The ideas that are presented in
Holding Police Accountable were first discussed at
James Fyfe Police Accountability Conference, held to honor the scholarly legacy of the late James J. Fyfe. The authors subsequently developed their ideas into the
chapters therein. Along the way, they often turned to the scholarly literature about police and policing and incorporated major themes into their new work.
Fyfe's voice remains one of the clearest in that literature, and that may be due, in part, to Fyfe himself knowing it so well that "he breathed police scholarship," as one of his students said. Fyfe compiled a working bibliography he used as he researched and wrote. That bibliography, which is current up to 2003—two years before his death—is presented here for contemporary police scholars. Also included are Fyfe's curriculum vitae (which itself constitutes a bibliography of police scholarship from the 1980s and 1990s) and a profile in the New York Times Public Lives column.
