Sometimes, when a chief of police or other high-ranking police official is interviewed regarding his career, he will say that he always wanted to be a police officer. Not me. I never gave much thought to becoming a cop. In fact, I was not very fond of police officers while I was growing up in Washington Heights, a working-class neighborhood in northern Manhattan. Police officers, like parents or teachers, told you all the things you couldn’t do. Police officers and their authority were resented and to be avoided.

However, just as I was getting ready to graduate from Cardinal Hayes...

In July 1969, I turned twenty-one years of age, was sworn in as a full-fledged police officer, and was assigned to the 44th Precinct in the Highbridge section of the South Bronx. I had actually gone to Cardinal Hayes High School in that part of the Bronx, so I was somewhat familiar with the neighborhood. I also lived just across the Harlem River in Washington Heights, so I could see my apartment building from the front steps of the 44th Precinct Station House. The precinct house, located on Sedgwick Avenue, which ran along the Harlem River on the Bronx side,...

I had passed the police sergeant’s exam in 1973 with a decent score. However, with little seniority and no veteran’s preference points, I wound up ranked between eight hundred and nine hundred on a two-thousand-person list. Historically, the NYPD would have promoted up to fifteen hundred sergeants on that list, so I was pretty certain of getting promoted. Unfortunately, with the police layoffs in 1976, there was obviously less of a need for sergeants, and so I “died” on that list.

In 1978, I took a new sergeant’s exam and scored much higher. I was in the first group of...

After numerous postponements of the captain’s exam in 1984, the test was finally administered in January 1985. It was a good time to take the captain’s exam since the Ward administration was committed to increasing the number of captains in the NYPD. My boss, Robert Johnston, was a strong proponent of this increase. He also supported tasking captains with additional responsibilities, including those that traditionally belonged to the front-line supervisors (such as sergeants and lieutenants). There were some who argued, quietly and privately, that Johnston was demeaning the rank of captain by giving them tasks sergeants and lieutenants usually performed....

The 5th Precinct is just one of seventy-six precincts in New York City (strangely, the precinct numbers go up to 123, with random numbers being skipped along the way). At the time that I was named commander of the 5th Precinct, there were about thirty chiefs in the NYPD, from one-star deputy chiefs to the four-star chief of department. Of them, at least five had been prior commanders of the 5th Precinct. Clearly, the 5th Precinct was in the top tier of desirable precincts along the career path.

While the 5th Precinct has been known as the Chinatown Precinct, it...

My new assignment at police headquarters was as commanding officer of the Chief of the Department’s Office, which meant running the office’s day-to-day operations. This would allow Deputy Chief Walsh to concentrate on the bigger issues facing the department, ranging from focusing on critical policy development to assisting operations in staffing a series of protests known as “Days of Outrage.” It also allowed me to be the understudy of Chief Walsh, who had a major skill that I lacked: attention to detail. Working under him made me understand how the department was organized, how to deploy thousands of officers to...

I did not know Bill Bratton before he was hired as police commissioner. I had met him only once, when he stopped by to meet with a group of NYPD runners prior to the 1993 Boston Marathon. At that time, Bratton was the number two guy at the Boston Police Department, having returned to that city after a two-year stint as the head of the New York City Transit Police. Bratton had done a great job with the Transit Police and, in the process, had received a great deal of attention from the press. This was highly unusual for the...

Probably the best-known—but least-understood—management technique in the Bratton administration was CompStat: a weekly crime meeting held at police headquarters by the top police brass and all of the local commanders, including specialized units such as detectives and those who dealt with narcotics, gangs, and warrants. CompStat is short for comparative statistics or computerized statistics. (I prefer comparative statistics since computers had very little to do with the initial creation and development of the crime meetings.) Many people in the Bratton administration have their own opinion on how the CompStat process first began. It all depends on where you...

At the end of 1994, Dave Scott, the first deputy commissioner, announced his retirement. The day after Scott’s announcement, I received a note on red paper from my Chinese godfather, Shuck Seid: “If you want to be number one, you must first become number two.” While I certainly wanted the job as first deputy commissioner, there was a huge financial and familial cost. The first deputy commissioner is a civilian position, similar to the police commissioner. There are only two people in the fifty-thousand-person organization who must reside in the city: the police commissioner and the first deputy commissioner. I...

After retiring from the NYPD on April 27, 1996, I had a few job offers in the private sector, but none was very appealing. I knew in my heart of hearts that policing was still in my blood. So I did the next best thing—I became a police consultant, sometimes with Bill Bratton and at other times with Jack Maple. The NYPD had received a great deal of press attention both nationally and internationally during Bratton’s administration, and it continued even after we left. Bill was in high demand as a speaker to talk about the “New York miracle.”...

In the late fall off 1997, Mayor Ed Rendell of Philadelphia hired Bill Bratton to do a quick study of the Philadelphia Police Department and to make some recommendations to improve its crime-fighting efforts. As part of his review Bill asked me to read some documents, including a management study of that department that had been conducted prior to Rendell taking over as mayor in 1991. The management study had been conducted by a group of consultants, which included at least one member of the Harvard faculty. Before we went to see Mayor Rendell, Bratton asked me if I would...

When I accepted the job of commissioner from Mayor Ed Rendell, I did so believing that I would hold that position for his last two years in office and then be off on my merry way because every new mayor wants to have his own police commissioner. After the Democratic primary in May 1999, John Street, the former president of the City Council, won the nomination for mayor. Running against him was Republican Sam Katz. As the campaign began to heat up toward the end of the summer, Katz ran on a platform that included keeping Timoney as the police...

In late November 2002, on a typically cold day in New York, with the temperature hovering in the high forties, I received a telephone call from Patrick Kelly, chief of police of a town called Medley, a small hamlet just west of the city of Miami. I didn’t know Chief Kelly, but he indicated that he had been following my career over the years. He went on to say that the city of Miami was conducting a search for a new chief of police and that in the course of a conversation he had had with Miami’s mayor, Manny Diaz,...

As a police chief you will sometimes hear allegations made about you and motives ascribed to you that will leave you scratching your head. In February 2003, I became aware that the Free Trade Association of the Americas (FTAA) was going to hold a meeting in Miami that coming November. I may have heard of the FTAA before that, although I honestly can’t remember. The reason why it is important to put a date to when we began security preparations is because of some of the outlandish allegations that were made after the event was over—to wit, that John...