Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!enterpoop.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.metro From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: For readers still trying to detect my MO . . . Date: Mon, 23 Nov 92 15:07:21 EST Message-ID: Lines: 96 \SE B;METROPOLITAN;POLICE BEAT \HD For readers still trying to detect my MO . . . \BY Fred Reed \CR THE WASHINGTON TIMES OK, here we are, some months into Police Beat, and things seem to be going reasonably well. (Any time a columnist hasn't been lynched, shot or convicted for two weeks running, he thinks things are going well.) The closest I've come to a literary catastrophe was - somewhere between my notes and newsprint - the reversal of an officer's first and last names. And a copy editor once caught an ambiguous pronoun reference that might have made a normal woman a transvestite. Oops. By daily press standards, not bad. A few things have come up, philosophy-wise. For example, another editor pointed out that, in a column on patrolling Anacostia, I made it sound as though no one in Southeast does anything except slug women, sell drugs or engage in prostitution. He was right. Alas, it will happen again. The problem does not lie in the nature of Southeast, although there is a lot of crime there. The problem lies in the nature of police work. A woman doesn't call 911 and say, "Hi! I'm celebrating 24 years of blissful marriage, my kids just got full scholarships to Cal Tech, and I passed my mammogram." Cops only hear bad news. And that's all I hear when I'm with them. In this column you will, I hope, get a faithful picture of life as seen through the windshield of a squad car. It will also be a sour and skewed picture of humankind. Second, readers should know a writer's policy and biases. So should the writer. This being a new and somewhat oddball column, I'm still kind of winging it. A question that quickly has to be answered, however, if anyone is going to take this patch of the paper seriously, is whether Police Beat is for or against the police, and how it plans to handle criticism of cops. I wish I knew. As a matter of personal taste, I like cops. On average they are straightforward, practical, unpretentious, varied, colorful and, by my lights, pretty sensible. They don't fare particularly well in media dominated by Ivy yups, princesses, wonks, the aggressively naive, and people who somehow don't seem to have been issued enough hormones. So, yes, the column is consciously slanted to give the police viewpoint. Buy it or not, you will at least know what it is. Criticism is harder. The police do things I know they shouldn't, and others I think they shouldn't. The column needs to talk about this stuff. On the other hand, there is trust. The cops have been pretty good at taking me into their confidence. In eight hours in a scout car, talking about a big metro area full of crazy people, a reporter hears and sees a lot. Some of it could embarrass an officer who has forgotten that he is talking to the press. I'm not talking crime, brutality and corruption but - attitudes, ways of working, tone of voice. How to cover questionable conduct without discomfiting individuals? The best I could come up with is to commend by name, but criticize anonymously. Most of what I see to criticize is systemwide, so nailing a particular guy accomplishes nothing. What questionable conduct? Little but real big stuff. For example once I was with a white officer who late at night caught a black guy urinating, not quite discreetly enough, in an alley. The cop gave the guy a humiliating tongue-lashing. The cop thought he was policing aggressively, maintaining a presence and hassling malefactors. If the bad guy had been a drug dealer, fine with me. But he was a government employee in uniform - a garbage collector, let's say - on the way home. All males urinate in alleys, including police. Humiliating people makes them hate you, which the cops don't need. Especially cross-racial humiliation in an area with jurisdictions that could blow up next week. Another time I was with some officers who were on the sidewalk, talking to someone. A woman, curious, stopped on the opposite sidewalk to watch. One of the cops called to her: "OK, sweetheart, move along. Go on home." White cop, black woman. Wrong attitude. You don't step on a woman's self-respect for no reason, not if you want to avoid riots. If she had been white and well-dressed, or if the guy urinating in the alley had been, the incidents would not have occurred. No, this isn't turning into a civil rights column, and, yes, white cops get plenty of racial guff from blacks. But a problem's a problem. So much for theory. Next week, gun control, I think. Heaven help us. 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