Authors: Bill Bratton and Peter Knobler

The Profession is both a searching examination of the path of policing over the past fifty years, for good and also for ill, and a master class in transformative leadership.
“A riveting combination of cop stories and community involvement, The Profession presents not only a fascinating and colorful life at the heights of law-enforcement leadership, but the vision for the future of American policing that we sorely need,” said a review on goodreads.com.
A review in The New York Times said that The Profession “begins in Boston, where William Bratton joins the police force out of high school as a highly ambitious but also highly cerebral cop, one who liked computers, geography and demographics.”
He absorbed Sir Robert Peel’s 19th-century dictum that “the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.”
Over a 50-year career in which he has headed three big-city police departments, he has walked a political and ideological tightrope that has maintained his credibility on all sides.