“As a cop, just seeing how some people live, is not easy. I’ll never forget one call. The apartment was one small room that served as home to a woman and her six children. There were cockroaches crawling everywhere. The kids were just laying on the mattress and several were in dirty diapers. You say to yourself is this how people live? You want to help them but there’s only so much you can do. You’ve got to keep your perspective. You can’t change their lives, but you can find small ways to help them. Sometimes just treating them with respect is enough.” – Bobby Hom

A Sneak Peek of Chapter Five — Bobby Hom

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As a lead investigator with the NYPD’s Southeast Asian Heroin Task Force, Bobby Hom spent years keeping illegal narcotics and human trafficking operations in countries such as Canada, Burma, Thailand, and Hong Kong out of New York City. Bobby was born in 1959 in the Bronx several years after his father emigrated from China. After the Police Academy, Bobby headed out onto the streets of New York where he learned what he calls the essential lessons of police work – commanding respect, developing empathy and the hard and fast rule that you can never take anything that happens to you as a cop personally.