Free The Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic by William Bratton, Peter Knobler

looked forward to passing the Drake's Devil Dog factory and smelling the sweet little chocolate cakes. From there I'd pass the famous Kasonoff Bakery and breathe in the rye bread. It was a tantalizing walk home.
    We were Catholics, but not very observant, my father more involved in religion than my mother. I had a brother who died shortly after birth, and although they never discussed it with me, I always had the feeling his death might have distanced them from the church. We went to church for the holidays, but other than that my mother almost never went, except for weddings. At the post office where my father worked, there was a chapel where a fifteen-minute quickie service was performed each Sunday without a sermon, so he tried to get there. After I made my first communion and got confirmed, my parents left the decision whether to continue to go to Sunday school up to me. I had no interest, and I stopped going.
    So one day here comes Father Carney up the front stairs.
    Father Carney was a young priest, kind of a Bing Crosby type, popular with the kids, the sort who was put in charge of the Little League. I answered the door when he knocked. I hadn't seen him in a while.
    “Hello, Billy. I'd like to see your father.”
    My dad was in the living room, reading. He didn't invite Carney in; he left the good father standing in the hall. Not to invite a priest into your home was unusual in our neighborhood. If we went to Mass, we'd hear buzzing in the pews about that one.
    “You son's not been attending our Sunday school courses,” Father Carney told him.
    “Well, Father,” said my dad, “I told him once he got confirmed that it would be his choice to go or not, and I guess he's made it.”
    “You know, it's your obligation as a Catholic father to make sure your son is all right in the eyes of the Lord. Our courses …”
    “There's nothing wrong with my son.”
    They went at it pretty good. My father had made a commitment to me, I was old enough to make my own decisions, and no matter how the priest invoked the Lord and Scriptures, my dad was never one to bend to unreasonable authority. Father Carney never got his foot in our door, and I never set foot in Sunday school again.
    Very early one hot and quiet summer Sunday morning when I was about fifteen, my father took me out in the car to teach me to drive. I didn't have a learner's permit, so I guess he was at some risk on his insurance, but he put me behind the wheel and off we went. There was not much traffic in Dorchester on Sundays.
    We drove by the corner of Morrissey Boulevard and Freeport Street with the windows rolled down, and there was a cop at a call box, swearing a blue streak. Every other word out of his mouth was fing this and fing that, so routinely. It rubbed me the wrong way. For some reason, that stuck with me.
    After I got my learner's permit, my father and I routinely spent Sunday mornings driving around Codman Square, a business district of Dorchester. One morning, we stopped behind a cop car at a red light. We were the only two cars at the intersection. The light turned green, and the two cops were busy shooting the breeze. They weren't moving. We waited.
    “Toot the horn,” my dad said finally.
    “What?”
    “Toot the horn, get 'em going.”
    So I tooted the horn.
    Cops being cops, they pulled out, let us pass, and then pulled us over. Both officers got out of the cruiser and sauntered toward us.
    “You honk your horn?”
    “The light changed, you weren't moving.” My father was immediately on his high horse. “Yeah, we honked at you. How'm I supposed to let you know that it turned green?” They straightaway got into a pissing contest.
    I was sweating there with just a learner's permit, fearing that anyconfrontation would end my driving career. One officer was leaning at the window, an arm cocked on the roof, the other at his gun belt, talking over me to my father on the passenger side. My father never let up. I just kept both hands on the