The Crime Fighter: Putting the Bad Guys Out of Business

With a mixture of autodidactic erudition and street smarts, Maple reflects on what he learned about effective policing in a career that started on the lowest rung of New York City law enforcement, as a transit cop patrolling underground subway tunnels. Maple worked his way up to deputy commissioner of the NYPD under Commissioner William Bratton in the early 1990s, and became a well-known fixture in the city. In 1993, Maple writes, he mortgaged his house and blew the money on $400 suits, fancy hats and bottles of Dom Perignon, which he drank over ice at the trendy restaurant Elaine's while formulating the four basic principles of policing that would guide the city's successful assault on crime (in two years, murder rates dropped by 50%). Maple favors military analogies, dropping names like Rommel and Sun Tzu as influences, but behind his swagger is an obsessive dedication and attention to detail. He offers a paddy wagon-full of examples from his career in New York, and later as a police consultant in New Orleans and other cities, of how police departments need to track data and of how cops often work against each other unnecessarily. Maple is at his most compelling when he illustrates his theories with war stories that recount the careers of notorious criminals, like a hit-man nicknamed ""Freddy Krueger,"" and the real-life police work that nailed them. With Mitchell's help, Maple writes with almost as much mischievous style as he dressed when he wore his homburg and spats to Elaine's. (Oct.)