Product Description

When Bill Bratton was sworn in as New York City's police commissioner in 1994, he made what many considered a bold promise: The NYPD would fight crime in every borough...and win.  It seemed foolhardy; even everybody knows you can't win the war on crime.  But Bratton delivered.  In an extraordinary twenty-seven months, serious crime in New York City went down by 33 percent, the murder rate was cut in half--and Bill Bratton was heralded as the most charismatic  and respected law enforcement official in America..  In this outspoken account of his news-making career, Bratton reveals how his cutting-edge policing strategies brought about the historic reduction in crime.

Bratton's success made national news and landed him on the cover of Time.  It also landed him in political hot water.  Bratton earned such positive press that before he'd completed his first week on the job, the administration of New York's media-hungry mayor Rudolph Giuliani, threatened to fire him.  Bratton gives a vivid, behind-the-scenes look at the sizzle and substance, and he pulls no punches describing the personalities who really run the city.

Bratton grew up in a working-class Boston neighborhood, always dreaming of being a cop.  As a young officer under Robert di Grazia, Boston's progressive police commissioner, he got a ground-level view of real police reform and also saw what happens when an outspoken, dynamic, reform-minded police commissioner starts to outshine an ambitious mayor.  He was soon in the forefront of the community policing movement and a rising star in the profession.  Bratton had turned around four major police departments when he accepted the number one police job in America.

When Bratton arrived at the NYPD, New York's Finest were almost hiding; they had given up on preventing crime and were trying only to respond to it.  Narcotics,  Vice,  Auto Theft, and the Gun Squads all worked banker's hours while the competition--the bad guys--worked around the clock.  Bratton changed that.  He brought talent to the top and instilled pride in the force; he listened to the people in the neighborhoods and to the cops on the street.  Bratton and his "dream team" created Compstat, a combination of computer statistics analysis and an unwavering demand for accountability.  Cops were called on the carpet, and crime began to drop.  With Bratton on the job, New York City was turned around.

Today, New York's plummeting crime rate and improved quality of life remain a national success story.  Bratton is directly responsible, and his strategies are being studied and implemented by police forces across the country and around the world.  In Turnaround, Bratton shows how the war on crime can be won once and for all.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #149180 in Books
• Published on: 1998-01-20
• Released on: 1998-01-20
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 9.53" h x 1.17" w x 6.37" l, 1.44 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 368 pages

From Amazon.com
When William Bratton was a year and a half old, his mother caught him directing traffic in the street out front of their Boston home. From that moment on, it seemed destined that he would become a cop. In this book, Bratton and his coauthor, Peter Knobler, chronicle Bratton's career, focussing particularly on his efforts to revitalize Boston's and New York City's police departments. Bratton rose quickly through the ranks of the Boston Police Department, where he pioneered community policing and cleaned up the city's subway system. As New York's transit-police chief, he cracked down on minor offenses like turnstile jumping on the theory that the people who commit more serious crimes underground also commit smaller ones. It worked. Finally, Bratton realized his dream of becoming America's top cop: the New York City Police Commissioner. The city's crime rate dropped over 10 percent a year during Bratton's brief tenure as top cop, until Mayor Giuliani's administration forced him out of the job in 1996.

In Turnaround, Bratton describes the police initiatives that led to these successes. Bratton and his peers used computer mapping to pinpoint crime hot spots and then cleaned up the areas using all the tools of law enforcement. One of the favored tools was "quality of life enforcement"--curtailing minor crimes like panhandling, squeegeeing, and prostitution in order to make the streets seem less inviting to worse criminals. Bratton made police commanders from all districts of the city accountable, requiring them to report on progress and problems in their locales, during frequent departmental meetings. Bratton is now a consultant to police departments across the nation, so, like it or not, his style of law enforcement may soon be coming to a city near you. This is not a page-turner or a masterful work of literature, but Bratton's ideas about curbing crime should be of interest to both those involved in law enforcement and regular people who are concerned about crime. --Jill Marquis

From Library Journal
More than the story of Bratton's two years as New York City police chief and his disagreements with Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, this work details Bratton's early life and tenure at previous policing jobs while providing a crash review of contemporary American policing. For every citizen who has wondered, "What do these cops think they're doing?" this book is the answer. Bratton's book resembles Los Angeles Police Chief William Williams's Taking Back Our Streets (LJ 4/1/96), but it covers more. The management reengineering that Bratton undertook in all of his command positions earned him the sobriquet CEO Cop and allowed him to step right into private industry when he resigned. Bratton may or may not be responsible for New York's plummeting crime rate, but he put impetus behind a new era of community and quality-of-life policing as espoused by George Kelling and Catherine M. Coles in Fixing Broken Windows (LJ 12/96). This book is certain to be widely read and may be Bratton's lasting contribution. [Preivewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/97.]?Janice Dunham, John Jay Coll. of Criminal Justice Lib., New Yor.
-?Janice Dunham, John Jay Coll. of Criminal Justice Lib., New York
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
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