Street Stories
The World of Police Detectives
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- 27,99 €
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- 27,99 €
Publisher Description
Detectives work the streets--an arena of action, vice, lust, greed, aggression, and violence--to gather shards of information about who did what to whom. They also work the cumbersome machinery of the justice system--semi-military police hierarchies with their endless jockeying for prestige, procedure-driven district attorney offices, and backlogged courts--transforming hard-won street knowledge into public narratives of responsibility for crime. Street Stories, based on years of fieldwork with the New York City Police Department and the District Attorney of New York, examines the moral ambiguities of the detectives’ world as they shuttle between the streets and a bureaucratic behemoth.
In piecing together street stories to solve intriguing puzzles of agency and motive, detectives crisscross the checkerboard of urban life. Their interactions in social strata high and low foster cosmopolitan habits of mind and easy conversational skills. And they become incomparable storytellers. This book brims with the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction violence of the underworld and tells about a justice apparatus that splinters knowledge, reduces life-and-death issues to arcane hair-splitting, and makes rationality a bedfellow of absurdity.
Detectives’ stories lay bare their occupational consciousness--the cunning and trickery of their investigative craft, their self-images, moral rules-in-use, and judgments about the players in their world--as well as their personal ambitions, sensibilities, resentments, hopes, and fears. When detectives do make cases, they take satisfaction in removing predators from the streets and helping to ensure public safety. But their stories also illuminate dark corners of a troubled social order.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A more global look at the nature of police investigations would seem to be a logical next step for Williams College sociologist Jackall, whose Wild Cowboys: Urban Marauders and the Forces of Order was a critically acclaimed study of the aggressive law-enforcement campaign against a vicious New York City drug gang. Unfortunately, the broader view Jackall offers here seems to come at the cost of sharp focus. Without a central plot line, the author relates dozens of war stories, interspersed with rather prosaic observations about the realities of police procedure and the judicial system's many compromises with truth-seeking to keep cases moving along. While the insights gleaned from his many years on the inside with both the NYPD and the Manhattan District Attorney's Office are a welcome antidote to the picture presented by TV shows like NYPD Blue and Law & Order, they offer little that's new for knowledgeable readers. More seriously, some questionable, unsupported and even offensive declarations ("Every police officer who seeks sexual solace with a Latina and then breaks it off can expect a civilian complaint to be filed, on principle") undermine the book. Readers seeking an understanding of police work would be better served by the works of Ed Conlon or Randy Sutton.
