The new guardians

About this book

The New Guardians: Policing in Americas Communities for the 21st Century embodies nearly forty years of experience in law enforcement in addition to a career in clinical psychology. In search of a better way to police our nation, Dr. Cedric L. Alexander takes us back some 200 years to the Constitutionand then some 2,400 to Platos Republicand shows us how to remodel the warrior cop into the Guardian at the heart of community policing. Amid todays explosion of homicide in our most-challenged neighborhoods and the bid of international terrorism for the allegiance of marginalized youth everywhere, healing wounded relations between the police and the people has never been more urgent. This is the story of one mans quiet, courageous leadership. Cedric L. Alexander entered law enforcement in 1977, as a deputy sheriff in Leon County, Florida, on the brink of profound transformations in America and American policing. In many cities, the nation was in civil war, the police on one side, the community on the other. Wars are about winning by inflicting defeat. As a young deputy, Alexander saw that unending combat was destroying police-community relations. He devoted the next four decades to creating something new and something better. His background combines a long career as a deputy, a police officer, and a detective in the Tallahassee area, in Orlando, and in Miami-Dade, Florida, with a career in clinical psychology, both as a practitioner and an assistant professor at the University of Rochester (New York). He holds a Doctorate of Clinical Psychology from Wright State University (Dayton, Ohio) and provided senior-level administrative and clinical leadership of mental health services within the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Rochester School of Medicine, with special emphasis on counseling police officers, firefighters, and their families.