Sunday, April 22, 2007

500th Police Officer Author

Editor's Note: Two of the authors are former military.

Police-Writers.com is a website dedicated to listing state and local police officers who have authored
books. With the Jack Sullivan, Mary Sullivan and Joe Sanchez, Police-Writers.com now lists over 500 state and local police officers who have written books. Command Jack Sullivan, USN(r) is the 500th Writer added to the list.

Commander
Jack Sullivan, United States Navy (R), was called to active duty in three wars: World War II; Korean War; and, Vietnam War. He was also called to active during the Cuban Missile Crisis. His book, Shields of Honor, “tells of his part in these wars and realistically portrays the role the Reserve Component of the Navy played in each. He combines the lighter parts of his life in the Navy with his role in combat. His characters are portrayed with true service humor, but also depict their sincere dedication to duty as well. It's an interesting read for anyone who had a friend or relative in the Reserve or National Guard.” When he wasn’t serving his county in the Navy, Jack Sullivan was a detective for the New York Police Department.

According to Lona Manning,
New York Police Department, “policewoman Mary Sullivan was banished from the undercover assignments she loved, to a succession of dreary station-houses, doing the usual woman’s work – looking after lost children and guarding female suspects. It was the height of the Roaring Twenties, there were plenty of bootleggers, drug traffickers and fake fortune-tellers to apprehend, and Sullivan, a young widow with a friendly Irish manner, impressed her superiors with her ability to transform herself into a dance hall girl or a society dame looking for a good speakeasy.” Mary Sullivan’s Biography, My Double Life: The Story of a New York Policewoman, was originally published in 1938 and re-released in 1983.

Joe Sanchez is a former New York Police Department police officer who lived the life and times he writes about in his book A Tale of Police Omerta from the NYPD. The stories are his, and though they're fiction, he has drawn on his on-the-job experience for their inspiration. He returned from Vietnam as a combat-wounded veteran to embark on a law enforcement career that included the Port Author of New York City, the New York Police Department and the New York Department of Corrections.

According to the book description, Joe Sanchez “has been trying to tell this story for some time. It’s his story, but not his alone. It’s also the story of those who lived and died alongside him, in Viet Nam and in that other battle, for justice and safety under the shield of the law, that is fought daily in the streets of every big city by every honest cop. In his case, the city was the Naked City and the cop was a Latino. And the battle was neither for the civilians alone, nor just against the bad guys in the street. Sometimes the bad guys were in the Department. And sometimes the people who needed protection were the honest cops.”

Police-Writers.com now hosts 501
police officers (representing 208 police departments) and their 1057 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.