History, Management and Tactics

Police-Writers.com is a website dedicated to listing state and local police officers who have authored books. This round of additions to the website includes a police officer who has written an extensive history of one department as well as a police officer who has contributed to the making of law enforcement history.

Sergeant Sven Crongeyer has been employed with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department for 17 years. His passion for historical research led him to write Six Gun Sound: The Early History of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which traces law enforcement efforts to meet the challenge of public safety that from the beginning were both enhanced and hampered by the influx of ranchers, cowboys, farmers, miners, gunfighters, and gamblers. Los Angeles was a den of iniquity that rivaled even the most famous towns of the Old West: Silver City, Tombstone, Dodge City, and Wichita.

Edward M. Davis was the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department from 1969 through 1978. Later, he was a California State Senator from 1981 to 1993. He also made an unsuccessful bid as the Republican candidate for the United States Senate in 1986.

Ed Davis pursued innovative approaches to crime. He balanced his tough law-and-order rhetoric with a boots-on-the-ground policing strategy that assigned police officers to specific neighborhoods in an effort to build personal ties with residents. His philosophy was incorporated in a program he called the "Basic Car Plan,” which divided Los Angeles into small geographical areas and assigned officers to meet with community representatives. Edward Davis, who assigned almost 900 officers to the program, believed that police would be more effective if their duties were tailored to each locality. The officers were instructed to find out which crime problems concerned residents the most and then devise crime-fighting plans.

Edward Davis also created the Neighborhood Watch program which encouraged police officers to spend time in the homes of local city residents, listen to their concerns and then set up effective crime fighting initiatives. Moreover, Ed Davis developed the idea of team policing wherein interdisciplinary groups of police officers were assigned as a unit to small, specific, geographic area. These interdisciplinary groups consisted of uniformed police officer, detectives and traffic enforcement officers working together on specific neighborhood crime problems.

Ed Davis’ programs were highly innovative for their time. Significantly, in the 9 years that Edward M. Davis served as police chief from, 1969 to 1978, crime rates actually dipped slightly by 1% in Los Angeles while rising nationwide by 55%. Furthermore, while subsequent Los Angeles Police Department police chiefs would dismantle or significantly reduce the programs, by the beginning of the 21st Century, more than two decades after his tenure as chief, the programs would either return wholesale, or new policing tactics would involve significant portions of Davis’ ideas.

In 1978, Senator Edward M. Davis authored Staff One: A Perspective on Effective Police Management. The term “Staff One” is the LAPD radio call sign for the Chief of Police.

Gabriel Suarez is a former Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputy sheriff and owner of Suarez International, a company that provides training in weapons, tactics and combat. Gabriel Suarez is the author of seven books on tactics and firearms: Tactical Pistol Marksmanship: How to Improve Your Combat Shooting Skills; Tactical Advantage: A Definitive Study Of Personal Small-Arms Tactics; The Combative Perspective: The Thinking Man's Guide to Self-Defense; Tactical Pistol: Advanced Gunfighting Concepts And Techniques; Tactical Shotgun: The Best Techniques And Tactics For Employing The Shotgun In Personal Combat; Tactical Rifle: The Precision Tool For Urban Police Operations; and, Force on Force Gunfight Training: The Interactive Reality-based Solution.

According to Gabriel Suarez, “Today the police training I offer is a concepts-based, aggressive approach to gunfighting. I’ve taught this system all over the United States, as well as in Europe, Central America, and Africa. The police training involves some range work, but it also incorporates hand-to-hand combat and a good bit of interactive police training (force-on-force). This eclectic method of police training makes some traditional shooting teachers very uncomfortable, but progress sometimes does that to people. I’m not so concerned with fitting into a certain methodology as I am with accomplishing the mission of winning the fight.”

Police-Writers.com now hosts 524 police officers (representing 217 police departments) and their 1117 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.