Features
- Cover Type: Hard Cover with 329 pages
- Published by: Random House
- Edition: 1st Edition January 20, 1998
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0679452516
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0679452515
-
Book Dimensions:
9.2 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
- Weighs: 1.4 pounds
Product Review
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 ten 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 YorkCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Reader ReviewsThis reviewer has no insight into how much of the book was written by Bratton and how much was written Knobler. Regardless, this book is a quick and delightful read. The language is rough and informal as one might expect from a police chief turned author, but is written with enough balance that it could be used a textbook for a criminology class. Assuming that Knobler had a major hand in this book, this reviewer intends to seek out his other books to see if they are as excellently written. Having recently read Giuliani's book, it is striking how much less ego is in this book than in Giuliani's book which covers many of the same events and initiatives. Additionally, there are many striking differences of fact in this book and Giuliani's. Not just the discussions of personalities and why different folks were moved around or fired, but very specific things such as the level of computerization in COMPSTAT and the timing of the "rollout" of different initiatives. All things being equal, this reader would tend to believe the Bratton version of events since he was working these issues much closer than the Mayor would have been. The book is not a true biography of Bratton. It has a short biographical section which is primarily structured to discuss why he became a cop and how his philosophy to criminology was developed. Then the book talks about Bratton's initiatives as the highest uniformed officer at Boston, as head of the transit police in NYC, as head of the Boston police, and finally his crowning triumph as Commissioner of NYPD. To be completely honest, this reviewer has little interest in police matters. This book was read as a research project for a scholar I work with. Despite this lack of background, I found some very interesting ideas outlined in this book. First, large institutions - Governmental Bureaucracies, military, police - tend to become monolithic and exclusive. This means that members of those organizations, in order to avoid stagnation and collapse as society changes around them, must constantly scan the outside world to lift the best ideas and procedures available. Second, American nature is fascinated and compelled by change and innovation. To sell ideas and make the folks doing the work feel involved and have ownership, one might consider selling the ideas often as innovation even if they are more evolutionary than revolutionary. Finally, Bratton and Giuliani ultimately did quite a bit of damage to both the general population of NYC and the NYPD because of their huge egos. After reading this book, I am willing to believe that Giuliani had the larger share of fault in this, but the there is plenty of blame for both in this case. Many will say that Bratton just rode the wave of national crime reduction. Some of the things they might cite as the real cause of the crime reduction might be: (1) the graying of America's general population. (2) The shift from Crack (a stimulant) to Heroin (a depressant). (3) The availability of cheap and legal abortions essentially killed the poor and disadvantaged before they had the opportunity to grow to adulthood and become criminals. (4) The decrease in crimes in NYC was simply a reflection of the statistical decrease of crime across the nation. While there is a grain of truth in all of these, they miss the point. NYC far exceeded the national average in crime reduction. Additionally, NYC is such a large population that they were a significant factor in the nation-wide reduction numbers. One need only look at cities like Washington DC or New Orleans to see that not all cities experienced reduced crime during this period. Therefore, the Bratton's policies must have had a significant role in crime reduction in addition to the elements discussed above. Of course, part of the reason that this book was written was to help Bratton with his public speaking and consulting business that he started after leaving NYPD. However, that fact does not detract from its usefulness. Additionally, it must be noted that Bratton has recently returned to public service as Police Commissioner at LAPD. It will be interesting to see what initiatives he develops in that much different environment and how effective his "old" techniques developed at Boston and NYC will be in an environment that is much different both culturally and geographically. In summary, this is an excellent book. I highly recommend it for folks interested in leadership, innovation, criminology, or the recent history of NYC. This book is better than Giuliani's both in terms of the writing and its usefulness.
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