Back from the Brink

Back from the Brink shows how police work in New York made an extraordinary difference: not by mass arrest or the so-called zero-tolerance policies that fill holding cells, but by deploying police to the right places, arresting the right offenders, and then debriefing every witness, informant, and accomplice to learn and act on all that can be known. This is not to say that the economic transformation of a city doesn’t matter or that police can’t be sullied by ‘stop-and-frisk’ lock-them-all-up excess, but Moskos, in a careful oral history of an extraordinary crime drop, makes clear how policing, when used to actually address and solve crimes, can be transformational. A worthy read. * David Simon, writer and producer of The Wire and We Own This City, and author of Homicide and The Corner *If there is any good news on crime, we are taught that the last people who had anything to do with it were the cops. In Back from the Brink, cops talk at length about the work they’ve done and the challenges they have faced. Peter Moskos has created a keystone work that gives us a window on reality. * John McWhorter, Professor of Linguistics at Columbia University, host of the podcast Lexicon Valley, and weekly writer for The New York Times *Peter Moskos does it again! This time telling the multi-decade drama of the Big Apple’s crime nosedive in the 1990s. The question of why crime went down has vexed me for much of my working life, and Peter Moskos helps answer the question. I am pleased and relieved Back from the Brink breaks away from a conventional textbook approach and borrows from the style of Pulitzer Prize winning oral historian Studs Terkel. Moskos lets the major players in the NYPD speak for themselves with voices that are distinctive, gritty, sometimes confessional, and ultimately persuasive. * Clarence Page, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist and member of the Chicago Tribune editorial board *Back from the Brink is a unique and compelling history of New York City, told by people whose individual voices and experiences are frequently flattened and marginalized in service of grand theories of the criminal justice system. Written by Peter Moskos, a brilliantly trained sociologist and a former cop who has a profound grasp of debates over policing and its consequences, the book gives voice and agency to the individuals that actually tackled crime and gives their strategies an honest depiction and a fair hearing. With a clear-eyed understanding about corruption and racism in policing, Back from the Brink provides a better sense of the people-their background and motivations-attempting to make New York City a safer place. * Michael Fortner, Professor of Government, Claremont McKenna College *If you want to understand the historic crime drops and transformative evolution of New York City that began in the 1990s, a great place to start and end would be Back from the Brink. An informative and entertaining narrative that keeps you absorbed with personal stories of many of the men and women of the iconic and fabled NYPD. There has been no shortage of books that have attempted to tell this story, including three of my own, but from my perspective this is one of the best. I learned so much about the department and people I’ve known for years. Read it and you will be very glad you did. * Bill Bratton, Retired New York City Police Department Commissioner and Los Angeles Police Department Chief *A delightful read…Back From the Brink demolishes the assumption that cops can’t play a role in reducing crime. Judging by the state of America’s big cities in the 2020s, the book’s lessons might be usefully relearned. * The Wall Street Journal *

Peter Moskos is a Professor in the Department of Law, Police Science, and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. He is also the Director of John Jay College’s NYPD Executive Master’s Leadership Program and a former Baltimore City Police Officer. His previous books include Cop in the Hood, In Defense of Flogging, and Greek Americans.