Street Cops

Street Cops is Jill Freedman's document of two NYPD precincts in the late 1970s, made after more than two years riding along with patrol officers through the day and night shifts of a volatile decade in New York.

Freedman came to the project already skeptical of the police, having photographed the 1968 Poor People's Campaign and the Vietnam-era protests it drew from law enforcement. Living alongside the officers of two precincts complicated that view: her pictures move between confrontation and boredom, violence and camaraderie, without editorializing either way. First published by Harper & Row in 1981, the book was long out of print before Setanta Books issued this hardcover edition in 2021, 256 pages with 117 images on 31.6 x 24.3 cm pages.

Freedman had no formal photographic training, learning the medium on the ground in earlier embedded projects like Resurrection City and Firehouse. Street Cops belongs to that same body of years-long documentary work, made from inside the institution it pictures rather than at a remove from it.