Street Justice traces the stunning history of police brutality cases in New York City (the city with the oldest and most comprehensive records on the issue) and the antibrutality movements that sought to eradicate it, from just after the Civil War through the present. Police violence is not, as Johnson shows, a static phenomenon, but neither has there been the simple progression toward more professional, less violent police behavior that some would like to believe. New York's experience with police brutality dates back to the founding of the force and has taken many different forms. In the late-nineteenth century "clubbing" -- the routine bludgeoning of citizens by patrolmen armed with nightsticks -- was the chief complaint. With the rise of Prohibition and organized crime in the 1920s came the "third degree," made notorious by the gangster movies of that era. During periods of social and political unrest, such as the 1930s and 1960s, public attention centered on violent mass-action policing of labor, the unemployed, or other political dissidents.

Marilynn S. Johnson is associate professor of history at Boston College of Born and raised in New York, she now lives in Brookline, Massachusetts