NYPD: A City and Its Police [Hardcover]

Thomas Reppetto (Author), James Lardner (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0805055789 | ISBN-13: 978-0805055788 | Publication Date: August 23, 2000 | Edition: 1st

An insider takes us behind the blue wall of America's biggest, baddest police force

Founded in 1845, the NYPD is the biggest municipal police force in the world, the oldest in the land, and the model on which the others-for better or worse-have patterned themselves. The authors-two seasoned experts of police operations-unearth the hidden truths behind the headline-making stories and explain how cops privately interpret incidents such as the shooting of Amadou Diallo and the Louima torture case. Episodes long forgotten-the campaign against German saboteurs in WWI, or the career of Joe Petrosino, the first Italian American in the ranks, who was gunned down in the streets of Palermo, Sicily-reveal an organization constantly fraught with turmoil, where an outward display of law and order belies the inner conflicts between politicos, bureaucrats, and the men and women on the beat.

Beyond the inner life of a remarkable institution are the characters and stories, including baffling mysteries, horrific crimes, inspiring heroics, and dreadful scandals. NYPD illuminates the old maxim of the vet to the rookie on his first night on patrol: "Forget everything you learned in the academy, kid."Timely and sure to be controversial, NYPD will be essential reading for anyone interested in law enforcement in America.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A comprehensive and elegant history of the New York Police Department, this book, written by a journalist (Lardner) and a former cop (Reppetto), charts the department's development, from its origins as a collection of unorganized watchmen in the 1820s to its recent past. In crisp, anecdote-rich prose, Lardner (a New Yorker contributor) and Reppetto (now president of New York's Citizens Crime Commission) take readers on a chronological tourDthrough the years when the department reluctantly adopted firearms and uniforms and when police applicants depended on patronage, through wave after wave of anti-corruption ferment, and through years of controversy. Drawing on sources ranging from the memoir of George Washington Walling, a 19th-century officer who saw action during most of the era's flashpoints (including the 1849 Opera House Riot and the 1863 Draft Riots), to newspaper accounts and legislative committee reports, Lardner and Reppetto assess the potential for good and bad in the city and on its police force. Along the way, they recount colorful stories about early gangs like the Dead Rabbits and Five Pointers; they examine the conflict between the Metropolitan Police and the Municipals, an early rogue offshoot; and they address the department's pendulum-like swings between corruption and reform (which, they note, gets activated every 20 years by a major scandal). They also depict the Giuliani administration's 1990s' "Rediscovery of Crime" and recent controversies like the deaths of Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond, both unarmed black men gunned to death by police officers. Arguing that the cop's lot has barely changed since the 1800s, the two authors assessDin a fair-minded wayDthe enduring relationship between a police force and their city. Their account is at once entertaining, historical and engaged with hard questions about the nature and politics of police workDa true accomplishment. 30 b&w illus. Author tour. (Aug.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Given the seemingly endless number of books about the NYPD, police brutality, and corruption, one might think it difficult to find a refreshingly new and in-depth approach to the nation's oldest police force. But this history accomplishes such a feat. Lardner, who has written on the NYPD for The New York Times Magazine, and Repetto, president of New York's Citizens Crime Commission, examine the long history of New York's police from the 1820s, before the city organized them into a formal department, until the near present. In 1820, there were no housing projects, violent gangs, gun-toting drug dealers, or media scrutiny. As time passed, the department mirrored the waves of immigrants that moved to the city, beginning with the Irish in the 1840s, the Italians and Jews in the 1890s, African Americans from the Southern states after World War I, and, most recently, the Puerto Ricans. People who criticize some of the NYPD's controversial actions today might be equally shocked by past actions, which included the common practice of accepting graft, brutality against criminals (with media support), bribery, riots, and competing city police forces, manipulated by politicians. Both entertaining and insightful, this excellent book is highly recommended for all libraries.
Tim Delaney, Canisius Coll., Buffalo
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.; 1st edition (August 23, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805055789
• ISBN-13: 978-0805055788
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,045,291 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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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

By 

Tim Crouse "timcrouse" (New York City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: NYPD: A City and Its Police (Hardcover)

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.

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 

Frederick S. Goethel "wildcatcreekbooks" (Central Valley, CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: NYPD: A City and Its Police (Hardcover)

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.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Needed Inspiration, October 22, 2003

By 

Rocco Dormarunno (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Nypd: A City and Its Police (Hardcover)

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