An ode to cop creativity how colorful characters with bold ideas made New York City safe

“Back from the Brink,” Peter Moskos’ new book chronicling New York City’s remarkable 1990s crime drop, revives something largely absent from national discourse in recent years: the voice of cops.It packs a powerful — and desperately timely — message for New Yorkers in 2025: Don’t believe the “experts” and academics who tell you police don’t reduce crime.Indeed, as we careen toward June’s mayoral primary, public safety remains Gothamites’ top concern.Yet many candidates still advocate what the 1990s turnaround debunked, as Moskos writes: “the dominant sociological ‘root cause’ concept of crime, dismissive of any positive role of policing.”Moskos critically reminds us social issues like “job creation, income maintenance, medical care, housing, education, drugs, and firearms” did not change majorly in the 1990s — “in fact, poverty increased.” Yet the Big Apple slashed its murder rate by 20% for five consecutive years, beginning in 1994, even while the city’s “jail population began a decades-long decline in 1992.”How? Not through introducing an army of social-service “alternatives” to policing and prosecution, as socialist Zohran Mamdani and a rainbow of other Democratic candidates advocate.

Instead, police leaders were given support “to try new ideas” and a fresh policing philosophy was adopted, “one focused on reducing crime, fear of crime, and disorder.” The book’s genius is in providing a veritable oral history (recounted in cop-ese) of this experimentation and revolution from the inside. It moves chronologically from the chaos of the city’s gritty, violent 1970s and 1980s to the restored order of the early 2000s, the transformation unfolding through interviews with police officers — and a handful of other key players — who witnessed it firsthand.That compelling, on-the-ground format is no surprise coming from Moskos, a sociologist who became a Baltimore Police Department beat cop as research f...