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Police interrogations in the Netherlands and Belgium are written up in police record format during the interrogation itself. The written version is written in different styles: a monologue style, recontextualized style and/or question-answer style. This chapter shows that the suspect’s spoken stories are transformed in various ways, depending on the style used by the police officer. In the monologue style it appears as if the suspect has volunteered all the information in the written text in a drastically summarized, coherent format. The complicated recontextualized style mainly looks as if it was volunteered by the suspect, but does show traces of the officer’s questions. However, not only the suspect’s words are reformulated in the written text, so are the officer’s questions, creating a false sense of accuracy. The question-answer style most accurately reflects what went on in the interrogation. However, not all questions and answers are written up, again creating a false sense of being complete. Therefore, future readers of police records must remember that it is always a reconstructed, summarized version of what went on in the interrogation.

This chapter briefly recounts the origins of the policing experiment of the early 1990s that flew under the Broken Windows banner. It also explores how that experiment has become an institutionalized feature of New York City's law enforcement since then. The history is tailored to highlight those changes in enforcement that most affected the flow and composition of cases into the lower criminal courts. It also portrays how the justifications for this policing model demanded bureaucratic practices that in turn shaped how these low-level cases came to be processed by criminal justice actors. Specifically, the chapter emphasizes the new record-keeping and record-sharing practices that the police and courts innovated in this period in an effort to mark suspected persons for later encounters and to check up on prior records to identify and target persistent or serious offenders.

This introductory chapter illustrates the concept of “jammed up”—a ubiquitous shorthand term used to describe when the organization launches an investigation into alleged misconduct (administrative or criminal)—as applied to the NYPD and the difficulty of defining and studying what it means to be jammed up, particularly when using a retrospective design that requires researchers to work backwards to piece together officers' personal and career histories, and when relying on official police department records to do so. This study, previously entitled Bad Cops, encompasses the period spanning from 1975 to 1996, and represents the culmination of perhaps the largest study of police misconduct ever conducted in the United States. In that vein, this chapter likewise presents an overview of the research methodology as well as the case studies to be explored for the remainder of the book.