NYPD Confidential – Leonard Levitt

Anyone who’s watched the strangely enjoyable, clichéd bollocks Donny Wahlberg vehicle ‘Bluebloods’ on Sky Atlantic will be aware of the uneasy relationship between Tom Selleck’s implausibly morally inscrutable Police commissioner and a slightly cartoony mayor always eager to drive police matters toward the most PR friendly outcome. Journalist Levitt’s modern-day history of the upper echelons of the NYPD during the mayoral terms of Edward Koch, David Dinkins, Rudy Guiliani and Michael Bloomberg, is a frankly depressing look at way commissioners and their underlings have dealt with issues surrounding police corruption (sometimes their own), mayoral influence – as it is the mayor who selects the commissioner - and the emerging threat of global terrorism.

What emerges is a culture of deliberate misinformation, vanity, patronage, power struggles and empire building that does few of the major figures in the book any credit whatsoever, despite serious crime figures generally coming down from the alarming highs of the early 1990’s. Even this progress, credited in the book to measures such as the Compstat meetings (familiar to anyone who has seen The Wire) and the Broken Windows theory (dealing with the smallest crimes to provide suspects and intelligence for the bigger ones), was the subject of squabbles and petty jealousy when credit was attributed. In many ways the book is an excellent companion piece to Edward Conlon’s ‘Blue Blood’, which was a personal officer’s history of the NYPD from ground level, and which echoes some of the themes seen here, most chillingly the almost omerta-like protection of other officers, by both rank and file and at higher levels, to the detriment of the greater outside good, despite some horrendous and tragic acts being carried out while in uniform. Although there are an extensive and dizzying number of different internal bodies and committees mentioned, which could occasionally prove confusing for a non-native, this is broadly a very interesting character study of a hugely important but flawed organisation.