Turnaround : how America's top cop reversed the crime epidemic /

This book tells the story of the author's meteoric career in law enforcement, from his days as an MP in the army's canine corps through his stint as a beat cop in Boston and his rise in that city's police department, and then on to head the New York City transit police, the Boston police, and the New York City police. Although the book recounts the daily life and tensions of a police officer, its greatest value is its depiction of the challenges facing leaders in big city police departments. In recounting his frustrations and innovations while in positions of leadership, Bratton provides invaluable insights into the problems of police leadership: the tendency to cast a blind eye to corruption, settle into comfortable routine, adopt reactive rather than proactive stances towards crime, become overwhelmed with ego, kowtow to interfering politicians, and in general not rock the boat. Bratton clearly rocked the boat throughout his career, but he was also well rewarded with rapid advancement for doing so. The best sections of the volume recount how he reinvigorated several lethargic police departments. Anyone interested in understanding the challenges facing leaders in big city police departments--indeed, in public service institutions of all sorts--should find this a valuable book. General readers, undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. M. M. Feeley University of California, Berkeley

This autobiography is many things, except perhaps unbiased and humble. This entertaining work takes us from Bratton at one year of age, when, after he disappeared from his house, his mother found him out in a snowy street directing traffic, to 1996, when Mayor Giuliani forced him out of his position as the commissioner of police because he was becoming too popular. In his lifelong ambition to become the "top cop" in America, he often passed up the easy way so that he could follow his dream: such as when as an enlisted man in the army he turned down officers' training in order to go into the MPs. Among his remarkable accomplishments have been transforming first the New York Transit Police and later the force as a whole into effective crime prevention organizations. Bratton is politically savvy and has not shied away from using the media to further his goals, which could explain his trouble with Mayor Giuliani. --Eric Robbins

Scant weeks after Rudy Giuliani's landslide reelection as New York's mayor, his ousted police chief returns to haunt him, `a la Banquo's ghost, in this self-serving but powerful memoir. With just-the-facts crispness, Bratton skewers his "callous" and "paranoid" former boss, whose effort to take credit for Bratton's manifold innovations caused the popular commissioner to step down after only 27 months on the job. As Bratton tells it, the struggle between the two lawmen was fueled by testosterone: in one corner, megalomaniac Rudy; in the other, the "CEO cop," a "gung-ho conscientious" civil servant nicknamed "Cannonballs," who came to see himself as a cross between Lee Iacocca and Babe Ruth. Bratton candidly reports how he spent his early years in the Boston Police Department "plotting and intriguing" to become commissioner; when his relentless courting of the media antagonized his superiors, he left to head up Boston's beleaguered Transit Police, then New York's. Both as top transit cop and then as commissioner, Bratton perfected the art of the "turnaround," mostly by linking disorder (e.g., fare evasion, panhandling, "broken windows") to more serious crimes, and by boosting cop morale by mobilizing top performers and requisitioning state-of-the-art equipment. And unlike Giuliani, who hated to be upstaged, Bratton hired a staff of renegade deputies, including Jack Maple ("a character out of Guys and Dolls") and flashy TV crime reporter John Miller. Despite a tendency to lapse into lecture-circuit pieties ("if you make unreasonable demands you get reasonable results"), Bratton comes across as a tough-minded visionary who rose above petty office politics to lead the city's rebirth. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

The New York City police commissioner dumped by Mayor Rudy Giuliani discusses his strategies for fighting crime and his real reasons for leaving the NYPD. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

The former police commissioner of New York City tells all. Bratton grew up in working-class Dorchester, outside Boston, and from childhood on was obsessed with the idea of becoming a police officer. By the time he was in his early 30s, Bratton had worked his way up from beat cop to second in command of the Boston police force. Even back then, his ambitions got him in trouble with the mayor (as they later would with New York's Rudy Giuliani), and he was transferred to a new post overseeing transit cops. Brat-ton became an expert in the field and came to new York in 1990 to head up the city's transit police, a job he loved. He got the transit cops a little respect and instituted a successful method of quickly arresting and processing turnstile-jumpers--who often commit crimes on the subway. He returned briefly to Boston to become police commissioner, then came back to New York in 1994 to fill the same position there. The marriage between Bratton and newly elected mayor Giuliani was uneasy from the start, and Bratton's instant popularity caused friction. The top cop claimed from day one that he would reduce crime and immediately instituted ideas that he credits partially to James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, authors of a 1992 groundbreaking study on community policing. As any New Yorker could attest, crime did go down and the quality of life improved. But who should receive credit for these changes became a political issue, which ended with Bratton's resignation after 27 months. While much of the second half of the book is caught up in a political showdown that might be of limited interest to those outside the Big Apple, Bratton does have a lot to say about police and society, how to respond to issues regarding race, and how to keep New York's finest precisely that. For a man often accused of grandstanding, Bratton (with the help of James Carville's and Mary Matalin's coauthor Knobler) has written a surprisingly readable and reasonable book. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.