Street Stories: The World of Police Detectives

by Robert Jackall

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 hard-won 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. And they become incomparable storytellers. This book brims with the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction violence of the underworld and tells about a justice apparatus that splinters knowledge, reduces life-and-death issues to arcane hair-splitting, and makes rationality a bedfellow of absurdity.

Detectives’ stories lay bare their occupational consciousness—the cunning and trickery of their investigative craft, their self-images, moral rules-in-use, and judgments about the players in their world—as well as their personal ambitions, sensibilities, resentments, hopes, and fears. When detectives do make cases, they take satisfaction in removing predators from the streets and helping to ensure public safety. But their stories also illuminate dark corners of a troubled social order.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology, Crime

448 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 2005

About the author

Robert Jackall has done several years of fieldwork with New York City police detectives and prosecutors, among whom he is known as “The Professor.” He is Class of 1956 Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Williams College.

Reviews

[Scooter Chick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been an armchair detective for more years than I’d like to admit. Being puzzled by criminals and their rationale for the crimes they commit must run in the family; my brother was a homicide detective for several years in a large city. Why am I saying all this? Because Robert Jackall is an excellent sociologist and an excellent writer. I didn’t know what to expect with this book. The cover artwork is pretty basic; it occurred to me, more than once as this sat on my bookshelf, that it might be nothing more than the usual Law & Order/CSU tv serial kind of stuff. It is so much better than that. Jackall is a great raconteur. His style is simple and straightforward, and the stories are endlessly fascinating. Initially I thought the stories might be “dated”, that perhaps times have changed since, but his observations about crime on the streets are just as pertinent now as they were then. He grasps and masters the intricacies of what motivates a detective and the challenges they face both on the street and from the NYPD and the city with compassion, understanding and wry perception.

[Tbone · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really good book. It was a little more intellectual than most of the cop books I have read as it was written by a doctor, I beleive a Psychologist who worked side by side with detectives for years. Good book though. REal legit cop stories.