Back from the Brink: Inside the NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop

Summary

From the 1970s to the early 1990s, New York City was seen, justifiably, as out of control. The city approached bankruptcy, the subways were covered with graffiti, and murders were at a record high. Right-wing fearmongering and vigilante justice were countered by liberal pleas to end poverty and provide drug treatment—neither of which happened. Then, in a surprising break from the past, new NYPD leadership decided to focus on crime. Between 1993 and 1996, the city’s murder numbers were cut in half, dropping to under 1,000 per year for the first time in decades. Eventually New York City would have fewer than 300 murders, fewer than Chicago, with one-third the population. Fewer than Baltimore, even, with one-fifteenth the population.

In Back from the Brink, Peter Moskos takes readers behind the Blue Wall, telling the story of the “New York City Miracle” from the men and women who were on the job. Moskos, a sociologist and former police officer, weaves together this rich narrative with extensive research and conversations with police officers, civic leaders, academics, and reporters. Delving deep into the behind-the-scenes workings of the NYPD, Moskos shows how leadership changed the rank-and-file’s dealings with crime, quality-of-life issues, criminals, and the public. The city’s police, political, and civic leaders provided a unified front that allowed cops to “do their job,” and, in doing so, New York became the safest big city in America.

Back from the Brink is an unofficial NYPD history that spans three decades of crime and crime fighting in the Big Apple. With crime, especially gun violence, a perennial problem in America, Moskos offers insight into effective law enforcement directly from the police officers who went to war against crime in New York in the 1990s and won.

“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. A worthy read.”—David Simon, writer and producer of The Wire and We Own This City, and author of Homicide and The Corner