In recent years, community policing has transformed American law enforcement by promising to build trust between citizens and officers. Today, three-quarters of American police departments claim to embrace the strategy. But decades before the phrase was coined, the New York City Housing Authority Police Department (HAPD) had pioneered community-based crime-fighting strategies.

The Last Neighborhood Cops reveals the forgotten history of the residents and cops who forged community policing in the public housing complexes of New York City during the second half of the twentieth century. Through a combination of poignant storytelling and historical analysis, Fritz Umbach draws on buried and confidential police records and voices of retired officers and older residents to help explore the rise and fall of the HAPD's community-based strategy, while questioning its tactical effectiveness. The result is a unique perspective on contemporary debates of community policing and historical developments chronicling the influence of poor and working-class populations on public policy making.

FRITZ UMBACH is an assistant professor of history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York.

"Ask Americans for a symbol of crime and failed policy and they'll likely name the 'projects.' Umbach inverts conventional wisdom, skillfully taking us where few tread—we are better for it."

"...a nuanced and compelling history of the importance of policing, both formal and informal, in creating social order in New York City projets."

"Beyond this book's powerful implications for contemporary policing, it's must reading for those interested in the larger social, cultural and economic history of Gotham since World War II. Sophisticated, skillful, and myth-toppling scholarship."

"Based on careful archival research into the New York City Housing Authority police department archives and interviews with both former officers and residents, Umbach's book provides a bottom-up view of residents' interactions with police. A welcome correction that engages many topics."