History of police brutality is a good read with valuable lessons

If you liked Martin Scorsese's film "Gangs of New York," or Herbert Asbury's 1928 book of the same name that inspired it, then you'll treasure "Street Justice," a masterfully crafted chronicle by a Boston College historian, Marilynn S. Johnson. This authoritative and well-documented volume provides rich, yet not always glowing, texture on the political reigns of such luminaries as former New York City mayors Robert F. Wagner Jr., Fiorello La Guardia, John V. Lindsay, and Rudolph W. Giuliani and their control over the New York Police Department.

Established in 1845 to protect the wealthy from the emerging poor, the NYPD was born into a tradition of favoritism, patronage, corruption, incompetence, and brutality. For the next 150 years, from the violent struggles of European immigrants in the 19th century to the tumultuous days following the tumbling of the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001, the clash between police authority and accountability has remained a constant.

When reading about the not-so-finest moments of New York's finest, be prepared to remove the rose-colored glasses. These are disturbing facts, not fluff fiction -- a far cry from television's Barney Miller and his benevolence or the compassion of Andy Sipowicz on "NYPD Blue." Replete with beatings and shootings, "muss-ups" and "shakedowns," graft and corruption, this book might easily have been called "NYPD Black and Blue."

The politicians of early Tammany Hall turned a blind eye to the injustice of police clubbings and curbside justice, so long as the enforcers "oversaw" the voting process. In the decades to follow, the police maintained a major role in responding to the perceived threats of racial integration, immigration, organized crime, bootlegging, vice, communism, organized labor, antiwar and antidraft demonstrations, drug markets and youth gangs, and terrorists, and, no less important, in advancing the political agenda of the day.

It is a troubling history that reveals how Americans, and New Yorkers in particular, have often granted the police a strong mandate to control emerging threats, overlooking, if not encouraging, extralegal uses of force. The beating of Abner Louima and the shooting of Amadou Diallo, episodes that tarnished the NYPD shield in the late 1990s, are the most recent and visible signs of a long tradition of violence against marginal or dissident groups.

The men and women in blue are invested with tremendous power -- a fact not fully appreciated by many Americans. Daily, they make decisions, often split-second ones, that carry life and death consequences. Curiously, while we debate endlessly the propriety of capital punishment and the process for selecting those to be condemned, comparatively little attention is given to the larger matter of police use of deadly force. Yet the number of felons "executed" without trial by police officers, some of whom may be just months out of the academy, far surpasses the volume of formal executions performed under state authority. Over the past quarter-century, for example, almost 10,000 felons have been killed nationally by the police during the commission of a crime or during flight -- an average of about 400 per year, many times more than the dozens who are punished by death annually.

Johnson is commended for her thorough archival research and attention to detail, as well as for her ability to shape academic writing into a lively and readable form. The pages are sprinkled with fascinating episodes and anecdotes, uncovering the "story behind the story" for such police practices as "the third degree" and "sweatboxes."

As a social scientist, my sole disappointment with Johnson's effort concerns the absence of a final summarizing chapter. There are so many parallels in how the police, politicians, and the public responded to the "mugging scare," the "red scare," the "crack epidemic," and other real or perceived menaces. While the author often notes in passing certain similarities across time, a concluding chapter analyzing these themes would have been welcomed. As an alternative, readers may benefit from digesting the overview introduction last.

This work is much more than a history of the NYPD and police brutality. It is a social history of urban America through the perspective of law enforcement, civil rights, and unrest. For all of us who may have dreaded 10th-grade history class, this is an opportunity to relearn lessons of the past through a unique approach.

As we are frequently reminded, the study of history can prepare us for confronting the future in an informed and effective manner. In the years ahead, New York City will face many difficult challenges while hosting the Republican National Convention in August and possibly the 2012 Olympics, amid the constant threat of international and domestic terrorism. Between the thin blue lines of "Street Justice" may be found a virtual manual for effective defense against these and other perils to our security and safety. It should be required reading in the police academy, if not more broadly.

James Alan Fox is the Lipman Family Professor of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University.