R. Barry Andrews
R. Barry Andrews has spent nearly half a century in and around law enforcement. He was sworn in as a peace officer in 1978 with the Village of Cleves, Ohio Police Department, and went on to serve twenty-three years as a sworn private police officer in and for the City of Cincinnati, providing crowd management for Cincinnati Bengals and University of Cincinnati football. He achieved the rank of Captain.
In 1989 he founded the Police Training Institute, a national non-profit law enforcement training organization, and served as its Executive Director for twenty-three years. Under his direction, PTI developed and delivered advanced training to more than five thousand officers from city, county, state and federal agencies. In May of 2006 he was at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, delivering a Field Training Officer program for the FBI Police.
He is retired now, though he keeps a toe in.
The novels come out of that career. Police officers are known for their stories, and Barry has spent decades collecting them — his own, and those of the officers he trained and stayed in touch with. He weaves the best of them together into fiction set in Cincinnati, his home town, where the procedure is right and the streets, the bars and the restaurants are the real ones.
His novels, in order:
- The New Recruit
- The Female Recruit
- The Black Recruit
- The Police Chief
- The Old Recruit
- The Partners
Barry sells and signs his books in person — at craft fairs, local markets, and book festivals. A good number of his readers met him across a table before they ever opened one of his novels.
He also writes here about the work itself: use of force and the standard courts actually apply to it, the prosecutions that follow, what training can and cannot fix, and how all of it gets covered. He has been publishing those pieces since 2017.
As featured in 2021 on WCPO’s, “Cincy Lifestyle”….