Beat Cop to Top Cop
A Tale of Three Cities
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- $34.99
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- $34.99
Publisher Description
Born in a rough-and-tumble neighborhood of Dublin, John F. Timoney moved to New York with his family in 1961. Not long after graduating from high school in the Bronx, he entered the New York City Police Department, quickly rising through the ranks to become the youngest four-star chief in the history of that department. Timoney and the rest of the command assembled under Police Commissioner Bill Bratton implemented a number of radical strategies, protocols, and management systems, including CompStat, that led to historic declines in nearly every category of crime. In 1998, Mayor Ed Rendell of Philadelphia hired Timoney as police commissioner to tackle the city's seemingly intractable violent crime rate. Philadelphia became the great laboratory experiment: Could the systems and policies employed in New York work elsewhere? Under Timoney's leadership, crime declined in every major category, especially homicide. A similar decrease not only in crime but also in corruption marked Timoney's tenure in his next position as police chief of Miami, a post he held from 2003 to January 2010.
Beat Cop to Top Cop: A Tale of Three Cities documents Timoney's rise, from his days as a tough street cop in the South Bronx to his role as police chief of Miami. This fast-moving narrative by the man Esquire magazine named "America's Top Cop" offers a blueprint for crime prevention through first-person accounts from the street, detailing how big-city chiefs and their teams can tame even the most unruly cities.
Policy makers and academicians have long embraced the view that the police could do little to affect crime in the long term. John Timoney has devoted his career to dispelling this notion. Beat Cop to Top Cop tells us how.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
From a rookie in the streets of the South Bronx to police chief in Miami, lifelong cop Timoney reflects on a career that put him at the center of many recent debates and advances in law enforcement. Born in Dublin, Timoney moved to New York in 1961 as a child and joined the NYPD after graduating from high school. He describes patrolling the streets during the turbulent late 60s, when protests and civil unrest ripped at the city s social and political seams. Picking up a bachelor s degree and two master s degrees along the way, Timoney rose steadily through the ranks, working directly for famed police commissioners like Ray Kelly and Bill Bratton. An advocate for community policing as the way the NYPD addressed quality of life issues (e.g., vandalism and truancy) that are often precursors of major crimes, Timoney helped develop and refine departmental policies on everything from the use of deadly force to race relations. After retiring from the NYPD in 1996, Timoney spent four years as police commissioner of Philadelphia before becoming Miami s chief of police in 2002, retiring in 2009. Both the ugly side of police work particularly corruption and the achievements of his beloved NYPD are showcased in this intriguing look at what it takes to fight crime.
