Jill Freedman spent more than two years riding with two New York City police precincts, and Street Cops gathers what she saw from the inside: the violence and volatility of the city in the 1970s and 1980s, and the quieter registers that rarely reached print. Her scepticism was not incidental. She had documented the Poor People’s Campaign after Martin Luther King’s assassination and watched the policing of Vietnam-era protests, and she came to the NYPD expecting the worst. Days on patrol and nights spent drinking with officers changed the shape of the work without resolving it into advocacy. Across 117 images she records arrests and their jokes, the tenderness between officers and neighbourhood residents, the camaraderie of partners, and the routine exposure to the extremes of human behaviour that the job demands.

What distinguishes the book is its refusal of a single verdict. Freedman worked with an anthropological curiosity and without judgment, and the photographs move between raw, unflinching description and moments of humour, vulnerability and care. The sequencing holds both sides of the law in the same frame rather than separating them into accuser and accused, and the result is less an argument about policing than a portrait of a city and the people who worked its streets.

Setanta Books’ 2021 edition is the first under its own imprint, a hardcover of 256 pages at 31.6 by 24.3 centimetres, issued with a dust jacket. It returns to circulation a body of work that had been unavailable, and it arrives with the full extent of Freedman’s authorship intact.

For collectors of American documentary photography of the 1970s, the book belongs beside the era’s essential New York work, and its large format gives the pictures room that earlier presentations could not. The subject is a city under pressure; the method is immersion; the tone is unsentimental and humane. That combination, sustained across two years of access, is what keeps Street Cops worth returning to.