James Lardner is a senior fellow
at Demos was a police officer for the Metropolitan Police Department (Washington, DC) for two and half years during the early
1970s. Today, he is a well-regard researcher and writer. As a journalist, he
has written for the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and The Nation, among other publications.
He is the author of Crusader: The Hell-Raising
Police Career of Detective David Durk; and, the co-author of NYPD: A City and Its Police and the editor of Inequality Matters: The Growing Economic Divide in America and Its Poisonous Consequences.
According to the book description
of Crusader: The Hell-Raising Police Career
of Detective David Durk, “When David Durk joined the New York City Police Department in 1963, he found an organization
with its own set of rules, where bribery and payoffs were routine and no one wanted to be disturbed. Durk set out to fix the
whole mess. For 22 years, until he was forced to retire at age 51, he was a thorn in the side of mayors, police commissioners,
commanders, sergeants, and beat cops alike. His crusading led to an investigation into police corruption in the 1970s by the
Knapp Commission (credit for which usually goes to Frank Serpico) and more recently, the Mollen Commission.”
Publisher’s Weekly said
of NYPD: A City and Its Police, “A
comprehensive and elegant history of the New York Police Department, this book, written by a journalist (Lardner) and a former
cop (Reppetto), charts the department's development, from its origins as a collection of unorganized watchmen in the 1820s
to its recent past. In crisp, anecdote-rich prose, Lardner (a New Yorker contributor) and Reppetto (now president of New York's
Citizens Crime Commission) take readers on a chronological tour through the years when the department reluctantly adopted
firearms and uniforms and when police applicants depended on patronage, through wave after wave of anti-corruption ferment,
and through years of controversy. Drawing on sources ranging from the memoir of George Washington Walling, a 19th-century
officer who saw action during most of the era's flashpoints (including the 1849 Opera House Riot and the 1863 Draft Riots),
to newspaper accounts and legislative committee reports, Lardner and Reppetto assess the potential for good and bad in the
city and on its police force. Along the way, they recount colorful stories about early gangs like the Dead Rabbits and Five
Pointers; they examine the conflict between the Metropolitan Police and the Municipals, an early rogue offshoot; and they
address the department's pendulum-like swings between corruption and reform (which, they note, gets activated every 20 years
by a major scandal). They also depict the Giuliani administration's 1990s' "Rediscovery of Crime" and recent controversies.”
According to the book description
of, Inequality Matters: The Growing Economic
Divide in America and Its Poisonous Consequences, “Since the 1970s, the U.S. economy has been sending more and
more of its rewards to fewer and fewer people. Once seen as a global exemplar of egalitarianism and middle-class opportunity,
America has become the most unequal of developed nations—a land where corporate leaders earn hundreds of times the pay
of average workers, and the only population group growing faster than millionaires is the uninsured. Statistics aside, this
quarter-century-long trend has changed the texture of American life in ways that threaten our deepest values. Drawing on the
best and latest research, the contributors explore issues such as the real story the numbers tell about how America has changed;
dimensions of inequality (education, health, and opportunity); causes of inequality—looking past the usual suspects
of technology, trade, and immigration; the persistence of racial disparities; the erosion of democracy and community; and
inequality as a moral and religious problem. Not just a catalog of inequality's ills, the book concludes with a plausible
and hopeful policy path—beyond redistribution—to a more just and humane economy”
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