John Cohen

ohn Cohen can't forget that his business comes down to people living or dying. As a local cop in Gardena, Calif., he and another officer saved a woman from a burning building-"her skin was coming off as we were pulling her out," he recalled, "but she lived." And he participated in a drug bust gone bad, where more than 70 shots were fired "in the middle of a crowded supermarket parking lot."

Since then, Cohen-who's only 42-has worked as acting chief investigator for the House Judiciary Committee, as a policy adviser in the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy, and as a law enforcement technologies expert for AT&T. As co-founder of the consulting firm PS Com and co-director of the Progressive Policy Institute's Homeland Security Task Force, Cohen has advised local governments from Los Angeles to New York and has played a lead role in writing the homeland-security strategies of Arizona, Detroit, Houston, and Massachusetts.

Cohen hammers home one message again and again: "The real challenge isn't setting up a bunch of emergency systems that you only roll out in the event of a specifically defined attack. The real challenge facing state and local governments is to make it part of your day-to-day operations," because if a city can't respond efficiently to a routine 911 call, it can hardly handle a 9/11.

Born in Durham, N.C., and raised in Lexington, Mass., Cohen attended Connecticut College, planning to go to med school. "In my senior year, I decided for some reason I wanted to chase terrorists." As a young special agent with the Naval Investigative Service, which polices naval personnel, he found himself working with local cops on drug busts. Cohen decided to switch from counter-terrorism to civilian police work; now his career has come full circle.