The Truth About Stop-And-Frisk

The truth about stop-and-frisk When cops act like professionals

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Monday, June 18, 2012, 4:28 AM With all of the talk about the dehumanizing, embittered and deeply cynical attitudes toward law enforcement brought on by the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy, a basic point is usually missed by detractors and defenders of the controversial law enforcement strategy.

The key is professionalism. If the cops can be professionals while out there on the streets, then all that talk of racism has little meaning.

A few years ago, I was told a story by a female cop who was astounded by two fellow officers whom she thought some of the most racist people in law enforcement she had ever met.

Every day, they threw around racist slurs with such casual intensity that one might have thought they were rappers on the side. Many of her colleagues were disturbed by these officers, who did not seem to care whom they rankled as they changed into their uniforms before going out to do their work.

One day, according to the female cop who told me the story, a building caught fire in Bedford- Stuyvesant, and when the two foul-talking cops got there, no fire trucks had arrived because it was summer and they had been slowed down somewhere along the way on the clogged streets of Brooklyn.

Up several floors, a black woman with two or three kids was trapped with smoke billowing out of the windows. The woman saw the cops and threw each of her children down to them — all of whom they managed to catch.

Still no fire trucks.

The woman was trapped. And so the two cops took some blankets out of the trunk of their squad car, hosed them down and went up the several flights, risking their lives in the process.

They brought the mother down to safety. She was reunited with her children, while the cops went to the hospital for treatment of smoke inhalation.

As I understand, a few days later, the two cops returned to the precinct house and began tossing around racial slurs as if nothing had happened.

Another cop, disgusted by their talk, called them on it, asking how they could have risked their lives saving a black woman during a fire but then come to work talking about black people as if they were all escapees from “Planet of the Apes.”

Full of chilly ire, one of them said, “What do you expect? We are cops. C-O-P-S. We got hired to be professionals, nothing else. We were just doing our jobs. What we did is what cops do. If you aren’t ready to be a pro, go look for another kind of job.”

Professionalism does not trump bigotry, but I would rather hope for it than wait around for the “all we need is love” solution. One of the central problems of bigotry is that the worst are held up as universal symbols of the entire group.

Not only that particular person is bad but all of them are — and we had better punish them for being what we know all of them to be, some version of scum.

The NYPD needs to root out any actions or dictates that impair its cops’ professionalism.

But the same can be said of the priesthood, the teachers union and any other group in our society where good has the possibility to be tainted with evil.

As far as I can tell, professionalism solves far more problems than it causes, providing a way the right things can transcend even their lower sources. [email protected]