The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic
Author: William Bratton
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 onepolice 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.
Publishers Weekly
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.)
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 York
NY Times Book Review
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's first Police Commissioner, apparently dismissed for shining too brightly in the news, gives his version of things.
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Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America
Author: Eric Rauchway
When President William McKinley was murdered at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, on September 6, 1901, Americans were bereaved and frightened. Rumor ran rampant: A wild-eyed foreign anarchist with an unpronounceable name had killed the commander-in-chief. Eric Rauchway's brilliant Murdering McKinley restages Leon Czolgosz's hastily conducted trial and then traverses America with Dr. Vernon Briggs, a Boston alienist who sets out to discover why Czolgosz rose up to kill his president.
Publishers Weekly
This ambitious book paints a fresh picture of American culture a century ago and finds there the confused stirrings of our own age. Rauchway's lens opens on the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz and keeps that event in focus throughout. The author's aim is to get us to understand in new ways the dawning 20th century, when so many of our present political and social struggles took form and solutions were proposed. For instance, the involvement in Czolgosz's case of "alienists" and criminologists provides Rauchway (The Refuge of Affections) with openings into such varied issues as nativism, racism, industrial conditions and social work. As for politics, he deals skillfully with now mostly forgotten issues-such as tariffs and currency policy-that rarely appeal to readers, but which here gain clarity through Rauchway's deft brevity. Most important, he shows how the nation's culture, and Theodore Roosevelt, who gained the presidency on McKinley's death, got caught up in a debate about the reasons for the murder. Was Czolgosz spurred by his psychological state or by anarchist ideology? Did the murder's origins lie within the assassin or in the social conditions that produce desperate people? These are issues that continue to divide Americans. And the book shines in dealing with them, making an important contribution to historical understanding. Rauchway's explanation for Roosevelt's 1912 loss as "Bull Moose" candidate of the Progressive Party-that he was caught between opposing interpretations of the roots of the nation's ills-is especially provocative. That alone should make the book controversial. (Sept.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Rauchway (Refuge of Affections: Family and American Reform Politics, 1900- 1920) here examines the murder of President William McKinley in 1901, with special emphasis on his assassin, Leon Czolgosz. Following Czolgosz's execution, Vernon Briggs, a Boston psychologist (or alienist, in period slang), probed into Czolgosz's background, looking for reasons why he committed this terrible crime. Though new president Theodore Roosevelt and other government leaders encouraged the idea that Czolgosz's actions had been politically motivated, given his connections with Socialist and anarchist groups, Briggs found that this was only part of the story. Evidently, Czolgosz incorrectly thought he was dying of syphilis; his conversion to radical politics came relatively late, and he decided to end his life with the death of the President. Rauchway further holds that Roosevelt moved to enact reforms that shaped the Progressive era as a means to reduce the threat of socialism and anarchism. This thought-provoking work is based on archival materials, including Czolgosz's trial manuscript and Briggs's personal record. Recommended for all libraries.-Stephen L. Hupp, West Virginia Univ. Lib., Parkersburg Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
An exploration of the personalities and sociopolitical forces that brought together President William McKinley and assassin Leon Czolgosz on Sept. 6, 1901. McKinley was downed by two assassins, Rauchway (History/UC Davis) argues. Czolgosz fired two shots into the president, but it was vice-president Theodore Roosevelt who proceeded to make most Americans and many historians forget about him. Rauchway first examines the assassination, the immediate capture of Czolgosz, his speedy trial only weeks after the murder (the jury deliberated for 25 minutes), death by electrocution a month later, the perfunctory autopsy, and the gruesome burial, during which sulfuric acid was poured over the body. American political and social institutions functioned very differently then, the author demonstrates. Although Czolgosz was identified early on as an anarchist, he was never part of any official organization. (The oxymoronic nature of an anarchist "organization" is not lost on Rauchway.) Emma Goldman charmed the future assassin when he heard her speak in Cleveland; Czolgosz followed her to Buffalo shortly before the killing, but he was not known to the principal anarchists of the day. Among the most interesting parts here are the summaries of post-mortem interviews with the killer's family in Cleveland conducted by Lloyd Vernon Briggs, a young physician who was attempting to determine if there were any psychological or medical reasons for his decision to shoot the president. Briggs discovered that Czolgosz had, in fact, led a fairly typical working-class life but had lost his job in a steel mill after the Panic of 1893. He was also, submits Rauchway, deeply concerned that he had developed syphilis andmight have believed he was dying. The author argues as well that Roosevelt's progressive beliefs arose in part out of his desire for a society that would not create men like Leon Czolgosz. Occasionally sluggish prose, but serviceable enough to convey ideas of great consequence. (15 b&w photos)
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