The Rise And Fall of a Violent Crime Wave: Crack Cocaine And the Construction of a Social Crime Problem

This book tells the story of a crime wave and the response to it by government policy makers, law enforcement officials, and the news media. The author relates how public officials and the news media used modest shifts in the official rate of violent crime during the 1980s to construct a crisis of crime and violence. The crack cocaine-related crime wave is viewed as a social construction, and the author discusses why this crisis was constructed. For more than a decade when the crack-based crime wave was being constructed, the author worked as a researcher and then chief of the New York State agency responsible for generating official crime statistics for the state. In addition, he spent most of this period conducting federally-funded research on the relationship between drugs and violence. This book is largely based on his experience as an insider during the construction of the last violent crime wave of the 20th century in the U.S.