Street Stories: The World of Police Detectives

Detectives work the streets—an arena of action, vice, lust, greed, aggression, and violence—to gather shards of information about who did what to whom. They also work the cumbersome machinery of the justice system—semi-military police hierarchies with their endless jockeying for prestige, procedure-driven district attorney offices, and backlogged courts—transforming hard-won street knowledge into public narratives of responsibility for crime. Street Stories, based on years of fieldwork with the New York City Police Department and the District Attorney of New York, examines the moral ambiguities of the detectives' world as they shuttle between the streets and a bureaucratic behemoth.