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.
