‘Back From the Brink' Review: When Gotham Was Reborn

Wall Street Journal

28-04-2025

The old consensus still reigns throughout much of progressive academia: Police can't do much to deter crime as long as its 'root causes' go unaddressed. Before a city can bring order to its streets and subways, this view holds, it's necessary first to address poverty, inequality and racism.
But is it? Peter Moskos, who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, thinks not. In his ably assembled oral history, 'Back From the Brink,' Mr. Moskos shows how Gotham went, in the space of a few years, from one of the most dangerous big cities in America to one of the safest. That transformation wasn't chiefly the result of underlying structural improvements, Mr. Moskos explains. It came about—as faithful readers of this newspaper's editorial page will know—largely as a consequence of proactive policing.
The book begins in the mid-1970s, when New York was a byword for blight and dysfunction. 'We were not a crime-fighting organization,' laments Louis Anemone, who rose to become one of the New York Police Department's top cops. About the only thing that could derail a cop's career in those years was a misconduct allegation or a contretemps with the police union. Officers learned to keep their heads down and their mouths shut, even as crime rates soared. No one held them accountable for perpetually high levels of crime. By the end of the 1980s, the sediment of failure had been accumulating in New York for decades. Some of the testimonials of human misery recorded by Mr. Moskos make for uneasy reading. 'I saw things . . . that nobody should ever see,' says a Port Authority Bus Terminal manager. Jeff Marshall, a Port Authority cop, recalled a mendicant known, unkindly, as Snakeman. 'He had no legs,' Mr. Marshall explains. 'He would drag himself' around 'and panhandle . . . I think they eventually got him a wheelchair at one time. But somebody stole the wheelchair . . . When I left in '93, he was still slithering along the floor.'
Then, in the final decade of the past century, New York experienced the greatest drop in violent crime the city ever recorded. In 1990, Bill Bratton took over the demoralized Transit Police. The city's subways were dangerous and notoriously unpleasant—'the longest horizontal urinal in New York City,' one officer recalls. Mr. Bratton was fortunate to encounter Jack Maple, a lieutenant who had barely finished high school yet went on to become one of the era's most successful anatomists of modern policing. Maple died in 2001, at 48. He was a complicated man who had a mammoth personality and a penchant for quotable anecdotes. Maple's reminiscences are among the many that make 'Back From the Brink' a delightful read.