Show Notes
Today’s guest is Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He spent two years as a police officer in Baltimore. I asked him to come on and talk about his new book, Back from the Brink, Inside the NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop. It’s one of my favorite books I’ve read this year (and it was one of my three book recommendations on Ezra Klein’s show last week). Peter spoke with hundreds of police officers and NYC officials to understand and describe exactly how the city’s leaders in the early 1990s managed to drive down crime so successfully. We discussed: * How bad did things get in the 1970s? * Why did processing an arrest take so long? * What did Bill Bratton and other key leaders do differently? * How did police get rid of the squeegee men? I’ve included my reading list at the bottom of this piece. Thanks to Harry Fletcher-Wood for his judicious transcript edits. Subscribe for one new interview a week.
For a printable transcript of this interview, click here: Peter, how would you describe yourself? I would say I'm a criminologist: my background is sociology, but I am not in the sociology department. I'm not so big on theory, and sociology has a lot of theory. I was a grad student at Harvard in sociology and worked as a police officer [in Baltimore] and that became my dissertation and first book, Cop in the Hood. I’ve somewhat banked my career on those 20 months in the police department. Not a lot of sociologists spend a couple of years working a police beat. It's generally frowned upon, both for methodological reasons and issues of bias. But there is also an ideological opposition in a lot of academia to policing. It's seen as going to the dark side and something to be condemned, not understood. Sociologists said crime can't go down unless we fix society first. It’s caused by poverty, racism, unemployment, and social and economic factors — they’re called the root causes. But they don't seem to have a great impact on crime, as important as they are. When I'm in grad school, murders dropped 30-40% in New York City. At the same time, Mayor Giuliani is slashing social spending, and poverty is increasing. The whole academic field is just wrong. I thought it an interesting field to get into. We're going to talk about your new book, which is called Back from the Brink, Inside the NYPD and New York City's Extraordinary 1990s Crime Drop. I had a blast reading it. Tell me about the process of writing it. A lot of this is oral history, basically. But supposedly people don’t like buying books that are called oral histories. It is told entirely from the perspective of police officers who were on the job at the time. I would not pretend I talked to everyone, because there were 30,000+ cops around, but I spoke to many cops and to all the major players involved in the 1990s crime drop in New York City. I was born in the ‘90s, and I had no idea about a crazy statistic you cite: 25% of the entire national crime decline was attributable to New York City's crime decline. In one year, yeah. One of the things people say to diminish the role of policing is that the crime drop happened everywhere — and it did end up happening almost everywhere. But I think that is partly because what happened in New York City was a lot of hard work, but it wasn't that complicated. It was very easy to propagate, and people came to New York to find out what was going on. You could see results, literally in a matter of months. It happened first in New York City. Really, it happened first in the subways and that's interesting, because if crime goes down in the subways [which, at the time, fell under the separate New York City Transit Police] and not in the rest of the city, you say, “What is going on in the subways that is unique?” It was the exact same strategies and leadership that later transformed the NYPD [New York Police Department]. Set the scene: What was the state of crime and disorder in New York in the ‘70s a
More from Statecraft
My guest today is Will Howell, the inaugural dean of the School of Government & Policy at Johns Hopkins, which welcomes its first class in fall 2028. His argument is that the standard policy masters degree is no longer fit for purpose. I happen to agree. Two disclaimers: I took Will’s class as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, and I’m a Journalist-in-Residence at his school now. Thanks to Harry Fletcher-Wood and Shadrach Strehle for their support in producing this episode.
A while back, Edward Luttwak explained to us how to stage a coup. Julian Waller focuses on the next step: how authoritarian regimes are built and maintained. We discuss: * Authoritarian regimes as the historical norm * Why military juntas don’t last and party states do * Autocracies: Iran, North Korea, and the Papacy * How the Kremlin has reacted to the Wagner mutiny * What a “pacted transition” looks like in Venezuela * Why the US shouldn’t worry about authoritarianism
Today, my guest is writer, thinker, and friend Dan Wang. He was on Statecraft a year ago, but this time, we're talking about a scholar who has shaped both of our thinking: the late great James C. Scott, author of (among many other classics) Seeing Like a State. We discuss: * How Scott’s fieldwork helped him understand peasant life and state capacity * How mountains impede state power, in Southeast Asia and the USA * How peasants and civil servants resist authority * The advantages of tubers over rice * Dan’s guiding principles for a career in an era of large language models For the full transcript of this conversation, go to www.statecraft.pub.
Today we have a special repeat guest, Scott Kupor, Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). The OPM is the people function in the federal government — the department that sets the rules for the various HR departments in other agencies. Director Kupor was on Statecraft six months ago, and is now a little more seasoned in the federal government. We discuss: * How veterans’ preference works in federal hiring * Who gets fired first when an agency conducts a Reduction In Force (RIF) * Proposed changes to prioritize performance during RIFs * Kupor’s progress in recruiting early career and tech talent to government The full transcript for this conversation is at www.statecraft.pub
On today’s episode, we’re continuing a conversation about presidential power that we broached a couple of weeks ago on Statecraft in an essay called, “What Trump Can Learn From Nixon.” It was about the attempts, in Richard Nixon‘s one and a half presidential terms, to build what observers called the “administrative presidency” — the presidency that actually fully controlled the administrative state. My guests today have thought very deeply about presidential attempts to control the administrative state. William Howell and Terry Moe are co-authors of a book called, Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency. They’re both political scientists. Terry is a professor of political science at Stanford, and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Will is the Dean of the School of Government and Policy at Johns Hopkins University. We discuss: * Why most federal employees in the 1800s were mailmen, and what changed * How presidents have tried to control the administrative state * Whether Republicans have used presidential power to rein in agencies they object to * Whether the Supreme Court has been a firewall against Trump For the full transcript of this conversation, go to www.statecraft.pub.