Daniel P. Smith was raised by the police. He had a grandfather, brother and four uncles who all wore the badge of the Chicago Police Department, so he knows, better than most, the stresses, motivations and struggles of the person behind the uniform. “I couldn’t reconcile what I know of the public perceptions of police officers with what I knew of them in my personal life,” Smith says. So in an effort to dispel a popular skepticism of police brutality, corruption and laziness, the 27-year-old author wrote “On the Job,” a new book that tells the nitty-gritty about busts, murder investigations and shootouts. But more importantly, Smith says, it tells how officers balance their personal lives and beliefs with the roughness and seemingly detached nature of their job. “I wanted to inspire a degree of empathy for officers—an understanding for what they do,” Smith says.
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