As only they could, the Police used it as a penal posting. Worst amongst the residents of Handstead were the Tree Top Mafia, a gang of violent thugs who terrorised their neighbourhood, the town and surrounding districts. They, and the officers doomed to serve at Handstead wrestled constantly for dominance. True stoics, the police officers resolved to make a difference in a town they called Horses Arse. Each group recognised something of themselves in the other. Not quite mutual respect, but something. This is the story of some of those Police officers; The Brothers, Psycho, Bovril, Pizza and others, a group of hooligans in uniform and their journey through manic excess, despair and finally some form of salvation. Police officers like these used to exist but their like have passed on. Only accounts like this one serve to remind us that once upon a time, police officers just got on with policing.

    It details Randy Jurgensen's determined effort to bring to justice the murderer of Patrolman Phillip Cardillo, who was shot and killed inside Harlem's Mosque #7 in 1972, in the midst of an allout assault on the NYPD from the Black Liberation Army. The New York of this era was a place not unlike the Wild West, in which cops and criminals shot it out on a daily basis.Despite the mayhem on the streets and the Machiavellian corridors of Mayor Lindsay's City Hall, Detective Jurgensen singlehandedly took on the Black Liberation Army, the Nation of Islam, NYPD brass, and City Hall, capturing Cardillo's killer, Lewis 17X Dupree. He broke the case with an unlikely accomplice, Foster 2X Thomas, a member of the Nation of Islam who became Jurgensen's witness. The relationship they formed during the time before trial gave each of the two men a greater perspective of the two sides in the street war and changed them forever. In the end, Jurgensen had to settle for a conviction on other charges, and Dupree served a number of years. The murder case is still officially unsolved. In 2006 the NYPD reopened the case, and it is once again an active investigation with full media attention.The book has received acclaim from current New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, as well as former Commissioner William Bratton.

    

    But, as The Progressive’s Anne-Marie Cusac observed, “Abu Ghraib shock[s] us because our soldiers abroad seem to have acted out behaviors that we condone, yet don’t face up to, at home.” On the heels of Our Enemies in Blue, Kristian Williams’ controversial chronicle of policing, the writer/activist gives us American Methods, once again upsetting the notion that the use of “excessive force” by the state is aberrant rather than altogether American.American Methods reveals torture not as a recent or rogue phenomenon, but a veteran tool of the American state. As Williams suggests, torture is not, as claimed, a means of interrogation used only by others, elsewhere. Instead, it is a tried-and-true weapon of social control and terror, right here in the US.Unlike other recent books, American Methods locates “war on terror” scandals in the systems of inequities and dominance that nurture them. Williams pays close attention to the distinct character of American torture and its gender and racial contours—particularly its emphasis on sexual violence, emasculation, and spectacle. His discussion ranges over much of the globe and a quarter-century: from US support of torture-regimes in Central America in the 1980s to today’s more favored approach—outsourcing torture to “friendly governments.” Returning to our shores, Williams observes the banality of violence in American prisons, precincts, and society. Ultimately, he offers devastating conclusions about the centrality of rape, racism, and conquest to both the state and our national culture.Kristian Williams' writings have appeared in CounterPunch, Columbia Journalism Review, and We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anti-Capitalism. A member of Rose City Copwatch in Portland, Oregon, Williams also authored Our Enemies in Blue (2004).