Professor of Sociology, coordinator of the Police and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College and visiting professor at London Southbank University, Vitale has spent the last thirty years writing about surveillance and consulting for both police departments and international human rights organizations. His academic writings on policing have appeared in Policing and Society, Police Practice and Research, Mobilization, and Contemporary Sociology. His essays are regularly published in outlets such as The New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation, Vice News, Fortune and USA Today. He has also appeared on CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, NPR, PBS, Democracy Now! and The Daily Show. In 2009, he published City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics, in which he explains how in the 1990s New York City policy focused on restoring moral order—a review of prostitution, graffiti, begging, and homelessness. This marked a shift in the priorities of the middle and upper classes, which notably affected several neighborhoods, the police, and New York politics. In 2017, he published The End of Police Control, in which he argues that the United States should radically reconsider surveillance, rather than simply reform it.