September 2, 2006 (San Dimas, CA) Police-Writers.com, a website dedicated to police officers turned authors, has added its 100th police author, Richard Rosenthal.  Richard is the Chief of Police the Wellfleet Police Department, Massachusetts, a town located halfway between the "tip" and "elbow" of Cape Cod. 

Before becoming Chief of Police in Wellfleet, Chief Rosenthal spent twenty years in the New York Police Department, where he ran the Heavy Weapons and Undercover Weapons Training programs and, as a detective in the Bronx dealt with homicide, narcotics, and armed robbery. Before joining the NYPD, he worked for U.S. Air Force military intelligence as a Russian language specialist.  In addition to being the chief of police, he is the author of four books.  His latest book, published in 2000, is titled “Rookie Cop: Deep Undercover in the Jewish Defense League.”

According to Kirkus reviews, it is "a strange true tale of a Jewish NYPD cadet recruited into the department's elite intelligence unit to spy on the Jewish Defense League, offering vivid portraits of a politically incendiary era and revealing secrets of intrusive police tactics.  This is a well-tuned portrait of the stress and acrimony that permeates such radical cliques, and of the lonely, paranoid personalities at their centers - and it offers insights into the radically charged violence of the early 1970s. Rosenthal has a fine eye for human detail and a cop's mordant sensibility. Altogether an exciting tale of unusual police practices, and a solid portrait of a quintessential fringe radical group inhabiting insecure, volatile times.”

His other works include two books on policing, “Sky Cops: Stories from America’s Airborne Police” and “K-9 Cops;” and, one novel – “The Murder of Old Comrades.” According to the Wall Street Journal, his novel is "a spicy police procedural about KGB assassins on the loose in Manhattan.” 

Police-Writers.com now lists 100 police authors and their 313 books in six categories.  Police officers have written a wide range of books.  Some are widely used by universities and colleges to teach in criminal justice, law enforcement, police technology and leadership.  Other police authors have concentrate on the police procedural genre in novels, adding realism that readers won’t find elsewhere.  Still other give readers a police officers insight into true crime and life on the beat.  But there are also books on poetry – if the author was a police officer you will find it on Police-Writers.com.