And Be Careful Out There

A wry and fatalistic cop once told me that every single night he went out on patrol, he went expecting to be killed. “That way,” he said, “if I am, it won’t come as so much of a surprise.”

His name was Steve Terry. We were friends for years before he moved away, and I learned much from him about the fears that were a part of his nights on the street.

Instead of dying, he quit police work and went to Reno. To the best of my knowledge, he’s still there, working as a security guard in the relative safety of slot machines.

While his observation about being killed may have emerged more from a sense of irony than reality, it told me something about what goes through a cop’s mind and what shapes his attitudes toward the rest of us.

To Terry, a partially opened window held a sniper, alleys were staging areas for ambushes, traffic stops were invitations to hell and every shadow cast in the street lights was a guy with a gun waiting to kill a cop.

As the years passed, I came to respect what policemen were going through. Salesclerks don’t go to work every day expecting to be killed. Neither do meter readers, carpenters, cosmetologists or, for that matter, journalists.

But I know, because I’ve heard it from others since Terry moved away, that while cops may not expect to be killed, they know it’s an increasing possibility in the lawless, crack-oriented, gun-crazy society that exists. The shadows are real. Cops are in jeopardy.

*

I mention this in response to a letter from a sergeant with the Monrovia Police Department. His name is Bill Crawford, and he wants a little respect.

Normally I don’t respond from the pulpit to people who write letters complaining about something I wrote. But this guy had a point.

In a recent column about the videotaped beating of teen-ager Felipe Soltero by Compton policeman Michael Jackson, I seemed to compare the pain suffered by Soltero to the earlier deaths of two other Compton policemen, Kevin Burrell and James MacDonald.

And then, to make matters worse, I seemed to go on to say the beating was more “unsettling” than their murder. Forget that a paragraph later, I tried to cast it all in a somewhat proper light. The damage was done, and Bill Crawford, a cop for 15 years, wouldn’t let it pass.

He wrote, “Your type of reasoning is ridiculous, when you consider the devastation that a coldblooded murder brings to family, friends and co-workers, as compared to the minor injuries that Soltero has. Last I heard he was still walking, talking and breathing. That’s a whole lot more than Burrell and MacDonald are doing.”

Crawford goes on to discuss a growing lack of respect for his profession and blames at least part of it on the media. He mentions an incident in Texas in which a policeman was killed. The murder was caught on a video camera mounted on the officer’s patrol car.

“How many times has that video been shown on the nightly news?” Crawford asks. “I think the first answer is just a few, and I would guess if you saw it at all, it was probably only once.”

*

I began with Terry to illustrate my empathy with cops. Since that friendship a long time ago, I’ve known a lot of them. I’ve drunk with them, played poker with them, written about them and created two TV series about them.

I’ve been to their funerals too. I’ve seen the long motorcades, listened to the sad words, and stood in silence to the ruffle of drums and the skirl of bagpipes. I’ve heard taps played over their graves.

I telephoned Crawford to explain that to him and we talked about his feelings for colleagues who have died in the line of duty. There were 161 of them nationwide last year. “For them,” he said simply, “we are in a state of mourning every day of our lives.”

The point Crawford was trying to make was that police officers feel pain and sadness and fear and despair, even as you and I do.

“We’re human,” he said. “We’re your brothers, your sisters, your mothers, your sons, your cousins. We shop, we eat dinner, we go to movies. We’re no different. We’re you.”

Not quite, Bill Crawford. You’re more. You’re our thin blue line against violence, our staunch symbols of an orderly society. We expect bad guys to beat and kill. From you, we expect restraint and good judgment.

That doesn’t excuse the awkward syntax of that earlier column. A kid beaten by a cop deserves atonement. Cops killed in the line of duty deserve our respect, our memory and our awareness of the dangers they face.

So be careful out there, Bill Crawford. And be wise.