Beat Cop to Top Cop
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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.
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A Tale of Three Cities
JOHN F. TIMONEY
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The Knapp Commission did make a series of recommendations that were solid, including more formal education of police officers. The commission also decried the poor wages police officers received and recommended increases, which all officers overwhelmingly endorsed. The pay issue was brought home to us one day at roll call. The Seventh Division inspector stopped in to speak to us before we hit the street. He talked about the Knapp Commission's findings and recommendations and then got to the issue of the pay raise and said, almost matter-of-factly, “Listen, you guys, we're gonna be giving you better pay, so there's no need to steal.”
The Knapp Commission hearings affected me directly when the Bronx district attorney, Burton Roberts, held a press conference. Roberts was a larger-than-life figure with a boundless ego; he did not suffer fools lightly. As the police department was being bashed day after day in the press, Roberts decided to hold a press conference to show that in the Bronx, at least, there were good cops who did not succumb to theft and bribery. He decided to call the press conference with Bronx police officers who had made bribery arrests the prior year. Two dozen police officers were assembled in a conference room, and I was one of them. The plan was for all of the officers to form a semicircle around the D.A. while he made his announcement and pontificated on how there were many brave and honest police officers in the Bronx. Before the conference, I figured out the best position to be in to get my mug on television, since I did not have a speaking part (our role was that of blue potted plants, a role I would play on numerous occasions throughout my career). I maneuvered for a position next to and slightly behind the D.A. while the officers took their positions. When I gathered all of my friends that night to watch the press conference on TV, there was a great shot of the D.A. with my left hand slightly to the right of his face. As the camera zoomed out to get a panoramic view of all those assembled, it panned to the left and showed all of the fine officers to my right, missing Patrolman Timoney, who stood to the right of the D.A. That was my first appearance on television. As the years passed, I would manage to get other parts of my body in the picture and even every once in a while have a speaking part.
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