Michael Fortner at The Washington Monthly:
Peter Moskos’s Back from the Brink is both oral history and urban epic—a ground-level account of New York’s astonishing, world-historical crime decline, narrated by the cops, commissioners, city officials, and civic leaders who tried, failed, improvised, and, in Moskos’s telling, ultimately helped turn the city from a national cautionary tale into a global public safety success story. A Harvard-educated sociologist, former police officer, and current professor at John Jay College, Moskos stitches together a dense tapestry of personal recollections and hard-earned reflections to advance a simple, stubbornly controversial claim: Policing matters. No one puts the point more plainly than Louis Anemone, one of the NYPD’s highest-ranking officials in the early 1990s: “Police can affect behavior. We really can.”