NEW YORK MURDER MYSTERY: The True Story Behind the Crime Crash of the 1990s.

• Author: Mencimer, Stephanie
• Position: Review

NEW YORK MURDER MYSTERY: The True Story Behind the Crime Crash of the 1990s by Andrew Karmen New York University Press, $27.95

DURING THE MID-1990s, I OFTEN found myself spending Saturday nights driving around in a patrol car in sketchy areas of Washington, D.C., taking in the sights with my boyfriend, a D.C. cop. Most of what I saw was a D.C. police department in a shambles. The city was in the midst of a crushing financial crisis, and it had failed to invest in the police department's infrastructure for years.

By 1995, scout cars were dropping wheels, brakes, and mufflers left and fight, and the department couldn't afford to fix them. Station parking' lots were littered with dead and disabled patrol cars, and officers showing up for work often would find that they had nothing to drive. They were using their own money to gas up their cruisers. Neighborhood groups held bake sales to raise money to buy toilet paper, radio batteries, and other critical supplies for local district station houses.

My friend's 4th District station was furnished like a 1950's schoolhouse, full of old desks, wooden chairs, and not much else. Officers used rotary phones--voice mail was unheard of, as were computers. When the station did get a few 486s, most officers didn't know what to do with them. They didn't have e-mail, and there was no central network for filing reports. All the crime reports were done by hand, on paper, and later sent to headquarters for processing.

The D.C. cops' crime fighting tactics weren't much more sophisticated. Officers would pace from one crime scene to another in response to radio calls, doing very little in the way of proactive policing. I was amazed they ever caught any criminals--and most of them didn't. Ten percent of the officers made 90 percent of the department's arrests.

In the midst of all the chaos, after work my cop friend and his buddies would sit around a pitcher of beer at the Fraternal Order of Police clubhouse and talk shop. Their conversations frequently turned to the other police departments around the country that they considered real police departments. Number one on their list was the NYPD.

To D.C. cops, the New York Police Department was the shit. It had Compstat, the state-of-the-art technology system that connected all the various districts to headquarters and allowed precinct commanders to call up maps showing the latest crime trends on their beats, helping them shut down trouble spots before they got out of hand. New York also had William Bratton...