Patricia Cornwell is an American crime writer. She is known for her best-selling novels featuring medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, of which the first was inspired by a series of sensational murders in Richmond, Virginia, where most of the stories are set. The plots are notable for their emphasis on forensic science, which has influenced later TV treatments of police work. Cornwell has also initiated new research into the Jack the Ripper killings, incriminating the popular British artist Walter Sickert. Her books have sold more than 120 million copies.
The John Jay College of Criminal Justice is a public college focused on criminal justice and located in New York City. It is a senior college of the City University of New York (CUNY). John Jay was founded as the only liberal arts college with a criminal justice and forensic focus in the United States.
The police procedural, police show, or police crime drama is a subgenre of procedural drama and detective fiction that emphasises the investigative procedure of police officers, police detectives, or law enforcement agencies as the protagonists, as contrasted with other genres that focus on non-police investigators such as private investigators.
Stephen Caracappa and Louis Eppolito were former New York City Police Department (NYPD) detectives who committed various illegal activities on behalf of the Five Families of the American Mafia, principally the Lucchese and Gambino crime families. The two subsequently became known as the "Mafia Cops".
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets is a 1991 book written by Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon describing a year spent with detectives from the Baltimore Police Department Homicide Unit. The book received the 1992 Edgar Award in the Best Fact Crime category.
Jeffrey Ross Toobin is an American lawyer, author, blogger, and legal analyst for CNN.
Cops is an American reality legal television documentary programming series that is currently in its 36th season. It is produced by Langley Productions and premiered on the Fox network on March 11, 1989. The series, known for chronicling the lives of law enforcement officials, follows police officers and sheriff's deputies, sometimes backed up by state police or other state agencies, during patrol, calls for service, and other police activities including prostitution and narcotic stings, and occasionally the serving of search and arrest warrants at criminal residences. Some episodes have also featured federal agencies. The show's formula follows the cinéma vérité convention, which does not consist of any narration, scripted dialogue, incidental music or added sound effects, depending entirely on the commentary of the officers and on the actions of the people with whom they come into contact, giving the audience a fly on the wall point of view. Each episode typically consists of three self-contained segments which often end with one or more arrests.
The Baltimore Police Department (BPD) is the municipal police department of the city of Baltimore, Maryland. Dating back to 1784, the BPD, consisting of 2,935 employees in 2020, is organized into nine districts covering 80.9 square miles (210 km2) of land and 11.1 square miles (29 km2) of waterways. The department is sometimes referred to as the Baltimore City Police Department to distinguish it from the Baltimore County Police Department.
Reuben Morris Greenberg was the first black police chief of Charleston, South Carolina, and known for being an innovative criminologist.
Edward T. Norris is an American radio host, actor and former law enforcement officer in Maryland. He is the cohost of a talk show on WJZ-FM in Baltimore, Maryland. Norris, a 20-year veteran of the New York Police Department, served as Police Commissioner for Baltimore from 2000 to late 2002 and Superintendent of the Maryland State Police in 2003. Norris played the eponymous detective Edward Norris in HBO's The Wire. In 2003, Norris was convicted of a felony and spent six months in federal prison.
One Good Cop is a 1991 American crime drama film written and directed by Heywood Gould and starring Michael Keaton, Rene Russo, Anthony LaPaglia and Benjamin Bratt. Keaton portrays New York City Police Department Detective Artie Lewis, who, with his wife Rita (Russo), adopts his late partner's (LaPaglia) children and loves them as their own. He also targets one of the criminals responsible for his partner's death. He initially seeks justice for his adoptive children, but ultimately chooses retaliation by robbing his quarry to support his new family, endangering them and his career.
Charles James Ogletree Jr. was an American legal scholar who served as the Jesse Climenko Professor at Harvard Law School, where he was the founder of the school's Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. He was also the author of books on legal topics.
Frederick H. Bealefeld III is an American former police officer who served as commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department from 2007 to 2012. He also served as deputy commissioner of operations for the department from January to July 2007. Born to a family of police officers, Bealefeld graduated from Chesapeake High School in Anne Arundel County, and attended Anne Arundel Community College, dropping out due to an injury preventing him from obtaining a lacrosse scholarship.
Peter Moskos is an American professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in the Department of Law, Police Science, and Criminal Justice Administration and the CUNY Graduate Center in the Department of Sociology. He is a former Baltimore Police Department officer. The son of military and Greek American sociologist Charles Moskos, he specializes in policing, crime, and punishment. Moskos was listed by The Atlantic as one of their "Brave Thinkers of 2011" for his book In Defense of Flogging. In Defense of Flogging proposes giving individuals convicted of a crime a choice between incarceration and corporal punishment.
The American city of Baltimore, Maryland, is notorious for its crime rate, which ranks well above the national average. Violent crime spiked in 2015 after the death of Freddie Gray on April 19, 2015, which touched off riots and an increase in murders. The city recorded 348 homicides in 2019, a number second only to the number recorded in 1993 when the population was nearly 125,000 higher.
Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan is a 2009 memoir by Jake Adelstein of his years living in Tokyo as the first non-Japanese reporter working for one of Japan's largest newspapers, Yomiuri Shimbun. It was published by Random House and Pantheon Books. Max adapted the memoir into a 2022 television series. According to Gavin J. Blair of The Hollywood Reporter, there were individuals that disputed whether certain events in the book happened as stated.
Akai Gurley, a 28-year-old black man, was fatally shot on November 20, 2014, in Brooklyn, New York City, United States, by a New York City Police Department officer. Two police officers, patrolling stairwells in the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA)'s Louis H. Pink Houses in East New York, Brooklyn, entered a pitch-dark, unlit stairwell. Officer Peter Liang, 27, had his firearm drawn. Gurley and his girlfriend entered the seventh-floor stairwell, fourteen steps below them. Liang fired his weapon; the shot ricocheted off a wall and fatally struck Gurley in the chest. A jury convicted Liang of manslaughter, which a court later reduced to criminally negligent homicide.
Thomas Abt is an American author, crime researcher, and former government official specializing in evidence-informed approaches to reducing crime in urban areas. His book, Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence and a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets, was published in June 2019 by Basic Books.
Wayne Earl Jenkins Jr. is a former Baltimore Police Department (BPD) sergeant who was the ringleader of the Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF), a plainclothes unit that engaged in widespread criminal activities while on duty. Jenkins, along with other members of the GTTF, was convicted on federal charges including racketeering, robbery, and overtime fraud in one of the most notorious police corruption scandals in Baltimore's history. He is currently serving a 25-year sentence in federal prison, with a scheduled release in 2037.
