A Word From The Publisher

We were in a local book store this week and were very surprised to see a display of books titled "Gangs In Garden City" by Sarah Garland, which was published on June 29. This was a surprise to us, because in spite of getting a report from the police department every week, we had never heard of any gang activity in Garden City.

The publisher's blurb on the dust jacket discusses two Central American gangs which have moved from cities to suburbs. "In Hempstead, Long Island, a crumbling village that borders the wealthy enclave of Garden City, New York, the rivalry between these two gangs has left a trail of young bodies."

This should have been a clue to us that the book does not actually discuss "Gangs In Garden City" as the title says, but "Gangs In Hempstead." The relevance of Garden City seems to be simply that it is next door, and wealthy. We purchased the book, and found that indeed almost the entire text discusses gang activity in Hempstead and a few other Long Island towns.

Since there was no mention of the Garden City Police Department in the book, we checked with the GCPD to find out if the author interviewed anyone there. According to the GCPD, "To the best of our knowledge, no member of the department was authorized to speak with the author, nor did anyone speak to her."

It seems unbelievable that an author could write a book about gang activity in a town without even contacting the local police department.

It also appears that there was little or no fact checking done on the book by the publisher. Two minor errors appear in the discussion of Garden City's early history - the date that Garden City was founded and the name of its founder were both misstated. This is information that would have taken an intern with a computer about two minutes to correct. It makes one wonder whether other, more substantive errors exist in the text.

Another, more pervasive error is that the author repeatedly refers to Roosevelt Field as being in Garden City. This is an error that is commonly made elsewhere because Roosevelt Field uses the 11530 zip code. (It is, in fact, in East Garden City.)

However, in the book the author uses that "fact" to shore up her argument that Hempstead's decline benefited Garden City. She says, "Hempstead's once-booming retail businesses buckled under competition from modern new shopping centers, among them the Roosevelt Field Mall in Garden City. The A&S - once the pride of Hempstead - closed its doors and moved to Garden City in 1991."

In fact, Garden City sees not one dime of revenue from the retail portions of Roosevelt Field. Its taxes are paid to the Uniondale school district and the Town of Hempstead. Moreover, Roosevelt Field also lured away several large retailers from Garden City's downtown area in the same time period. Again, this is information that is readily available online for a fact checker to review.

In spite of the foregoing concerns about the accuracy of the book, there were many sections that were movingly told. In the beginning of the book Ms. Garland tells the story of the stabbing death of 15-year-old Michael Alguera in Hempstead from the point of view of his stunned parents. Any parent reading this passage would empathize with the horror that they felt.

However, the book tries to make the case that racial segregation in suburban communities is one of the root causes of the increase in gang activity, and here we must disagree. Racial segregation in housing has been an unfortunate fact of life on Long Island for most of a century. But gang activity is a very recent phenomenon, dating back to approximately 1990. She also does not discuss alternative theories about the rise of crime in some suburbs. For example, The Atlantic magazine published an article in its July/August 2008 issue "American Murder Mystery" which linked the rise in the Section 8 housing program with the rise in suburban crime.

Unfortunately, the national news media is perfectly happy to accept the book's contentions without debate. Sarah Garland appeared on WNYC radio's Leonard Lopate show on July 15, and while the interview was interesting, she was posed no challenging questions. She is expected to appear on NPR's Diane Rehm show on July 30, and we expect largely the same treatment.

Meg Morgan Norris

Publisher