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.

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.

“Die Hard in a gated community.”—Chris Hauty, national bestselling author of Deep State and Storm Rising From the critically acclaimed author of Overwatch and other titles in the Logan West Thriller series, comes a can’t-miss, brand-new thriller that proves Matthew Betley is the modern master of the unputdownable page-turner. It was supposed to be just another ordinary night ... What happens when your neighborhood harbors a secret so destructive that dangerous men are willing to kill for it? Welcome to Hidden Refuge, a normal American subdivision full of normal American suburbanites. At least that’s what the citizens thought before men impersonating police officers show up on their doorsteps in the middle of the night. Once the entire community is under siege, so begins a long, dark night that will prove to be anything but ordinary. But Zack Chambers, suburban family man and programmer by trade, has his own secret. One he had dearly hoped that he’d never need to use again. The deadly ex–CIA agent and trained operative plots to take back the night, doing whatever it takes to protect his neighborhood. In the face of a small army of trained killers, he’s got his wits, his babysitter, his equally lethal brother, and a ragtag group of neighbors willing to help. Action-packed and relentless with twists and turns and old scores to be settled, this propulsive and brilliantly plotted can’t-miss thriller brings a shocking end you won’t see coming. Fans of Matthew Betley’s trademark blend of gritty realism and edge-of-your-seat action will be delighted.

“A well-supported critique of therapeutic policing and, by extension, of similar paternalistic efforts to help the poor by hassling them into good behavior.” —Los Angeles Times In his first year working in Los Angeles’s Skid Row, Forrest Stuart was stopped on the street by police fourteen times. Usually for doing little more than standing there. Juliette, a woman he met during that time, has been stopped by police well over one hundred times, arrested upward of sixty times, and has given up more than a year of her life serving week-long jail sentences. Her most common crime? Simply sitting on the sidewalk—an arrestable offense in LA. Why? What purpose did those arrests serve, for society or for Juliette? How did we reach a point where we’ve cut support for our poorest citizens, yet are spending ever more on policing and prisons? That’s the complicated, maddening story that Stuart tells in Down, Out & Under Arrest, a close-up look at the hows and whys of policing poverty in the contemporary United States. What emerges from Stuart’s years of fieldwork—not only with Skid Row residents, but with the police charged with managing them—is a tragedy built on mistakes and misplaced priorities more than on heroes and villains. At a time when distrust between police and the residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods has never been higher, Stuart’s book helps us see where we’ve gone wrong, and what steps we could take to begin to change the lives of our poorest citizens—and ultimately our society itself—for the better.

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.

Dr. Lee P. Brown, one of Americas most significant and respected law enforcement practitioners, has harnessed his thirty years of experiences in police work and authored Policing in the 21st Century: Community Policing. Written for students, members of the police community, academicians, elected officials and members of the public, this work comes from the perspective of an individual who devoted his life to law enforcement. Dr. Brown began his career as a beat patrolmen who through hard work, diligence and continued education became the senior law enforcement official in three of this nations largest cities. The book is about Community Policing, the policing style for America in the Twenty-First Century. It not only describes the concept in great detail, but it also illuminates how it evolved, and how it is being implemented in various communities throughout America. There is no other law enforcement official or academician who is as capable as Dr. Brown of masterfully presenting the concept of Community Policing, which he pioneered. As a philosophy, Community Policing encourages law enforcement officials, and the people they are sworn to serve, to cooperatively address issues such as crime, community growth, and societal development. It calls for mutual respect and understanding between the police and the community. The book is written from the perspective of someone whose peers identify as the father of Community Policing, and who personally implemented it in Police Departments under his command. It is a thoroughly amazing book that has been heralded as a must read for anyone who has an interest in law enforcement. Elected officials, academicians, leaders of the nations police agencies and members of the public will be captivated by Dr. Browns literary contribution.

A narrative-driven exploration of policing and the punishment of disadvantage in Chicago, and a new vision for repairing urban neighborhoods For people of color who live in segregated urban neighborhoods, surviving crime and violence is a generational reality. As violence in cities like New York and Los Angeles has fallen in recent years, in many Chicago communities, it has continued at alarming rates. Meanwhile, residents of these same communities have endured decades of some of the highest rates of arrest, incarceration, and police abuse in the nation. The War on Neighborhoods argues that these trends are connected. Crime in Chicago, as in many other US cities, has been fueled by a broken approach to public safety in disadvantaged neighborhoods. For nearly forty years, public leaders have attempted to create peace through punishment, misinvesting billions of dollars toward the suppression of crime, largely into a small subset of neighborhoods on the city’s West and South Sides. Meanwhile, these neighborhoods have struggled to sustain investments into basic needs such as jobs, housing, education, and mental healthcare. When the main investment in a community is policing and incarceration, rather than human and community development, that amounts to a “war on neighborhoods,” which ultimately furthers poverty and disadvantage. Longtime Chicago scholars Ryan Lugalia-Hollon and Daniel Cooper tell the story of one of those communities, a neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side that is emblematic of many majority-black neighborhoods in US cities. Sharing both rigorous data and powerful stories, the authors explain why punishment will never create peace and why we must rethink the ways that public dollars are invested into making places safe. The War on Neighborhoods makes the case for a revolutionary reformation of our public-safety model that focuses on shoring up neighborhood institutions and addressing the effects of trauma and poverty. The authors call for a profound transformation in how we think about investing in urban communities—away from the perverse misinvestment of policing and incarceration and toward a model that invests in human and community development.