Beat Cop to Top Cop: A Tale of Three Cities

The City in the Twenty-First Century

by John F. Timoney, Tom Wolfe (Contributor)

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 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 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.

Genres: Autobiography, Biography

352 pages, Hardcover

First published May 6, 2010

Reviews

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an easily read account of John Timoney's career in the New York Police Department to a top position, then later as the Chief of Police in Philadelphia and Miami. I found this to be a good source of information on modern policing,e.g. explaining protest management, the broken window theory (address the little things and the big things will go better), limiting use of excessive force, and so forth. I do remember many of the events described in the book so it was interesting to read a "professional" account of how these matters were handled.

While the account seems to be neutral it seems quite likely that Timoney does have some axes of his own to grind (certainly does not seem to get along with Rudy Guiliani, for instance), but on the whole he seems to be a smart, even-tempered person who is a good source of information.

I do wish that there had been more editing - persons are introduced and reintroduced several times, as though episodes in the book had been dictated at different times, and no one bothered to integrate the separate pieces. There are also misspellings that will not be picked up by a spellcheck (e.g., loose for lose, decent for descent, moral for morale)- editors are not doing their job.

[Clifford Dunbar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book. Gave me a lot of insight into policing. Also gave my walks in downtown Miami more meaning, as I know the places he refers to and I contemplate the history there.

[Arlisscrowe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I quite liked this book because it tells of being a cop from different angles, problems and cities. A good variety of anecdotes keep the book moving.

Arliss

[Jaie]

I got about half way through this book.