The Last Neighborhood Cops by Gr Umbach - Book Report/Review Example

Name Tutor Course Date The Last Neighborhood Cops: the Rise and fall of Community Policing in New York Public Housing Bibliographical Information Umbach Holcomb Gregory. The Last Neighborhood Cops: the Rise and fall of Community Policing in New York Public Housing. Critical Issues in Crime and Society. Rutgers University Press, 2011. The book has 233 pages. Background Information Gregory Umbach serves as the assistant professor of history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York. As the assistant professor of history, Umbach studied and got a PhD in the history of America from Cornell University. At the same university, he received the award known as “John M. and Emily B. Clark Distinguished Teaching Award.” He won the award because of his outstanding teaching to undergraduate students in the university’s College of Arts and Science. Not long ago, he won the third-largest teaching and learning grant issued by the National Endowment. This he won alongside Patricia Licklider and Elizabeth Glitter both in English. Gregory Umbach was given the award for "Making Objects Speak: Portable Audio Guides for Teaching with Visual Culture in the Humanities". Apart from this, he has made publications in scholarly and popular journals on a wide range of topics in the history of America and that of the world. On this list is police brutality, consumer culture and Chinatown all of New York. Among his famous publications is the book on which this review is based “The Last Neighborhood Cops: The Rise and Fall of Community Police in New York's Public Housing’ published in 2011 by Rutgers University Press. A part from this, he is the director of many scholarly archives among the “Gathered in Time: Utah Quilts and Their Makers: Settlement to 1950; Ground One: Voices from Post-911 Chinatown; and the September 11 Digital Archive” which were consented to by the Library of Congress as their first important digital acquirements. He has also became the historical consultant and he features in a Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade documentary by New Yorker films that came with the production of the film Adanggaman produced in North America by Ivory Coast’s Roger Gnoan M’Bala as the film director. Professor Umbach received his BA from Northwestern University, his MA from Cornell University and a PhD from the same university. The author has written on the 20th Century history of the United States, at the state and local levels, history of the Middle Atlantic (DC, DE, MD, NJ, NY and PA), and Law enforcement, Political Science, Social Science and Sociology. Classification on the Basis of Book Type This book is non fiction and its subject area is History. It is basically written on the history of America. It carries the details of community policing although not known by this name at the time, by the residents and the police at the New York City Housing Authority Police Department (HAPD) and their efforts to fight crime. Classification on the Basis of the Intention of the Author The intention of the author in writing this book was to address the issue of community policing by drawing lessons from the rise and fall of New York City Housing Authority Police Department HAPD. He targets specialists in the area of community policing, fighting crime and provision of security in residential areas. He limits his survey to the activities of HAPD and paints a picture of what today’s society can learn from that initiative. Subject and Thesis Statement This book is about the rise and collapse of community policing in the New York City Public Housing and the activities of the Housing Authority Police Department in New York City. The author talks of how this strategy was birthed and how it died at the merger of the Housing Authority Police Department with NYC police. According to Umbach, the HAPD strategy was not tactically effective enough to last and achieve the objectives for which it was developed. He goes on to discuss several reasons as to why the strategy could not succeed (Umbach, 78). Structural Analysis The book starts with the introduction. In the introduction, the author discusses the genesis of community policing, the history of civil rights and activism against crime, the collapse of community policing in New York Public Housing and the way of urban liberalism. He also discusses the History of Urban Law enforcement in America and community policing. He also addresses urban policing within the era of reforms and the oral histories. In Chapter 1, the author discusses policing, public housing and the politics of New York City between 1934 and 1960. He goes on to discuss the Kefauver hearings and the beginning of a new police force, how the scandal and police transformed the Housing Police and the battle over Fort Greene (Umbach, 34). In chapter 2, the author generally discusses the paradox in law enforcement. Under this, he talks about the involvement of residents and officers in the development of community policing in NYCHA between 1960 and 1980, the vertical patrols in NYCHA, issues of race and residency in HAPD, the HAPD structure and NYCHA community policing, community order and fines and the influence of the community on policing, strikes over rent and political leverage (Umbach, 47). Chapter three is dedicated on the Confluence of Crises. The author begins this chapter by discussing how community policing was undermined in the 1970s, the politics of police unions and the precinct experiment, community policing and the informal economy and the interaction between model cities and the politics of police unions. He goes on to discuss the community policing against supervisors and tenants, police supervision and community policing, the re-discovery of the precinct model and the rights revolution in NYCHA. In chapter 4 the author discusses the end of community policing which took place between 1980 and 1995. He also discuses the day to day changes in people’s lives in NYCHA and welfare housing. This includes the changing requirements in eligibility, the Brooke amendment and the politics of homelessness in NYCHA (Umbach, 117). He goes ahead to talk about the consequences thereof, the whitening of HAPD and affirmative action, how community policing ended, the increase in crime and the response of NYCHA and residents to crime. In the response he talks about the 1970 solutions, the evictions in the 1980s and then the conclusion. In the last chapter (Chapter 5), the author talks about the return to origins and the merger between 1990 and 1995. He explains how the housing police was lost, saved and finally lost again. He discusses the attempts made in order to restore community policing, how the HAPD officers handled the new community policing and the merge (Umbach 180). Summary of Content In the recent past American law enforcement has been transformed by community policing which promises to establish trust between officers and citizens. Currently, 75 percent of American police agree that they are applying this strategy in their work. However, a number of decades prior to the coining of this phrase the New York City Housing Authority Police Department (HAPD) had already introduced strategies for fighting crime based on the community (Umbach, 14). This is a great book that provides details about the history of the NYC Authority housing police and how they related with the HAPD public housing development tenants. The book is a bout the history of cops and residents who started community policing in the New York City’s public housing complexes. This happened in the last half of the 20th century. The authors, Gregory Holcomb Umbach and Fritz Umbach analyse historical accounts and combines this with poignant story telling to explore the dig into the issues surrounding the rise and fall of the HAPD strategy. The author digs out long forgotten police records and the words of older residents and police officers to paint a picture of the rise and fall of this strategy whereby he also questions its effectiveness in terms of tact. He brings to the reader contemporary debates on community policing and develops in history listing the influence of the working class and poor people on policy making in the public sphere. Umbach talks about the beginning of the police since they began as special patrolmen accredited to the projects to the point of their dissolution at the merger with NYC Police that happened in 1995 (Umbach, 47). The police began as neighborhood cops most of them from their community of service. They were known to their tenants at a personal level. They took their main assignment to be the enforcement of Authority regulations to increase the residents’ quality of life. They worked in cooperation with tenants and managers to get solutions to problem before they could escalate. The police brought errant youths to their parents instead of arresting them (Umbach, 78). They fostered a relationship that maintained good behavior and enforced norms within the community. This was community policing although at the time it had not been given such a name. Umbach provides a number of reasons for this. First, the decisions by the court brought in by OEO lawyers restricted the Authority’s right of enforcing standards and maintaining firm residential requirements for eligibility. This was a disruption of the social cohesion in the HAPD public housing developments, something that surprised the tenants (Umbach, 66). The second point the author gives is that the economic conditions made most of the residents to begin home businesses in which they worked together with unauthorized residents. This made them shy away from the Housing police because they were afraid these police would report them. Another reason was the desire by police to have promotional opportunities that resulted in pressure for precinct type of policing. Finally, the author cites the replacement of police walking beats with patrols in cars because of the loss of manpower which caused a reduction in contact with tenants (Umbach, 160). In addition, there was the issue of demographic changes resulting from the arrival in masses of welfare families and homeless people which increased the social pathologies that they came with. Furthermore, the deployment of new housing police from a consistent police list ushered in many officers who lacked an understanding of the projects (Umbach, 170). Several other conditions caused this situation. Critical Comments By and large, the author achieved his intended purpose for the book. The book makes a great contribution to the field of history especially the history of America. The author does not adopt a biased approach of the subject matter (Lyons, 25). He is objective in his discussion. The author found the views of police officers and residents useful in strengthening the discussion. However, Umbach appears to be misleading the reader because he presents some inaccurate information. The author mentions PSA’s as Public Safety Areas. Instead they were Police Service Areas. Professor Umbach also says that Uniform Crime Reports or UCR may have given the projects a worse image than their real image because the actual population was between 20 and 30 percent higher than the officially recognized number. This resulted from the doubled up resident effect. This is accurate but the purpose of the UCR reports was for the comparison of jurisdictions. A UCR index for small developments such as those of between 100 and 200 residents was not useful at all because it had the potential of multiplying index crimes for every 1000 people in the population. Again the author does not seem to know that all the crimes taking place on the side walks near the projects were under the jurisdiction of HAPD, but for purposes of UCR, they were removed from the UCR reports. A homicide, a robbery or the rest of the crimes happening on the sidewalks did mot feature in the official UCR report. The HAPD and NYCPD made this as a compromise between themselves. These, coupled with other types of pressures resulted in the merger with NYC (Lyons, 33). Nevertheless, this book is very important because through it, the author will preserve the story of HAPD and NYC who followed their motto “second to none” to the later. The book is very comprehensive and it hits the target. It describes the major problems of public housing in the city of New York. He clearly describes and defines the ghost population which appears to be a significant source of drugs and drug related crime in the residential areas. This has a negative effect on life because it makes it hard for those people who are law abiding as described in the Federal law (Jones-Brown, 2013). From the research done by the author, he makes his points elaborately and defines these legal and social issues. Indeed it is an excellent and realistic view of New York City’s public housing. For real, I have enjoyed reading the book and I do recommend it to other readers. Works Cited Bowden John. Writing a Report: How to Prepare, Write and Present Effective Reports. How to Books, 2004. Jones-Brown Delores. Return to Community Policing. New York Times, 2013. Retrieved on November 9 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/08/22/how-the-next-mayor-should-deal-with-crime-in-new-york/return-to-community-policing Lyons William. The Politics of Community Policing: Rearranging the Power to Punish. University of Michigan Press, 2002. Palmiotto Michael. Community Policing: A policing Strategy for the 21st Century. Jones and Bartlett Learning. Umbach Gregory & Fritz Umbach. The Last Neighborhood Cops: The Rise and Fall of Community Policing in New York Public Housing. Rutgers University Press, 2011. Read More