by Peter Knobler
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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.
Amazon.com 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 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
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Police Innovation!, 2008-09-07
This book written by the creator of Compstat is a great read. This strategy is considered a major contribution to the field of policing by many and it is nice to hear about it from the creator. I bought this as part of a literature review for a thesis and it was a good place to start. William Bratton is a very motivational guy.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
He Made Things Happen....Repeatedly, 2008-06-14
We all enjoy watching a great athlete "step onto the field" and perform brilliantly time and time again. Bill Bratton, in Boston, NYC and now LA, has led very complex sets of activities--policing a multimillion person city--and reduced crime dramatically.
I lived in NYC from 1980-1983 and saw a rough place...and rarely saw policemen. During my first night in the city, I sat on the floor of my apartment because gunfire, for a long period, was a block away. When I moved back in 1997, I was shocked to see a patrolman on the beat in lower Manhattan. The city--I was about to find out--had changed dramatically.
This book goes into great detail to describe the man behind many leadership and management actions that made a DRAMATIC difference in crime rates and quality of life. What most struck me was his decision to disconnect the linkage between the economic and social nature of the community AND the associated crime rate. That is, he led while telling his officers and citizens that criminal behavior was caused by "bad guys"...and not merely my the economy, the job rate and general social conditions. Once he delinked those factors, he was able to apply organizational & human performance management--along with a solid budget--to go after crimes large and, more importantly, small. Mr. Bratton was able to apply information, intelligence and feedback (COMSTAT), get better resources, add incentives for the police and citizens, provide better/more realistic training and select the right people to serve in the police department.
I use Mr. Bratton's approach--and the NYPD--as part of a course/workshop on organizational leadership & performance. The attendees, senior law enforcement officials from outside the USA, are amazed that someone has so successfully "broken the code."
Read this book; I did twice in the first week. This guy really gets the process of orchestrating complex performance in tough environments. Who else can you say that about?
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Great Leadership and Accomplishments!, 2008-05-31
"Turnaround" tells the impressive story of William Bratton's turnarounds in the N.Y. Transit Police and New York Police Department, along with his growing up in Boston, and early learning experiences on their police force.
Bratton began his transit leadership by regularly riding the system and meeting people to learn their issues. An early lesson was that staff were demoralized (disliked being posted in uniform all day in the same spot in a futile effort to stop fare-beating - the violators simply moved elsewhere) and generally had a sloppy appearance. Bratton changed to using plainclothes police who were able to make "mass" arrests, substantially reducing the processing time for violators, and publicity over the arrests. Checking violators for warrants produced the side benefit of further reducing crime.
Lobbying for improved radios involved not only fighting city hall but also bringing community leaders on transit tours to understand conditions. Other leaders followed the one-month process to obtain warrants and shortened it to two days by implementing electronic records and lobbying court and D.A. personnel. Warrant-serving was further improved by launching sweeps at 4 A.M., instead of during the days when the perpetrators usually weren't home.
Other improvements included improving the uniforms and weapons, and having cops visit recently released transit-violator parolees to congratulate them on their release and remind them that security would be watching.
Bratton was then sought out by newly-elected Mayor Giuliani to take over the NYPD. Personnel decisions dominated Bratton's early days, as well as improving cooperation between fiefdoms (eg. detective bureau leaders were threatened with replacement). Another obvious problem was that staffing was largely M-F, 9-5, not a good match to 365-24-7 criminal activity.
Friction with the publicity-hungry mayoral office began the first week. Bratton et al worked through it and also quickly resolved the "squeeze people" - a mayoral priority. About half stopped when warned by police, and about half those remaining were arrested for warrant violations - the problem quickly stopped.
Bratton found that the focus of NYPD leadership was not on reducing crime, but avoiding media criticism for corruption - primarily by avoiding problematic undercover operations. Jack Maple (brought over from transit) was one of Bratton's innovative leaders - his innovations included instituting weekly crime statistics and maps, as well as the acclaimed Compstat reviews. (The latter involved challenging questions to area leaders regarding what they were doing to reduce crimes, and even personally challenging suspect answers and performance.)
Gun arrests had not been followed up - NYPD began pushing to learn the sources, and the sources of the sources.
Results were impressive - felony crime dropped 39% in the 27 months of Bratton's leadership, and NYPD's approval rating rose from 37% to 73%. Unfortunately, the publicity given Bratton grated on Giuliani, and intense micro-management by the mayor's office began, along with public undermining. Bratton left.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 What good leaders do, 2008-02-18
Bratton's ideas and practices have existed in one form or another over the last 30 years in policing. It is a testament to his leadership ability that he managed to implement his programs. A good leader is constantly in touch with his surroundings and can to an extent predict future trends based on information. The book is a must read for any law enforcement officer who is looking for the next trend in policing.
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
Better than Giuliani's Book, 2005-09-25
This 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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