The author has done a nice job of describing the work, findings, and recommendations of a few of the major investigative commissions that have been formed to address large-scale corruption in large U.S. police departments (e.g., New York, Philadelphia). The commissions she most often cites did their work in the 1970s and 80s, so there are real questions about whether the information is useful today. But if you're looking for a primer on some of the larger investigative commissions, this book may be useful to you; if you're looking for anything else, keep looking.



This book is really just a lengthy college term paper. It might be worth a B+ if a college junior had written it, but it was written by a professor (yikes). The book is long on assertions but short on citations/research to back them up (I suspect much of the author's research involved watching cop movies). The Utopian solution proposed by the author probably looks really good to someone sitting on a college campus. But in the real world it's unworkable, if not outright silly. And contrary to the assertions of the back cover reviews, the author offers very little information about the causes of police corrutpion or it's cures. I'll probably avoid reading anything written by Heymann, Moore, or Shearing just based on their horribly inaccurate reviews of this book (I'm guessing they reviewed it without reading it). But, although the book lacks much useful information, the writing itself is actually good - it's clear and organized.



The bottom line: If you're an internal affairs investigator, a police manager, a mayor, a city commissioner, or a member of the public interested in police corruption, there is nothing in this book for you. If you're a college professor or student looking to cite a poorly-researched book about commissions that investigated police corruption in the 1970s, this is your book.