Word: precinct
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Conlon is a detective in New York City's 44th Precinct, in the South Bronx, a few blocks north of Yankee Stadium, not far from the legendary Fort Apache. At 39, he has a bit of that seedy-sexy Chris Noth charm to him--late Chris Noth, more Mr. Big than Detective Logan. But Conlon has another calling too: he's an author. His book, Blue Blood (Riverhead; 562 pages), is a memoir of his first seven years as a New York City cop, and it may be the best account ever written of life behind the badge...
...Blood is that where a lesser writer would just have gone numb, Conlon stays alive to the humor and the sadness and the ironies of life even in the teeth of the city's everyday assault--bricks (and, once, a canned ham) thrown from rooftops, the festering bitterness of precinct-house feuds, the bizarro underworld of the midnight shift, the agony, both Dantean and Sisyphean, of sifting through the rubble of the World Trade Center that has been moved to Staten Island. Conlon has no ambitions as a whistle-blower or a hero--he's neither a Serpico...
...counties in 18 of the target states from 2000. It has held 127 regional training sessions. By June, it will have made 800,000 phone calls to Republicans. Almost 200,000 volunteers have signed on. It boasts that it will be able to run the first "national precinct campaign," involving lieutenants in all the 10,020 precincts of every swing state, a level of blanketing usually reserved for smaller campaigns...
Each candidate was awarded a number of delegates corresponding to the percentage of people standing in its corner. Out of the seven allotted in this fake precinct obsessed with pet hierarchy, four went to the dogs, three went to Uncommitted, and none went to the birds since so many of them got confused during realignment that they strayed from their corner. While much was learned about how caucuses work, more was learned about the intelligence of people who own birds...
Statistically, the results are impressive. Homicides in the 77th dropped 45%, to just 65, last year. But the precinct's experience also provides a case study of the effect that Bratton's more concerted policing can have on a neighborhood suffering from high crime rates. TIME went on night patrols with officers of the 77th at regular intervals over the past 12 months, and it was clear the cops were becoming a lot more aggressive, routinely frisking suspected gangsters on the street on the basis of little more than how they were dressed. But the positive effects are rippling through...