This book is designed to help law enforcement professionals overcome the internal assaults they experience both personally and organizationally over the course of their careers. These assaults can transform idealistic and committed officers into angry, cynical individuals, leading to significant problems in both their personal and professional lives.

Drugs, bribes, falsifying evidence, unjustified force and kickbacks: there are many opportunities for cops to act like criminals. Jammed Up is the definitive study of the nature and causes of police misconduct. While police departments are notoriously protective of their own—especially personnel and disciplinary information—Michael White and Robert Kane gained unprecedented, complete access to the confidential files of NYPD officers who committed serious offenses, examining the cases of more than 1,500 NYPD officers over a twenty year period that includes a fairly complete cycle of scandal and reform, in the largest, most visible police department in the United States. They explore both the factors that predict officer misconduct, and the police department’s responses to that misconduct, providing a comprehensive framework for understanding the issues. The conclusions they draw are important not just for what they can tell us about the NYPD but for how we are to understand the very nature of police misconduct. ACTUAL MISCONDUCT CASES »» An off-duty officer driving his private vehicle stops at a convenience store on Long Island, after having just worked a 10 hour shift in Brooklyn, to steal a six pack of beer at gun point. Is this police misconduct? »» A police officer is disciplined no less than six times in three years for failing to comply with administrative standards and is finally dismissed from employment for losing his NYPD shield (badge). Is this police misconduct? »» An officer was fired for abusing his sick time, but then further investigation showed that the officer was found not guilty in a criminal trial during which he was accused of using his position as a police officer to protect drug and prostitution enterprises. Which is the example of police misconduct?

Violent crime has been rising sharply in many American cities after two decades of decline. Homicides jumped nearly 17 percent in 2015 in the largest 50 cities, the biggest one-year increase since 1993. The reason is what Heather Mac Donald first identified nationally as the “Ferguson effect”: Since the 2014 police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, officers have been backing off of proactive policing, and criminals are becoming emboldened. This book expands on Mac Donald’s groundbreaking and controversial reporting on the Ferguson effect and the criminal-justice system. It deconstructs the central narrative of the Black Lives Matter movement: that racist cops are the greatest threat to young black males. On the contrary, it is criminals and gangbangers who are responsible for the high black homicide death rate. The War on Cops exposes the truth about officer use of force and explodes the conceit of “mass incarceration.” A rigorous analysis of data shows that crime, not race, drives police actions and prison rates. The growth of proactive policing in the 1990s, along with lengthened sentences for violent crime, saved thousands of minority lives. In fact, Mac Donald argues, no government agency is more dedicated to the proposition that “black lives matter” than today’s data-driven, accountable police department. Mac Donald gives voice to the many residents of high-crime neighborhoods who want proactive policing. She warns that race-based attacks on the criminal-justice system, from the White House on down, are eroding the authority of law and putting lives at risk. This book is a call for a more honest and informed debate about policing, crime, and race.

Police departments across the country have begun to embrace a new approach to law enforcement based on accountability to citizens, better leadership, and collaboration with the communities they serve. Standing in marked contrast to “Ashcroft policing,” these new strategies are exactly what police need both to make the streets of our cities and towns safer, and to prevent terrorism. David Harris, law professor and nationally known expert on police profiling, has spent the last five years visiting police forces across the country, collecting examples of smart, progressive law enforcement. Drawing on successful strategies currently in use in Detroit, Boston, San Diego, and other cities and towns all over the country, all of which have reduced crime without infringing on civil rights, Harris here unveils the concept of “preventive policing,” a term he has coined to meld these strategies into a new vision for good cops. From preventive policing’s founding principles to its real-world applications, Harris shows that the solutions to reducing crime, fighting terror, and preserving civil liberties are within reach—if only the Department of Justice will listen.

In Stoning the Keepers at the Gate, police psychologist Lawrence N.Blum, Ph.D.looks at the role of law enforcement in modern times and argues that, while bad cops need to be rooted out, blanket condemnation of the police threatens the very liberties that make such condemnation possible, as well as the safety of the American public in their homes and lives. Blum argues that the enormous stresses officers experience--from violent physical attack to unrewarded or miusunderstood acts of heroism--require special understanding, an understanding that is often missing from police departments themselves. Blum provides a unique insight into the dynamics, practices, and activities within police agencies that influence police officers' actions, and that often hide the real sources of police behaviors that are thought of as faulty, insensitive, or inappropriate. A passionate call not only for understanding but a reappraisal of whose actions are scrutinized within and outside of police agencies, police accountability, and the nature of policing itself in the twenty-first century. Stoning the Keepers at the Gate is a dynamic and fascinating analysis of the role of law enforcement today.

In recent years, community policing has transformed American law enforcement by promising to build trust between citizens and officers. Today, three-quarters of American police departments claim to embrace the strategy. But decades before the phrase was coined, the New York City Housing Authority Police Department (HAPD) had pioneered community-based crime-fighting strategies. The Last Neighborhood Cops reveals the forgotten history of the residents and cops who forged community policing in the public housing complexes of New York City during the second half of the twentieth century. Through a combination of poignant storytelling and historical analysis, Fritz Umbach draws on buried and confidential police records and voices of retired officers and older residents to help explore the rise and fall of the HAPD's community-based strategy, while questioning its tactical effectiveness. The result is a unique perspective on contemporary debates of community policing and historical developments chronicling the influence of poor and working-class populations on public policy making.