"The New Centurions" is likely the most autobiographical of Wambaugh's novels. He provides a straightforward narration of events with little use of flashback. Each chapter is written in the third person from the point of view of one of the three protagonists. They have no contact with each other once they graduate from the academy, but their paths are similar and converging. Like Wambaugh, his protagonists move from a few years of uniformed patrol in minority districts to plainclothes assignments in juvenile and vice work, experiences which so affected Wambaugh that he returns to them repeatedly as plot elements in his fiction.