Charles R. "Mike" Swanson is the managing partner of Swanson and Bracken, a firm specializing in police promotional testing. He has extensive experience in designing promotional systems and tests for state, county, and municipal public safety agencies, including the Kentucky State Police, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the Alabama State Troopers, and the Georgia State Patrol. He has conducted over 60 job-analysis studies and written more than 125 promotional tests. He has designed and implemented at least 75 assessment centers, as well as written their exercises. Mike has trained assessors from 18 different states and has testified in federal court as an expert witness on police promotional matters.

Mike enlisted in the Marine Corps when he was 17 years old and then joined the Tampa Police Department, working as a uniformed officer in the highest crime areas of the city before being promoted to detective. Subsequently, he worked as the senior police planner and later as the acting deputy director of the Council on Law Enforcement in the Office of the Florida Governor. While working in Florida, Mike earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in criminology from Florida State University. After a teaching stint at East Carolina University, Mike accepted a faculty position at the University of Georgia’s Institute of Government, where he received a Ph.D. with an emphasis on public administration and rose through the administrative ranks, retiring as the interim director in late 2001. While at the Institute Mike trained over 10,000 law-enforcement officers from 42 states in advanced courses such as homicide investigation and police agency leadership. He remains active as a consultant to law-enforcement agencies and has written more than 200 technical reports for them.

In addition to this book, Mike has coauthored four others, including Police Administration: Structures, Processes, and Behavior, and has authored or coauthored a number of monographs, articles, and conference papers pertaining to policing. In 2003 he received the O. W. Wilson Award for Outstanding Police Scholarship. He has received multiple awards from the governors of three states and from the Georgia Association of Chiefs of Police, who recognized his contributions to their association by making him the first Honorary Chief of Police. The University of Georgia twice recognized Mike for "extraordinary work with law enforcement agencies." He is currently working on a novel, tentatively titled The Night Man.

Neil C. Chamelin was an assistant state attorney in Leon County, Florida, and presently is an attorney at law. He previously served as a hearing officer in the Florida Division of Motor Vehicles; director of Criminal Justice Programs for Troy State University—European Region; director of the Florida Police Standards and Training Commission; division director, Standards and Training Division, Florida Department of Law Enforcement; administrator of the Police Science Division, Institute of Government, at the University of Georgia; and director of the Florida Institute for Law Enforcement. He has also served as a police officer in Sarasota, Florida. Neil is author of Criminal Law for Police Officers and coauthor of Introduction to Criminal Justice and Police Personnel Selection Process.

Leonard Territo is presently a Visiting Distinguished Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Saint Leo University, Saint Leo, Florida, and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Criminology at the University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida. He was previously the Chief Deputy (Undersheriff) of the Leon County Sheriff's Office in Tallahassee, Florida. He also served for nine years with the Tampa Police Department as patrol officer, motorcycle officer, and homicide detective. He is a former chairperson of the Department of Police Administration and director of the Florida Institute for Law Enforcement at St. Petersburg Junior College (Now St. Petersburg College), St. Petersburg, Florida.

In addition to writing nearly 50 articles, book chapters, and technical reports, he has authored or coauthored 12 books, including Police Administration, which is in its eighth edition; Crime and Justice in America, which is in its sixth edition; Police Civil Liability; College Crime Prevention and Personal Safety Awareness; Stress and Police Personnel; Stress Management in Law Enforcement, which is in its second edition; The Police Personnel Selection Process; Hospital and College Security Liability, and a mystery crime novel based on a true story, Ivory Tower Cop. His books have been used in more than a thousand colleges and universities in all 50 states, and his writings have been used and referenced by both academic and police departments in 16 countries, including Australia, Barbados, Belarus Canada, China, Chile, Czechoslovakia, England, France, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Poland, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and Spain.

His teaching awards include being selected from among 200 criminal justice educators from the state of Florida as the Outstanding Criminal Justice Educator of the Year and the Outstanding Teacher of the Year by the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of South Florida. He has been given awards by both the Florida Police Chiefs Association and the Tampa Police Academy for his years of teaching and meritorious service and has been selected for inclusion in Who’s Who in American Law Enforcement. He’s also been given an award for Distinguished Scholarly Publications at Saint Leo University, Saint Leo, Florida. He is also a qualified police procedures expert in Alaska, Arizona, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.

Robert W. Taylor is currently professor and Program Head for the Public Affairs Program at The University of Texas at Dallas. Before that he was the founding Executive Director of the W. W. Caruth, Jr., Police Institute, an executive training and police research center funded through a $9.5 million grant embedded in the Dallas Police Department. For the past 30 years, Bob has studied police responses to crime and terrorism. He has traveled extensively throughout the Middle East, Europe, and Far East Asia. He currently serves as a consultant to numerous federal, state, and local agencies on policing issues and practices, intelligence analysis, human trafficking, and terrorism. Since September 11, 2001, Bob has been a consultant to the U.S. Department of Justice working with the Institute for Intergovernmental Research. He acts as a lead instructor in the State and Local Anti-Terrorism Training (SLATT) program, which is responsible for training law-enforcement and other related criminal justice professionals (specifically the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces—JTTF, the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces—OCDETF, and the DEA High Intensity Drug-Trafficking Area Strike Forces—HIDTA) on Middle Eastern groups and other terrorism issues. Bob focuses on the nexus between human trafficking, drug trafficking, and the financing of terrorist incidents internationally and domestically. In 2008 the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences presented him with the O. W. Wilson Award "in recognition for his outstanding contribution to police education, research and practice," and in 2003 the University of North Texas presented him with the Regent’s Lecture Award for his outstanding work on terrorism in the Middle East.

Bob also has written extensively in the area of law enforcement management and administration, community policing, and public policy. He served as a sworn police officer in Portland, Oregon, for six years, three of which were as a major crimes detective. Aside from this work, Bob has coauthored four additional books: Juvenile Justice: Policies, Programs, and Practices; Police Administration: Structures, Processes, and Behavior; Police Patrol Allocation and Deployment; and Digital Crime and Digital Terrorism.