories with war stories that recount the careers of notorious criminals, like a hit-man nicknamed "Freddy Krueger," and the real-life police work that nailed them. With Mitchell's help, Maple writes with almost as much mischievous style as he dressed when he wore his homburg and spats to Elaine's. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
