How to Rate Your Local Police: A User’s Guide for Civic Leaders, Governmental Officials, Concerned Citizens, and Police
My earliest book began life in 1982–83 as a short publication for the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), written while I was chief of the Madison Police Department. It quickly became something more: a trusted, practical guide that police chiefs and civic leaders across the country handed to newly elected mayors, police chiefs, city managers, and council members so they could understand, in concrete terms, what good policing actually looks like. I revised and expanded it in 2015 against the backdrop of Ferguson and other cities in America dealing with what many citizens saw as excessive force by police. I updated it for an era in which public trust in police was under renewed and urgent scrutiny.
The book poses a deceptively simple central question: is your local police agency effective in fulfilling its responsibilities to you and your community, and can it be trusted? Rather than leaving that question abstract, I supply a narrative framework alongside a hands-on checklist and rating sheet, letting readers systematically assess leadership, training, community relations, use-of-force policy, media relations, and organizational culture. It’s written to serve multiple audiences at once — a working officer, a police chief evaluating their own department, a mayor sizing up a candidate for chief, or simply a citizen trying to hold their local force accountable.
Drawing on my more than three decades across four municipal departments, two of them as chief, the book distills that field experience into an accessible, usable tool rather than a theoretical treatise. It stands as a companion piece to my later book Arrested Development, sharing its core conviction: that policing improves only when it is deliberately, continuously measured against clear standards — and that ordinary citizens, not just police professionals, have both the right and the responsibility to do the measuring.
You can purchase a copy HERE.
Improving Police: A Necessary Conversation 