It was one of these rarely beautiful days. The sunrays were falling slanting through the sheer curtain, brightening the office on police station’s first floor. As always, it was quiet. In any case, the agenda for the day was including simple everyday cases.
Detective John Carnes had arrived at the office at his favorite habit long before anyone else. His nights were short, his days long. "Who was your contact? How did you manage to get such a transfer?" Jim Riley, general chief of police in the previous precinct, had asked him wryly fifteen months ago. At Bronx, New York, things were completely different. His daily activity report included murders, suicides, drugs, contract killings and so forth. In contrast, here in Burlington things were quiet. Others would yearn for it, would beg for a job like this in a sleepy little city, but he was feeling his adrenalin boiling inside him, he was considering his transfer unfavorable, a real block to his career.
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He let it ring twice, and then picked it up. He listened carefully to young cadet, Anthony Garner, talking to him about a girl who insisted to meet him. She was waiting at the public’s reception area on the ground floor.
"Send her over, Garner," he said with deep and resonant voice.
While he was waiting for her to come, he opened his gray tweed jacket and pulled out his nine millimeter chrome plated gun from his – hung from the strap – inner pouch. He removed the bullets from the magazine, put the gun on the desk and stayed still for a while looking at it. It was glistening in the morning light. Soon after, he placed it along with the bullets in the first drawer, took off his well-pressed jacket, hung it on the back of his chair and sat down. He repeat-ed some ritual actions almost every single morning. He finally crossed his hands on the desk and waited for her to come.
The girl knocked twice on the door.
"Come in," Carnes
Bratton, W., & Knobler, P. (1998). Turnaround: How America’s Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic. New York: Random House Press.
Newjack is Ted Conover’s personal memoir as a correctional officer in one of New York’s famous maximum security prisons: Sing Sing. The job of a correctional officer consists of long days locking and unlocking cells, moving prisoners to and from various locations while the prisoners beg, aggravate and abuse them. After a short time at the academy and a brief period of on-the-job training, Conover found himself working, often alone and always unarmed, in galleries housing sixty or more inmates. He heard of many stories that happen in prison. Stories include inmates beating inmates and burning their cell house, an inmate who was beaten by correctional officers after striking an officer in the head with a broom handle. Surprisingly, there are even some instances where there are voluntary sexual encounters between female staff and inmates. It is really a welcoming job for the “newjacks” and for the readers. On top of that, supervisors do not mentor or guide new officers and officers on one shift push problems off onto the next. Conover sees and realizes that correctional workers are very flexible characters, neither good nor bad, but must cope with stress and problems in a well-organized manner. As Conover points out, that at Sing Sing is against the possibility of staff getting to know prisoners. It is ridiculous to see that there are problems that prison administrators clearly could have solved but do not, instead, they care more about the inmates and officer’s relationship. In particular, enticements for better supervision and more support for effective staff are clearly needed.
Officers were rewarded and reprimanded appropriately for the amount of arrests that were made. When Officers successfully prevented or deterred crime it didn’t show on paper. This tied in with officer morale in a big way. The book illustrates that when departments put out arrest quotas for the east side arrests fell, usually to the minimum. Mosko is often very critical of upper police managements distance and ignorance to the actual problems out there.
Into the Kill Zone: A Cop’s Eye View of Deadly Force, by David Klinger, explores the effects that shooting a deadly weapon will have on law enforcement officers. The author interviews over eighty men and women from a number of police agencies spread across four states. He conducts these interviews to note the pre and post mental conceptions police officers have after shooting a gun in the line of duty. Klinger shares his interviewees’ stories in the novel to show readers how pulling the trigger of a gun can cause a variety of issues both within and outside of a police officer’s life.
Dowd becomes a patrol cop in Brooklyn’s 75th Precinct, in East New York in 1983, and within a year, he formed a crew of cops that began robbing drug dealers. In 1986 known on the streets as ‘’Mike the Cop”, he began charging drug dealers as much as $8,000 for protection. And also, He began to participate in kidnapping of drug dealers and sold stolen drugs on Long Island. In 1988, NYPD Internal Affairs Sgt. Joe Trimbole began to investigate officer Dowd, but he didn’t receive enough support from the New York Police Department to prosecute him
... we need change your eyes…” After absconding from his own department, Chief Anderton decided to make his way to future a prediction laboratory but that laboratory was now under supervision of an observer that came from justice, Mr. Witwer. This conversation between the chief and doctor reflects the level of commitment and sacrifice that an officer needs to make just to resolve a case. Of course here his own child and wife were also one of the main reason. But nevertheless his dedication towards duty gives another dimension to the story. No matter what your teammates are cooking, your duty remains the top most priority. If not often then Dick’s work falls in to the category of ‘conflict’ and later someone rises beyond the traditions to resolve the same. “The adjustment bureau” and “The Minority Report” are some of the examples of his work reflecting the same thought.
Hallcox, Jarret. Behind the Yellow Tape: On the Road with Some of America’s Hardest Working Crime Scene Investigators. New York: Berkley Books, 2009.
In the early 1990’s the crime rate in New York City was astronomical. Every category including the eight nature index crimes were all on the rise if not extremely high already. Mayor Giuliani a former federal United States prosecutor was elected into office and brought with him a reputation of viciousness against crime. His campaigns lead to the appointment of Commissioner William Joseph Bratton to hold the position of police commissioner of New York City. Giuliani learnt of Bratton’s amazing crime reduction plan that helped reduce crime in two other cities. He requested him for the position as police commissioner for New York City and was appointed in 1990. Bratton had previously helped establish an innovative policing program in Boston Back Bay neighborhood and Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority. Using the same approach he would attempt to reorganize and help the New
Because police investigators are usually under pressure to arrest criminals and safeguard the community, they often make mistakes. Sometimes, detectives become convinced of a suspect 's guilt because of their criminal history or weak speculations. Once they are convinced, they are less likely to consider alternative possibilities. They overlook some important exculpatory evidence, make weak speculations and look only for links that connect a suspect to a crime, especially if the suspect has a previous criminal record. Picking Cotton provides an understanding of some common errors of the police investigation process. During Ronald Cottons interrogation, the detectives did not bother to record the conversation “But I noticed he wasn 't recording the conversation, so I felt that he could be writing anything down”(79) unlike they did for Jennifer. They had already labelled Ronald Cotton as the perpetrator and they told him during the interrogation “Cotton, Jennifer Thompson already identified you. We know it was you”(82). Jenifer Thompson 's testimony along with Ronald Cotton 's past criminal records gave the detectives more reason to believe Ronald committed the crime. Ronald Cotton stated “ This cop Sully, though, he had already decided I was guilty.”(84). Many investigative process have shortcomings and are breached because the officials in charge make
Prior to reading Zimring’s, The City that Became Safe, I had a general understanding of the national crime decline, beginning in the last decade of the 20th century, continuing into the early 21st century. In addition, there were concepts that were brought up consistently throughout my previous JLC classes – Nixon and Regan’s War on Drugs, the Crack-Cocaine Epidemic, Super Predators – that began to appear, at least to me, as simple terms, to explain a complex issue. Individuals would use these concepts as keywords, coupled with the increase in incarceration (i.e., mass incarceration) that served as a deterrent to rising recidivism rates, to explain the crime drop across the nation, without a deeper appreciation and understanding as to the deeper significance of each ‘key term.’ As I will later discuss, these individuals are known as naïve consumers of information. Nonetheless, as I began to delve into the novel, Zimring brought up a topic known as the “New York Difference,” which refers to an unsolved element or technique implemented within New York City that served as a catalyst for the boosted decline in their crime rates, years after the national trend began stabilizing. Nonetheless, I would soon come to realize how – as Zimring mentioned – “little all of us know about criminology,” to the extent of understanding why these index crimes (e.g., homicide, robbery, rape) occurred in great numbers prior to the 1990’s and the techniques that
Even with the increased training and accountability that came with the Peelian model of policing, the next sixty years of policing were dominated by politics. Policing was one large part of the political patronage system, a system where political candidates would reward those citizens who provided support during the election (Roberg et al. 2012). After elections, public officials rewarded individuals by providing them with police jobs. As a result of political pressure, the police were now used as a tool in the political machine’s fight to maintain control (Roberg et al. 2012). The character of police departments would frequently change after every new election.
Tom Ryan’s police abuse story is not as sudden and physically painful as Hobbs’ story, but it deserves just as much attention to prevent it from happening, since both Hobbs and Ryan fear that they are in danger for no particular reason. Ryan describes the town of Newburyport, his hometown, as a city, whose natives are always trying to struggle over the power of politics (Ryan 22). In his memoir Following Atticus, Ryan states, “I would often sit shocked as city councilors or other community leaders lied in some televised meeting and thought nothing of it. When I’d report it, they’d act as though I were the one who had crossed the line – and in some ways they were right, I had. I refused to let business happen as it always had happened” (Ryan 25). When Ryan’s newspaper began to involve the misconducts of police officers, he began to receive death threats on his car’s windshield and in his mailbox. However, Ryan never decided to report these threats because he suspected that the police might have been the ones who wrote them. Ryan continues to explain the long controversial history of Newburyport’s police department and how most politicians feared it. During one night, in front of Newburyport’s city hall, Ryan had a short conversation with a police officer that left him so frightened that he did not to mention the police in his newspaper for the next year and a half. Ryan’s readers wanted to know why, but all he could do was say he did not want trouble from the police (Ryan 37-8). Ryan asserts about one officer in particular, “He said to me, ‘How about we form an uneasy alliance - you and me? I won’t go after you if you don’t go after me.’
At the beginning of the story, the Narrator has been playing Detective in a city of his imagining for years. Unlike the real town he lives in, the Narrator’s city is a sprawling metropolis, where everyone in his real life has a secret role. His parents, for example, “...were well-meaning but unimaginative people, and I was polite to them”, and his brother, Mark, “...was the district attorney, my nemesis” (p. 52). These roles have significance, in
Walker, S., & Katz, C. (2012). Police in America: An Introduction (8th Edition ed.). New York:
In the past eight years as a police officer for the City of South Salt Lake, I have found that personal growth and achievement in my career have been based on certain past experiences. Such experiences have molded what my personality is today. I have found that in order to be triumphant in my personal and professional goals, it has been necessary for me to reflect not only on my strides, but also my mistakes.