Called to Rise: A Life in Faithful Service to the Community That Made Me

David O. Brown had lost a great deal before the night of July 7, 2016. His academy partner was shot dead in 1988. His younger brother was killed by drug dealers in 1991. And on Father’s Day in 2010, just weeks after he became chief of the Dallas Police Department, his own son shot and killed a police officer and another man before officers killed him.

Then a sniper opened fire on Dallas officers guarding a peaceful protest march, killing five of them. Brown became the face of a grieving department and a grieving city. Called to Rise opens on that night and then goes back to tell the whole story.

Ballantine Books published it in June 2017, eight months after he retired. He wrote it with Michelle Burford.

What is Called to Rise about?

Brown grew up in Dallas, raised by a single mother whose parents and grandparents had lived under Jim Crow. He learned early to stay away from police. His mother worked double shifts to send him and his older brother to parochial school, and couldn’t afford it for his younger brother.

At eleven, during school desegregation, a white classmate invited him home for dinner. Brown writes that it changed how he thought about race, and the two are still friends. He wanted to be a lawyer because of Perry Mason, went to the University of Texas, and left after his sophomore year when crack cocaine hit his neighborhood. He joined the police instead.

The book follows his career through patrol, crime scene work, dispatch, SWAT and internal affairs on the way to chief. It covers his divorce, his father’s death, his faith and his second marriage. And it traces how he changed, from a traditional beat cop to one of the country’s best-known advocates for community policing.

What happened after the 2016 attack?

Brown authorized the use of a robot carrying explosives to end the standoff with the gunman, the first time an American police department had done that. Afterward he said publicly that the country was asking police to do too much. He also invited protesters to apply to join his department.

Who is David O. Brown?

Brown joined the Dallas Police Department in 1983 and served as chief from 2010 until October 2016. He later worked as a television news contributor and served as superintendent of the Chicago Police Department from 2020 to 2023.

How does Called to Rise make the case for community policing?

Through Brown’s own change of mind. He started as a cop who believed in enforcement first, the way most officers of his generation were trained. Over time, and through loss, he came to believe that police can’t do their job without the trust of the people they serve. The book argues for dialogue, transparency and compassion, and it’s built on that change.

After the 2016 attack, he told reporters the country was asking police to fix problems that belonged to schools, mental health systems and families. He meant it as a warning. His answer to protesters was an invitation: apply to join the department and change it from inside. That mix of grief, frankness and outreach is what made him a national figure that summer, and it’s the voice of the book.

What Called to Rise shows a leader planning a book

It’s a crisis book done well. One terrible night is set inside a whole life, so the reader understands the person who had to lead through it and why he led the way he did. That’s harder to write than it looks, and it’s why a good collaborator matters.

Michelle Burford, credited on the cover, is a founding editor of O, The Oprah Magazine and a bestselling collaborator on many memoirs. The book launched at an event at Dallas’s Winspear Opera House, co-hosted by the Dallas Morning News. The 2018 paperback carried a new subtitle, The Power of Community in a Nation Divided.

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