The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic by William Bratton, Peter Knobler
Authors: William Bratton, Peter Knobler
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the corner one evening and found himself nose to nose with a big snapper. He and his dog took off like a bat out of hell, with the alligator chasing after them. We never lost a handler, but we saw a lot of alligators.
The base never had any action. Not one national-security alert in the two years I served there. It was easily the most boring assignment you could possibly have.
In the fall, 1968, my girlfriend Linda and I were married. Married soldiers could go home at night when they weren't working, so Linda got a job in a store in Homestead and I drove seventy miles round-trip when I went off duty to be with her. Homestead was a sleepy little southern townwith a small nonmilitary population. It was a long two years. Money was tight, and I was just marking time.
I made sergeant and got a leadership role running the K-9 security detail. I was finally discharged on November 29, 1969. Linda and I loaded our cat and what few possessions we had into my prize possession, a 1966 burgundy two-plus-two Ford Mustang, and drove back to Boston. As 1970 came in, I went back to work full-time for the phone company and was also working four nights a week behind a cash register in a Curtis Farms convenience store.
Chapter 3
I BASICALLY MISSED THE SIXTIES. WHEN I WAS IN VIETNAM, SOME OF THE GUYS wore beads, smoked marijuana, and listened to antiwar rock and roll, but I never had much interest in that. As far as the antiwar movement goes, after watching the Vietnamese Army and people, many of us began to feel they just wanted to be left alone. We began to ask what were we doing there. I knew enough history to know that the Vietnamese had been fighting a civil war for fifty years and that the French had been there before us. But I was nineteen years old and did not try to understand the overall scope of it. I was there, there was a war to be fought, my country was involved, and I had a small piece of the action. Two years of enforced isolation in the Everglades put me even further from the cultural upheaval that affected a lot of my generation.
I was fresh out of Vietnam at the time of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. Looking at hippiedom, Woodstock, the drug culture, the style of dress, the music, Jimi Hendrix, Abbie Hoffman, the 1968 Democratic National Convention, from where I stood it was as if the country had had a national nervous breakdown. I disliked everything about the sixties.
I didn't particularly mind serving in Vietnam, I felt it was my obligation and I was proud to serve. I thought the war was justified, that ourintentions were honorable. I believed in the domino theory about communism, that we had to draw a line in the sand. (Later, like so many others, I came to question the wisdom of the war and the loss of lives; I came to believe there might have been a better way.)
I always loved my country and loved our system of government. When it became fashionable to be anti, I never bought into that. I never felt disenfranchised. I didn't harbor the anger and mistrust toward the government that other people did. I believed in order and conformity and the need for everyone to abide by social norms. There was behavior that was accepted and behavior that was not. Even as kids on the corner, we knew you didn't drink in public and you didn't use the street as a toilet. There were rules, there were reasons for these rules, and I understood and accepted those reasons.
I always liked to be in control, which is why drugs never appealed to me. I didn't need drugs for escape. If I wanted to escape, I went to a movie or read a book. I didn't have to shoot up to get away from anything, and I had little tolerance or understanding for people who did.
In the three years since I'd left the corner of Hecla and Adams, the whole neighborhood had changed. The area had been redlined by real-estate agents and targeted for rental and sale to minorities. It was astonishing, as if my entire hometown had
The base never had any action. Not one national-security alert in the two years I served there. It was easily the most boring assignment you could possibly have.
In the fall, 1968, my girlfriend Linda and I were married. Married soldiers could go home at night when they weren't working, so Linda got a job in a store in Homestead and I drove seventy miles round-trip when I went off duty to be with her. Homestead was a sleepy little southern townwith a small nonmilitary population. It was a long two years. Money was tight, and I was just marking time.
I made sergeant and got a leadership role running the K-9 security detail. I was finally discharged on November 29, 1969. Linda and I loaded our cat and what few possessions we had into my prize possession, a 1966 burgundy two-plus-two Ford Mustang, and drove back to Boston. As 1970 came in, I went back to work full-time for the phone company and was also working four nights a week behind a cash register in a Curtis Farms convenience store.
Chapter 3
I BASICALLY MISSED THE SIXTIES. WHEN I WAS IN VIETNAM, SOME OF THE GUYS wore beads, smoked marijuana, and listened to antiwar rock and roll, but I never had much interest in that. As far as the antiwar movement goes, after watching the Vietnamese Army and people, many of us began to feel they just wanted to be left alone. We began to ask what were we doing there. I knew enough history to know that the Vietnamese had been fighting a civil war for fifty years and that the French had been there before us. But I was nineteen years old and did not try to understand the overall scope of it. I was there, there was a war to be fought, my country was involved, and I had a small piece of the action. Two years of enforced isolation in the Everglades put me even further from the cultural upheaval that affected a lot of my generation.
I was fresh out of Vietnam at the time of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. Looking at hippiedom, Woodstock, the drug culture, the style of dress, the music, Jimi Hendrix, Abbie Hoffman, the 1968 Democratic National Convention, from where I stood it was as if the country had had a national nervous breakdown. I disliked everything about the sixties.
I didn't particularly mind serving in Vietnam, I felt it was my obligation and I was proud to serve. I thought the war was justified, that ourintentions were honorable. I believed in the domino theory about communism, that we had to draw a line in the sand. (Later, like so many others, I came to question the wisdom of the war and the loss of lives; I came to believe there might have been a better way.)
I always loved my country and loved our system of government. When it became fashionable to be anti, I never bought into that. I never felt disenfranchised. I didn't harbor the anger and mistrust toward the government that other people did. I believed in order and conformity and the need for everyone to abide by social norms. There was behavior that was accepted and behavior that was not. Even as kids on the corner, we knew you didn't drink in public and you didn't use the street as a toilet. There were rules, there were reasons for these rules, and I understood and accepted those reasons.
I always liked to be in control, which is why drugs never appealed to me. I didn't need drugs for escape. If I wanted to escape, I went to a movie or read a book. I didn't have to shoot up to get away from anything, and I had little tolerance or understanding for people who did.
In the three years since I'd left the corner of Hecla and Adams, the whole neighborhood had changed. The area had been redlined by real-estate agents and targeted for rental and sale to minorities. It was astonishing, as if my entire hometown had
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