A former police officer, James J. Fyfe came to prominence in U.S. criminology during the 1990s. As a professor of criminal justice at Temple University, Fyfe drew upon his 16 years on the New York Police Department (NYPD) in his examinations of the nature and appropriateness of physical force used by police. Calling in his work for reforms to help both police and the public, he collaborated with the scholar Jerome H. Skolnick on the critically acclaimed Above the Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force (1993). Throughout the 1990s Fyfe was much in demand as an expert witness in courtrooms nationwide.

Born in 1942 in New York, Fyfe came from a working class family. His father, who worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, encouraged him to become a police officer. He scored extremely high on tests, joined the NYPD, and worked a beat. Meanwhile he pursued a college...