Street Stories: The World of Police Detectives
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Book Overview
Detectives work the streets - an arena of action, vice, lust, greed, aggression, and violence - to gather shards of information about who did what to whom. They also work the cumbersome machinery of the justice system - semi-military police hierarchies with their endless jockeying for prestige, procedure-driven district attorney offices, and backlogged courts - transforming hardwon street knowledge into public narratives of responsibility for crime. Street Stories, based on years of fieldwork with the New York City Police Department and the District Attorney of New York, examines the moral ambiguities of the detectives' world as they shuttle between the streets and a bureaucratic behemoth. In piecing together street stories to solve intriguing puzzles of agency and motive, detectives crisscross the checkerboard of urban life. Their interactions in social strata high and low foster cosmopolitan habits of mind and easy conversational skills.
Format:Hardcover
Language:English
ISBN:0674017099
ISBN13:9780674017092
Release Date:April 2005
Publisher:Harvard University Press
Length:429 Pages
Weight:1.45 lbs.
Dimensions:1.4" x 5.9" x 8.6"
Customer Reviews
1 rating
The Forest and The Trees
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 19 years ago
This is an impressive book. By and large I've found books about police are written in a positive but unintellectual style. The authors retell the stories as told by the officers but don't add much in the telling. Jackall essentializes the stories in a style that in itself would make him a good storyteller but goes a step farther. He weaves these stories into a historical background of the police departments and the culture in which the detectives exist. As a result, Jackall smoothly shifts between well told close-ups of particular characters, and fascinating wide angle views of the history and organizational culture the subjects function within.
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