Officer in Trouble

Police-Writers.com is a website dedicated to listing state and local police officers who have authored books. Three police officers who have written books about officers in trouble were added to the website.

Officer in Trouble is based on the real life experiences of its author, James Crawford, a veteran of the Detroit Police Department. According to the book description, “an intense and committed man, Lieutenant James Crawford dedicated himself to making Detroit's finest one of the best departments in the nation. His efforts, however, were not always appreciated and often he found himself on the wrong side of the political battlefields. Against insurmountable odds, he continued to fight until succumbing to the realization that he might win a battle or two, but he could never win the war.”

A second book entitled Officer in Trouble was also written by a Detroit Police Department police officer. In 1981, over ten years prior to James Crawford’s book, James Viner, a six year veteran of the Detroit Police Department, wrote his novel. Whereas James Crawford’s book is a true-life account, James Viner’s is “fiction, but the dilemmas, challenges, pressures and doubts faced by the men in blue are real.”

In Prison for 31 years, former New York Police Department police officer William Phillips is the co-author of his memoir, On the Pad. According to a recent interviewed by Geoffrey Gray, (February 27, 2007), in the New York Times, “The trouble started one spring day in 1971 at P. J. Clarke’s, the glittering bar and hamburger restaurant on Third Avenue. This place, typically overrun with police officers, bookmakers, ballplayers and prizefighters, was Mr. Phillips’s hangout. He was only a patrolman, but looking at him, you’d never know it.

“I dressed like a million dollars,” Mr. Phillips said during one of two interviews conducted at Fishkill last year. “I was an East Side guy. Making money, hanging around, chasing broads. I was just a fun-loving guy. I mean, I would meet a gal, we would hit it off, go do different things, have fun, she’d drift off and someone else would come along and that’s it.” Or, as he put it in his memoir, “On the Pad,” published in 1973: “My life was one big fun.”

Police-Writers.com now hosts 452 police officers (representing 191 police departments) and their 947 books in six categories, there are also listings of United States federal law enforcement employees turned authors, international police officers who have written books and civilian police personnel who have written books.