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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Terrific Read, October 26, 2000
Cops are cops the world over, but New York's complex and turbulent development has given a unique shape to the force that the city created one hundred and fifty-five years ago to control its own manifold aggressions. It is the feat of James Lardner and Thomas Reppetto to have surveyed the multitude of trends and personalities operating inside this much-examined yet oddly cloistered institution, and to have synthesized them into a constantly engaging narrative. Here we find innovators such as Thomas Byrnes, the Gashouse kid and Civil War veteran who, as a precinct captain, virtually invented modern American detective methods; reformers like Teddy Roosevelt, who tramped the streets at night in search of derelict patrolmen; forgotten heroes like Joe Petrosino, assassinated on a Mission Impossible in Sicily; rogues like Inspector Alexander "Clubber" Williams, who, when queried about a personal fortune that included a Connecticut estate and a steam-powered yacht, claimed to have made a lucky killing in Japanese real estate (this being 1894); and sundry exemplars of the rank and file, with their special talents (spotting from his gait alone a man wearing a gun), their folk wisdom (to stay alert, keep the windows of the squad car open in any weather), and their lore and lingo (dido means a reprimand; Goatsville is an outlying, graftless precinct). Into the mix has also gone a high incidence of uninspiring commissioners, a chronic strain of corruption that gets rediscovered and prosecuted roughly every two decades, and a long record of racism (in 1916 there were just fifteen blacks on the force; Chicago, then half the size of New York, had one hundred and thirty-one blacks in its department). A huge amount of fascinating history has been skillfully packed into a few more than three hundred fast-flowing pages.
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15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
You REALLY Can't Judge a Book by It's Cover, August 10, 2001
By reading the title and information on the dust jacket, I believed this was a history of the New York Police Dept. And, to an extent, it was. If you can believe that prehaps 3 dozen men founded, organized, operated and developed the policies of the Department over the last 155 years, and that they were crooked, inept, stupid,and brutal, then you will find this to be a good read. What I found was the stories of about 3 dozen men who had the qualities I mentioned above and whose exploits were detailed at length. And, no matter how these people behaved, the authors had to find something wrong with it. In fact, in several places they seem to contradict themselves as to what should have been the appropriate handling of a situation. And, there really never is any thesis to the book or follow up as to what the authors believed happened. It seems more to be a detailing of fact; little beyond that. This would be a good book if it were titled, "NYPD: A History of Graft, Corruption and Stupidity" and it was used as a text book for a class at John Jay College in that subject area, but it is a book that is far from a representative of the history of the men in blue in New York. In addition to those faults, I found the book difficult to read. One moment they are following a chronilogical sequence, then they are following a different line. It made it tough to keep track of the people detailed. If you want a good book about the New York Police Department history, find it elsewhere. If you are a historian and wish to add one small peice of the story to your collection then maybe this book would be a good buy.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Needed Inspiration, October 22, 2003
I bought this book in a shop in the mall of the World Trade Center; four days later 23 NYPD officers died in and around the those towers. As I prepared to read this book, I grumbled, "There better be no cop-bashing in here." And at the first sign of negative criticism of the force, I put the book down and didn't start again until two years later. I'm glad I did: I might not have given it a fair reading or review back in 2001. Having said that, Reppetto and Lardner have put together a decent history of the NYPD. And yet, I finished the book with an empty kind of feeling. Considering that Reppetto is a retired NYPD cop, I thought I'd get something deeper, more probing than this. For anyone familiar with New York history or the NYPD, there's nothing really new here. A lot of known ground is rehashed: the Police Riot of 1857, Teddy Roosevelt's reforms, the attempts to fight Organized Crime, and the lurid corruption scandals that seemed to recur with every new generation of cops. The cast of characters can be found in any book on the seamy side of New York City history: Alexander "Clubber" Williams, Detective Byrne, Lt. Becker, Serpico, etc. What I'm saying is that I had expected a book that would explain how the department evolved and detail its daily processes and procedures, and not a collection of anecdotes accumulated over 150 years of department history. What is redeeming is the authors' willingness to admit to these episodes of graft and other crimes. Still, the point is clear that no matter how many corruption scandals have surfaced over the years, the ratio of honest cops compared to the dishonest ones is so disproportionate in favor of honest cops. There are several sections that describe some of the lesser known heroes and heroics of individual police officers. These were enjoyable and, sometimes, inspiring. But nothing could be more inspiring than the sacrifices those 23 police officers made on September 11, 2001. Rocco Dormarunno,
author of The Five Points
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