Behind-the-scenes looks at key figures in the New York Police Department from the 1970s to the present.
Daly, a Daily Beast correspondent who also wrote for New York Daily News and New York Magazine, looks at the past four decades of New York’s police force through two principals. First is officer Steven McDonald, who was paralyzed from the neck down in a 1986 shooting, a moment that underscored the city’s beleaguered reputation. McDonald publicly forgave his shooter, a gesture that went some way to easing tensions between police and citizens. But perhaps more directly influential was Jack Maple, a transit officer whose rejection of the police’s bureaucracy and cliquishness led to the creation of stats-driven, proactive policing that was key to the drop in crime in the city into the 21st century. At least that’s how Daly frames it. Though he’s alert to moments when the NYPD disgraced itself (the Central Park Five, Amadou Diallo, stop and frisk), his approach is to suggest that those shortcomings were problems that a straight-talking technocrat like Maple could responsibly, if not completely, address. (Daly’s laser focus on the NYPD precludes him from exploring other economic and sociological forces.)
