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Fund the Police . . . And Others, Too (concluded)

When police actions go bad, we shout, “Reform the police.” “Defund the police.” But we should be looking at ourselves. We proclaim that we are the richest and most powerful country in the world, but we the people refuse to spend the money to make things better. We are more concerned with taxes than with the public welfare. It isn’t just on the police; it is also on us.

We should have police reforms. We should have better screening of those who become an officer. We should have a national database of problem cops who sometimes now go from one police force to another without information available about their past performance. We should have better training for the police especially on how to restrain potentially violent people. We need better discipline of the police. We need a reconsideration of qualified immunity. But many of these steps require funding, and we don’t want to provide it.

A seemingly simple reform would be to require body cams. Studies have shown police behave better if they know they are being videoed, but these cameras also help the police. Charges of abuse were lodged against an officer in a small Pennsylvania department recently, but he was wearing a body cam, and the video of the incident exonerated him. Both the police and the general public have a stake in police body cams.

At the police forum I recently attended, a police chief said that he welcomed body cams, but he pointed out that not only does it take money to get the equipment, it takes a computer technician to maintain, store, and review the results. The police chief did not have money for a technician to maintain his current computer equipment. He certainly had no money in his budget for the support needed for body cams even if he had money to obtain the cameras themselves. I repeat; that shortfall is on us, not on the police.

But something more is on us. Ta-Nehisi Coates writes a letter to his son in Between the World and Me and says, “But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful—the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive moments.”

Coates is speaking to a sad reality. We are too often unable to fully see blacks as individuals; instead we see them as a member of group. The tendency then is to assume that the worst actions of one of them applies to all of them. This gets ingrained in the subconscious, including the subconscious of police officers. A split skull and much worse too often results.

We do something similar to the police. Although there are thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of interactions between the police and the rest of us each day, we see on the news, the internet, and social media the worst actions by individual officers; we don’t see the professional, useful, helpful encounters. We make all police officers responsible for those racist, brutal, incompetent police behaviors committed by some of them. And so we tend to lump all police together — the good ones and the bad ones. And the natural reaction is for police officers to hunker down in their tribe and separate themselves from the rest of us. This only exacerbates the problem.

The police may need to change attitudes and practices, but we also need to change our attitudes towards the police. We can’t just view police officers as the evil “other.” Recently I taught a seminar at an Ivy League university entitled “Race, Poverty, and Criminal Justice.” Not surprisingly in a course with that title, almost all of the liberal-minded students were anti-police. They would speak at length – and with too little data — of how bad the police and police departments are. I asked if any of them would consider becoming a police officer. They had looks of horror as if we were inside a chainsaw-massacre-movie. They not only could not imagine being an officer, they could not even imagine that a “normal” person would want to be one. The police were completely “other.”

That is a problem for all of us.

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Fund the Police . . . And Others, Too (continued)

Police brutality was on my radar a generation or two ago when I was defending criminal cases. Some defendants when first appearing in court would have fresh blood, ugly bruises, cuts, or contusions on their bodies. They would tell me that officers beat them up for no reason. When we would appear in court, I would list for the public record the injuries and marks on the defendant. The prosecutor gave the uniform reply that these injuries came when the defendant resisted the officers’ lawful, peaceful arrest, and the charges the defendant faced in these circumstances always included a count of resisting arrest. Back then, neither prosecutors, judges, nor police commanders seemed to care a whit about allegations of excessive force. My organization did what the police and prosecutors should have been doing: we started keeping records of the officers who were involved in the beatings to see if we could identify problem cops. I was part of a unit that sued officers for excessive force and tried to collect damages for those beaten up with the hope that the police department would discipline some notorious officers. I confess that we weren’t successful.

Smartphones with cameras and body and dashboard cams have made a dent in this world. Sometimes now we have a video of the encounter. It is no longer just a defendant’s or bystander’s word against that of a police officer. With increasing recorded visual evidence, at least some of the time, a claim of needless or excessive force is taken more seriously today.

So, yes, police sometimes lie, misrepresent evidence, and sometimes use unnecessary force. Even so, we need the police. Besides my muggings—the spouse, too, has been mugged—I have been the victim of a considerable number of crimes—cars, car batteries, car radios, and bikes have been stolen, and the house has been burglarized more than once. The police I have dealt with as a result have been professional and helpful. My world would not be better without police. One day two officers rang my doorbell. They said that they had heard a loud bang from my house and wanted to make sure everything was all right. The adjoining building, once a hospital, was being gutted by a Catholic charity in order to turn it into housing. What the police had heard was from the demolition next door, but I was grateful for the officers’ concern and attention. There are many problems with individual police officers and with police as an institution, but there are many, perhaps most, cops who do want to serve and protect.

Thrown about now is the poorly chosen phrase “defund the police.” The term seems to have different meanings to different people. Its most sensible use seeks to shift funds away from the police to other agencies who might better deal with certain problems. So, e.g., have you or someone you know ever called the cops? The possibilities seem endless. Loud party next door; call the police. Screams in the night; call the police. Reckless driving; call the police. Dead dog in the street; call the police. Shots fired; call the police. Money short in the till; call the police. Men shoving each other on the corner; call the police. Furtive exchange of money for (possible) drugs; call the police. Baseball through the window; call the police. Scantily clad women hanging around; call the police. Tricked out of some money; call the police. Someone overdosed; call the police. Untaxed cigarettes for sale; call for the police (after buying a carton?). People not wearing face masks; call the police. Could any single person or organization be trained and competent to handle all that we ask of the police?

Here’s a personal example. My nonbinary progeny was on the subway when a disheveled man for no reason socked her in the jaw. (The NBP was incredibly proud of taking the blow without being knocked down.) He got off the train at the next stop. People followed him and found a police officer who took him into custody. He was mentally ill. A high percentage of the people who the police interact with are mentally ill or otherwise have a mental disability. P.S. the police took the NBP to the station and someone waited with them until the spouse could come to take them home.

The police are not the obvious organization to deal with the mentally ill or disabled. It seems sensible to have psychiatric social workers or similar people responding in these situations, but it is not that simple. A call comes in and says, “My son is threatening me with a knife.” That son might have a mental illness, but who should respond to a potentially violent situation such as this? Perhaps the best answer is that both a well-trained police officer and a well-trained social worker should. But that is not accomplished by shifting money from the police to a social welfare agency. Instead we need more money for the psychiatric social workers. We need more funds, not just a shift in budgets.

I attended a forum with police representatives and the community in a northeast Pennsylvania county. A police chief said that she would welcome the assistance of social workers for many of the calls her department responded to, but she also said that her budget had been cut over the last fifteen years as had been the money for social welfare agencies. Psychiatric social workers were not available for all the times that they could be useful. The only available responders to the mentally ill (and to the homeless, to the drunk on the corner, etc. etc.) would come from the increasingly strapped police and the overwhelmed court system. When I worked recently in a Florida public defender’s office, the head of the office told me, “We have a mental health facility here; It’s called the county jail.” And that is it how it is handled throughout much of this country.

(concluded October 8)

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Fund the Police . . . And Others, Too (continued)

By the time of the shooting on my Brooklyn block, I had had many more encounters—nearly daily ones–with the police; I had become a public defender. I learned that police officers were not all the same. Some cops were smart and some dumb; some were defensive and some forthright; some were engaged and some apathetic; some had empathy and some did not; some were nice and some were assholes  They weren’t all the same, but still “the police” as an entity applied.

Although they were individuals, it was always clear that they belonged to a particular tribe—the police—that separated them from everyone else. That was most apparent in their dealings with prosecutors. We might have said that prosecutors and defense attorneys were on opposite sides of the fence, but we also knew that police saw us as just variations on a theme. The barrier between prosecutor and defender was a temporary, professional thing. We might be drinking together in the evening, and we might switch sides in the future. To the outsider, the police and the prosecutors appeared to be on the same side, but both police and prosecutors knew better. Both had the job of enforcing the law, but the police held themselves apart. Police officers are individuals, but they share a life that is different from the lives of lawyers—and doctors, teachers, plumbers, construction workers, and computer programmers. The police are a tribe distinct from the rest of us.

My early work as a lawyer was defending drug cases. The prosecution’s primary witnesses were invariably police officers, and often the only chance of winning an acquittal was to convince the jury that the arresting officers were not telling the truth. Jurors seldom wanted to believe that, and it was easier for them to think that a cop was mistaken rather than that he was lying. Sometimes, however, the only possible way to an acquittal (which did not happen regularly) was to argue that the cops were liars. Did they lie? Probably not as often as I suggested, but without a doubt they did.

For example, when a defendant was first brought to court, I would go into the holding cells and inform him of the charges. I might say, “The officers said that you had in your jacket seventy-two glassine envelopes containing what looked like heroin, but we will have to wait for the lab report about the envelopes’ contents.” This was sometimes met with the shout, “That’s a lie. I had over 150 bags!” I would look him in the eyes and say, “So let me understand. You want me to tell the judge that you had even more drugs than what you are charged with?” First a look of bewilderment, then one of understanding, and then one that recognized the uncomfortable reality of his predicament. And then a look of even greater hatred for the police.

Maybe on rare occasions unvouchered drugs were for the cop’s use or for sale, but often they would go for the maintenance and development of informants who often had a drug habit. Enforcement of drug laws has always been a messy, dirty business. On the other hand, there have been famous instances of police corruption in which cops did profit from seized drugs.  One of my first big cases involved a special narcotics unit best known for the French Connection case that ended up in a movie in which vouchered drugs went missing. In my own case, pounds of heroin had been seized, analyzed, weighed, and sent to the police office where evidence was kept. Before the trial, which was several years after the seizure, the white powder, which was in several packages, was analyzed and weighed again. Package A weighed more than it had twenty-eight months before. I questioned the police lab guy about this discrepancy, and he said that a powdery substance, even though sealed in layers of police plastic, could draw water out of the air and, thus, weigh more now than it did years ago. He loved saying “deliquescent.” I asked about Package B which, we (and the jury) were told, was secured and stored precisely the same as Package A. I then went back to the lab reports. Package B, treated the same as Package A, now weighed less than it had when it came into police custody. So I asked how it could that the powder in one package had drawn water from the air but the other had apparently lost water to the air. The lab tech had no explanation. He didn’t use the words, but in essence he said, “It is what it is.”

Underlying this was a basic fact about the drug laws. We might have said informally that the police had seized “two pounds of heroin,” but in fact, the true legal terminology was “two pounds of powder containing heroin.” Whether the two pounds contained one percent heroin or fifty percent heroin, it was the same crime. The level of the crime was set by the total weight of the powder, not the proportion of drugs in the powder. Cutting the powder was not unknown. Take two pounds of the powder, remove one pound, and fill the package back up with Gold Medal flour. (For reasons I never knew, the flour cutting agent was always said to be Gold Medal, not Robin Hood or Hecker’s or some other flour.) There would still be two pounds of a powder containing heroin. I don’t know if this had happened in my case, but something odd was going on and I said so. The jury was skeptical of the police and acquitted my client of the heroin charges. (He was convicted of possessing a sizeable amount of marijuana—I think it was nine pounds—and went to jail for nine years, which was a lot less than the life sentence he would have received for possessing kilograms of heroin.)

Money was also undercounted. I might tell the defendant at that first court appearance, “The criminal complaint says that you had 28 bags of heroin and $742 in small bills.” Sometimes the defendant would reply, “That’s a lie. I had over $1,500!” And I would say, “You say you don’t have a job. You can’t explain how you had $742 much less twice as much.” The defendant would absorb this, and it was not mentioned in court. I never believed that the pilfered money was going to informants. I only hoped that it made the cops’ kids’ lives better.

So, yes, cops lied. Whenever there is enforcement of what might be called lifestyle crimes—drugs, prohibition, prostitution—lying and corruption too often follows, but the lack of the truth is not confined to these areas. What were called “turnover arrests” also caused lying. In New York City, an arrest required paperwork and custody. This was the job of the arresting officer, but if the arrest happened late in the shift, the duties might carry on past the scheduled quitting time. Often the officer was happy for this (and this could affect the timing of arrests) because overtime pay was involved. But the officer might have been tired and needed sleep or had family obligations or whatever, and the officer wanted to leave on time. The officer might then turn this arrest over to a colleague coming on duty or who wanted overtime. The arresting officer would explain why the person had been arrested, and the second officer would do the paperwork as if he had wielded the handcuffs. Of course, this was not the truth, but most often there was little risk that the lie would come out. Almost always the defendant took a plea bargain. However, once in a while, such a case went to trial, and interesting situations could arise.

One sticks in my mind.  A man with many previous convictions was charged with possessing a loaded handgun in Times Square. On the evening before jury selection was to begin, I got a call from my prosecutorial counterpart who told me that the “arresting” cop was lying. It had been a turnover arrest. I was almost amused. I had not had a viable defense before the call. The defendant, because of his prior convictions, would not be offered a meaningful plea bargain. His sentence was going to be the same as if he went to trial and lost, and thus a miracle verdict, unlikely as it was, was the only possible hope. “Great,” I thought. “For the first time, I can actually prove the police are lying, but if the real arresting officer comes into court and explains everything, I am still facing seemingly irrefutable proof that my client possessed the gun. I can prove the cops were lying, and we are still going to lose.” My lawyerly ass was saved, however, because the District Attorney decided to dismiss the case. (I was told later that the prosecutors went through a good deal of soul searching as to whether the cops should be charged with crimes. They were not.)

In these turnover cases, and even when a lesser amount of drugs was vouchered than seized, the police were not trying to frame an innocent person. They felt that they had a guilty person and that that guilty person would still be prosecuted and punished. Even if officers were not telling the full truth, I could understand why and was not sure how I would have reacted had I been in their shoes.

However, it is not this level of police misconduct that has drawn the recent ire, protests, and calls for reform. It is unnecessary or wrongful police violence.

(Continued October 5)

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Fund the Police . . . And Others, Too (Continued)

I have been robbed at knifepoint Chicago and Brooklyn. These robberies could only have been prevented or deterred by the kind of huge police force with a presence every ten yards that is only imagined by dystopian screenwriters and novelists. And this is not a police force that I want. For me, there is a vague line between being comforted by the presence of security forces and being frightened by them. In response to some violent incident in the University of Chicago vicinity when I was there decades ago, the university’s security force started patrolling the campus and environs with German Shepherds after dark. That sight always made me more fearful with my unconscious thought no doubt being, “It must be incredibly dangerous if campus cops have to go out with dogs.” I may have been wary before, but those animals told me I should be really scared.

My reaction should hardly have been surprising. People of my generation had watched those nightly news shows in which police led by Bull Connor had attacked civil rights demonstrators in the South with clubs and fire hoses and  dogs. The images of those canines’ canines ripping into human flesh could not be forgotten and were brought back to me on those campus nights. The year before I arrived there, Martin Luther King, Jr. had led civil rights demonstrations in Chicago protesting segregated housing and police practices. While dogs may not have been used to quell the demonstrators, Chicago authorities and the police had not given an open-armed welcome to these criticisms of their city. Even though I had not been part of those civil rights demonstrations, hostility between minorities and the police and the city’s administration were high.

Although I had not participated in those civil rights demonstrations, I was part of the anti-Vietnam War movement. My three years in Chicago was a time of Yippies, Weathermen, the counter-culture, SDS and SNCC, mass demonstrations, tear gas in Grant Park, and what were labeled police riots. Like many who opposed the war I wore a kind of uniform of distinctive clothing. Our hairstyles, facial hair, and glasses made us identifiable with the result that insults, the finger, and threats of violence from others occurred. Half-way through law school I moved several miles west from the university neighborhood to a white working-class neighborhood peppered with George-Wallace-for-President signs. I could feel every eye on me as I walked down the street. Porch conversations stopped as neighbors interrupted each other so all could stare at my passage. I was followed by a manager in the grocery store. I was told that I was unwelcome in a neighborhood bar. For the first time in my life, I had an inkling of what many black people must feel every day of their life, but mine was not a permanent condition. After months, as those I encountered realized that I was polite and respectful (and had a pretty girlfriend), most accepted my presence, often nodded, and sometimes even smiled at me. The grocery clerk came to ask about the not-yet-spouse, neighborhood kids sought me out for conversation (they told me that they called me “hippie man”), and I even made some friends.

Even though I came to be accepted in my new neighborhood, I also started to feel what many blacks must feel every day — a wariness of the police. I had seen recurrent paragraphs in the local papers about violence coming out of a traffic stop with the driver injured or even killed by the police. Back then I did not know the phrase DWB—driving while black, but I and my cohort had more than a little fear of being stopped by the police; call it DAW, driving while anti-war. Weekend parties were periodically interrupted by a phone call from someone who had been arrested and was in a precinct lockup. A collection would be taken for bail money. The conversation that black parents had with their kids now applied to us: Don’t flout traffic laws; if stopped, keep your hands in the ten and two positions on the steering wheel; don’t make any move until the police tell you to; be respectful and polite even if it you think you were stopped for no legitimate reason. I followed this advice the four times I was pulled over driving my VW during my three years in Chicago. (I have been stopped three times in my fifty years of driving since then.)

However, while I was wary of the police, I did not approve of the demonstrators who shouted “pigs” at them. Those individual officers were not the enemy. I assumed that they had come from the same lower economic strata as I had, and I felt a kinship with them. Furthermore, I saw a societal and governmental system of racism and war leading many officers to be trapped in their roles. The way to win the hearts and minds of those police officers was not by yelling epithets at them.

I may have also been different from my longhaired university colleagues not only because I abhorred yelling “pigs” at the police, but also because, although I found many actions by the police reprehensible, I came to appreciate police work more and more. I did and do believe that laws need to be enforced and that is often a difficult, scary task. This was reinforced on my only Night-with-a-Cop. The Chicago Police knew they had a public relations problem. One way to counteract this image was to allow students (it may only have been law students) to spend a night in a squad car with a cop on patrol. I drew an overnight slot on a winter night. In those days, Chicago used one-officer patrol cars, so it was just me and the officer. As we drove up and down the streets assigned to him, I was struck by how lonely this was. Normally for eight hours he was alone in the dark, and since I was still shy around adults, it was not much better for him with me along. Think what it would do to your emotions and psyche if you drove at 3 A.M. around city streets by yourself night after night.

It turned out to be a quiet night. We got few calls. I only remember two. The first brought us to the scene of a fire. The fire truck was blocking the narrow street with hoses strewn about and ice accumulating in the cold weather. We were there because a very drunk man was driving his already beat-up car into the pumper’s bumper. When there was no effect, he would do it again and again. He kept shouting with slurred words, “Get out of my way! You’re blocking the road!” Bang; no effect; more shouts. The officer politely got the man to park his car at the curb and then convinced him to get out of the car. The officer made a call, and someone came to take the man away, either to sober up or to be charged with drunk driving or perhaps malicious mischief.

Although this all seemed a bit humorous, the other call I remember — the report of a “domestic disturbance–was not. The building was a five-story walkup with an unsecured entrance. The officer had put in a call for backup assistance, but he was the first to arrive, and as was the protocol, he went in without another officer. The apartment was on the top floor. It seemed as if people from every apartment had poured into the hallways and landings to watch the two of us walk up; but no one said a word. I realized that the officer had no idea what awaited him at the end of the climb: people yelling at each other; someone hit with a cast iron pan; people crying and hugging and forgiving; a butcher knife imbedded in a gut; a person with a gun; two people with guns. Of course, I was scared, and I admit I lagged a floor or two behind him. When I entered the apartment, I saw a group of people. One person had been cut on the forearm, probably by a steak knife on a table nearby, and another young man had apparently already said that he had done it. The officer was calm and polite and said that he was calling for medical assistance for the one but that the other would have to be taken into custody. This brought howls of protest that was not necessary: “It’s over.” “He’s sorry.” “He was provoked.” But the young man was handcuffed and taken out of the building followed by many staring eyes and now some mutterings about “the police.”

I thought about what it was like walking up five flights night after night for twenty or more years not knowing what situation awaited at the top. Some of the time it was going to dangerous for the officer and might require instantaneous decisions with tremendous consequences. And, of course, I was thankful that this was not one of those nights.

I had similar thoughts a few months later. The woman who lived in the apartment behind me banged on my door. She was close to hysterical. She had returned home finding her doors bolted from the inside. She had just kicked out a boyfriend, and she was afraid that he was lying in wait for her. I called the police, and a lone officer quickly came. Backup was coming, but that responding officer broke into Jean’s apartment alone. I was a few feet behind him (this time definitely wondering what the Hell I was doing), but I again realized that the cop had no idea what waited for him on the other side of the door. This was his job—to go into places that might be dangerous and, at least some of the time, were. Again, this time, I am happy to report, it was not. The ex-boyfriend had destroyed much of Jean’s new furniture, which was her pride, opened a back window, jumped the five feet to the backyard, and fled.

I had a dangerous encounter with the police a few years later when I had moved to Brooklyn. During a commercial break in The Rockford Files (an all-time great TV show), I put the garbage out and found my block swarming with police. I asked an officer what was going on, and he said that there had been a report of a shot fired. This, of course, concerned me, but what really got my attention was that a cop was crouching behind my car on the opposite side of the street with his gun drawn. He fired at the roof line of a house a few down from mine, and another officer screamed, “What are you doing? The shots came from the other side of the street!” The trigger-happy cop came running across the street and took cover behind someone else’s car. He was now fifteen feet from me, and I could almost smell his adrenaline, excitement, and fear. I wondered about his training and discipline. He, in all likelihood, had been shooting at another cop who was trying to get into position across from the apartment building in mid-block, fifty yards from my house where the shot was fired. A stand-off occurred and a negotiating team arrived. I eventually went inside glad not to be one of those cops under fire.

With the hatred, fear, and disgust engendered in the anti-Vietnam War days, I got the merest inkling of what it is like to be black in this country, but I also knew that this white boy could never really understand. With those police encounters, I got the merest inkling of what it is like to be a police officer in this country, but I knew that this civilian could never truly understand.

(continued October 2)

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Fund the Police . . . And Others, Too

I have avowed or suggested or implied that a police officer was a liar, had been incompetent, had been less than bright, had used excessive force, had been brutal. I have been personally wary and fearful when I have seen a cop. But I respect the police and what they do.

I didn’t have any contact with the police in the small town where I grew up until I was halfway through high school. Then one day I was asked to go the police station after school where I was questioned by detectives. The crime being investigated had occurred in my girlfriend’s neighborhood. I had dropped Wendy off the previous night. (Of course, I had walked her to the door; I was a young gentleman.) I had been driving my father’s two-toned Oldsmobile, and apparently a neighbor thought that the car had been involved in some sort of incident on the previous night. I seldom drove that or any other car, and although the police kept me for an hour, I was eventually dismissed. Perhaps it was my teenage arrogance (which did not necessarily end with my teenage years), but I was never concerned or scared or apprehensive. I was, after all, innocent. I thought it mostly amusing.

My other contact with a police officer in high school was more informal. On summer mornings I umpired younger kids’ baseball games that were held at what was once a minor league stadium. The program was supervised by a police officer, who, after his midnight-to-eight shift, came to the ballpark. He seemed like a nice guy, but I was shy around adults and learned little about him or his work. I regret my inability to talk more with him. I wonder now what it was like to patrol my hometown and the stories he might have shared. I did not think then about who his friends were or about his family. The kids I hung out with came from a wide economic swath of the town. My friends’ parents worked in factories, were tool and die makers, cabinetmakers, barbers, factory owners, lawyers, bankers, tavern owners, manufacturers’ representatives, physical education teachers, insurance salesmen, clergy, and jewelers. But I knew no one whose parent was a police officer. Whatever world this police officer and his colleagues inhabited, it was completely separate from my world.

I had no contact with the police at my isolated university either. I don’t remember ever seeing an officer on the campus. The police certainly did not seek to enforce the drinking laws. As long as we were on college property, we could have our beer and scotch. This only meant finding a senior to buy the goods and carry it across the street from the liquor store onto the campus. (Done in those genteel days without a fee or surcharge other than one beer for the senior.) There were drinking rules on the campus; underage students were not to drink openly on campus, but it was ok in rooms and certain outdoor places. This restriction was loosely enforced by university security personnel called proctors, and violations were usually met with a mere reprimand. Something more severe, such as breaking a bottle or window, might cause a report to a dean. Never once did it occur to us that such behavior could cause an arrest and trip to the precinct headquarters or to court—something I only thought about a decade later when, working as a public defender, I realized that comparable street corner actions in New York often brought out the handcuffs.

In my college years, I did have one contact with the police. I was sharing driving duties with classmates as we drove from New Jersey to Chicago, and I was stopped by an unmarked car for speeding (which I was) on the turnpike in the middle of Pennsylvania. I was asked to get into the cop car and was driven to a Justice of the Peace where I paid a fine while my college colleagues waited for my return. (I was a little miffed that they did not offer to pick up part of the fine since all of us drove over the speed limit.) I was polite and mostly quiet with the officer. As we got to the court, he said, “I could have charged you for going more than fifteen miles an hour over the limit, and I would have, if you were a wiseass, but you haven’t been.” I thanked him and said, “I was being careful to keep it at thirteen or fourteen miles too fast. I only went above fifteen because I saw you behind me and sped up to get in front of some cars in the right lane to pull over and let you get by me.” He smiled a bit. What I most remember about the drive from the turnpike to pay the fine was that this was my first sight of Appalachia and that many of the houses’ sagging porches looked as though they were being held up by a wash line strung between the corner posts.

Primarily, however, as I left college, I had given little consideration to the police, who they were, where they came from, how they learned their job, or the work they did. I, like almost anyone of my generation, had seen the televised police brutality with civil rights demonstrators, but that was in the South. I assumed that the South was a world apart.

I chose to go to law school in Chicago over what some assumed were more prestigious law schools elsewhere.  After growing up in a little Wisconsin town and going to college in a small, isolated New Jersey village, I wanted to live in a city. The University of Chicago certainly provided me with a new atmosphere. It was a beautiful campus in a beautiful neighborhood, but that neighborhood was small and bordered “ghettoes,” which meant black neighborhoods. We were told that these were not safe for university students, which meant young white people. This was the first time that I lived in a community where people were concerned about crime and their personal safety. These concerns, however, did not cause me to reflect much on the police. They did not seem to me to be my protector; they couldn’t really protect me if I were to become a victim. This was confirmed the first time I was mugged.

I lived in a terrible one-room, one-window apartment with a decrepit bed that came out of the wall. There was no air conditioning and the window faced a brick wall three feet away. During that first hot summer, the apartment was unbearable. I got up one night from my sweat-soaked mattress and decided to make an after midnight walk in hopes of catching a breeze. Instead, I was confronted by teenagers with knives who demanded money. They got it, but they agreed that I could keep my wallet when I said that I didn’t want to have to replace my papers. One said he wanted my watch. I said that a friend had only given it to me a week ago (true) and I would not give it up. The leader smilingly nodded to me, and they ran away without it.

It never occurred to me that a police officer should have or could have prevented this incident. The mugging took just a few moments, and it would have been the barest coincidence if a cop had been nearby when it happened. That was driven home twenty years later when I was robbed at knifepoint again, this time on the Brooklyn block where I live. I was walking from the subway to my home after work on a winter evening when a man walked past me, turned, and blocked my path. He made sure I saw the knife in his right hand and quietly, but menacingly, demanded my money. He got it, but again I retained the wallet. This only took a few moments. Other people were out on the block. I could see my next-door neighbor over the mugger’s shoulder. She yelled hello. She could not see the knife held by the man I was apparently chatting with. I merely nodded in response, and my robber sprinted off after getting my twenty dollars.

(continued Sept. 30)

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Snippets

            It isn’t often nowadays that a stranger asks to take my picture. (In honesty, it did not happen much, if ever, before, either.) But it happened in a Costco the other day. A woman liked my shirt, and after asking permission, pulled out her iPhone, and snapped away, pausing to request me to look cool even though I already thought I did. She liked my tee shirt that read, “Old’s Cool.” And then that mystifying person who looks at the receipt when you exit my favorite store told me how much she liked the shirt, too. The NBP was with me. The NBP bought it for me as a Christmas present. I was pleased

          Her politics are liberal. She said that the defeat of the incumbent president was essential. She had been an early supporter of Obama. She had proudly announced that she had read White Fragility a while ago. The friend was a member of the community’s diversity committee. But she was not going to go election canvassing again this year as she had four years before because the Democrats then had assigned her to a “bad neighborhood.”

          The finals of the National Hockey League are being played. I can’t wrap my mind around the fact that the two teams competing for the championship of North American ice hockey are Dallas and Tampa Bay.

          My Pennsylvania community, pretentiously I think, encourages giving names to our houses or “cottages,” as they are ostentatiously labeled. Flags can be flown, but banners, including political ones, are not allowed. I plan to have a big sign made naming my cottage, “BidenMyTime.”

          The headline: “Pompeo’s Principles.” I was surprised an article followed.

Robert G. Kaiser in Act of Congress: How America’s Essential Institution Works, and How It Doesn’t, a book about the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act wrote that at onepoint Senator Christopher Dodd tried to shame Mitch McConnell. The author added: “not an easy task.” You can say that again.

“The chief use to which we put our love of truth is in persuading ourselves that what we love is true.” Pierre Nicole.

If men got pregnant, the right to choose would be a holy rite.

          Can you even imagine finding Donald Trump lost in thought?

          Are you like me and feel much safer because of the president’s efforts to save us from the dangers of TikTok? Are you like me and don’t really understand that huge threat TikTok is to us and our national security? Are you like me and conclude that TikTok must be hugely dangerous or the president wouldn’t spend so much of his non-Fox-and-Friends time on TikTok? TikTok is clearly much more a threat to the future of you and me and our country than are Russian efforts to interfere with our elections.

          The headline: “Kids’ Remote Learning Interrupted by Porno.” Apparently the sixth graders already knew everything about the depicted sex acts.

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Aphorisms When Thinking About Trump (II)

“O you who complain of ingratitude, have you not had the pleasure of doing good?” Sebastién Roch Nicolas Chamfort.

“Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.” Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach.

“The man who is too old to learn was probably always too old to learn.” Henry S. Haskins.

“A party which is not afraid of letting culture, business, and welfare go to ruin completely can be omnipotent for a while.” Jakob Burckhardt.

“A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.” Dr. Samuel Johnson.

“The mind of a bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract.” Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

“The people who are most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all.” G.K. Chesterton.

“Any mental activity is easy if it need not take reality into consideration.” Marcel Proust.

“Unanimity is almost always an indication of servitude.” Charles d Rémusat

“There is no patriotic art and no patriotic science.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

“Science has promised us truth. . . . It has never promised us either peace or happiness.” Gustave Le Bon

“Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.” Georg Christoph Lichtenberg.

“Always mistrust a subordinate who never finds fault with his superior.” John Churton Collins.

“Experience shows us that the first defense of weak minds is to recriminate.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

“The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.” Thomas Carlyle.

“Every man likes the smell of his own farts.” Icelandic proverb.

“When one had not had a good father, one must create one.” Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche.

“The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience so that they believe they are as clever as he.” Karl Kraus.

“The triumph of demagogies is short-lived. But the ruins are eternal.” Charles Pierre Péguy

“Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.” George Bernard Shaw.

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Let’s Divide Up America

 We are now a highly divided country, but we have had divisions that have affected politics, government, and our society since the inception of the nation. For over seventy years, we had slave states versus free states, which morphed into South versus North. We have had free trade versus protectionism; the gold standard versus silver; imbibers versus teetotalers; labor versus management; men versus women; everyone versus plutocrats; Protestants versus Catholics; everyone versus Jews; blacks versus whites; Italians versus the Irish; suburbs versus cities; urban versus rural; war proponents versus war opponents (and on a different front, everyone versus the New York Yankees; everyone versus Tom Brady fans; everyone versus Ted Cruz; and almost everyone versus that My Pillow guy).

 We tend to believe that our politics reflects our divisions, but it does more than that. Our politics helps to create the divisions and does less than ever before to bridge them.

The two major parties are increasingly ideological or, perhaps more accurately, partisan. When was the last time that there was a conservative Democrat or a liberal Republican? There are many reasons for this. The successful Republican “southern strategy” killed the old Southern Democratic party and thereby most conservative Democrats. Newt Gingrich and Tom Delay made Republicans, in effect, swear loyalty oaths to one brand of Republicanism that excluded liberal Republicans. Gerrymandering has produced more safe seats in both state and national legislatures creating ing districts where officeholders and seekers do not have to appeal across divides for votes. Robert G. Kaiser in Act of Congress: How America’s Essential Institution Works, and How It Doesn’t points out that as cooperation between the parties has declined, the demonization of opponents has become more common which further increases divisions. (Kaiser says this trend has been aided because members of Congress no longer spend uninterrupted weeks and months in Washington getting to know each other. Instead, with modern transportation, they have three or four-day Washington work weeks and then go back to their home districts.) Trump is not the creator of this path of demonization and divisiveness; he is merely an extreme example of its danger. He and other politicians seek to divide with the hope that their cries of the devil will energize their supporters who will turn out to vote more than their opponents.

Besides the major chasms that the parties have fostered, however, politics today creates many mini-fractures in the societal landscape that have been deepened by modern media. Jill Lepore suggests in These Truths: A History of the United States that this started with the 1960 presidential election when the Democrats turned to “data science” and hired the Simulmatics Corporation. (Jill Lepore, who seems to publish something interesting at least once a month, has a new 432-page book out about Simulmatics, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future. I have not [yet?] read it.) That company got punch cards from pollsters of recent elections, fed them into an early computer, and “sorted voters into 480 possible types.” One category, for example, was “Eastern, metropolitan, lower-income white, Catholic, female Democrats.” Another was “Border state, rural, upper-income, white, Protestant, male, Independents.” Such data dredging revealed shifts in voting patterns not apparent before. So, for example, the Democrats discovered that between 1954 and 1956 a small but significant shift by northern Blacks to the Republicans had occurred in eight key states. This helped to propel the Democrats to put a civil rights plank into their 1960 platform and encouraged John F. Kennedy, who had showed little interest as a Senator about the issue, into supporting civil rights.

We continue to see similar data today. Politicians seem to assume that on many major issues—abortion and gun control, for example—minds are made up, and voters and can’t be persuaded away from the candidate they already support. Accordingly, elections are seldom analyzed along ideological lines. Instead, analysts and strategists turn to the 1960 approach but with increasingly sophisticated demographics. “Male whites without college degrees and over fifty living in a rural area;” “white suburban women with children who work outside the home with family income above $75,000 per year” are now categories that are refined and then refined some more.

Of course, this in some way is just an extension of what has been going on since the Kennedy-Nixon election, but now there is a difference. However it was that JFK decided to be a civil rights candidate, this stance was apparent to all Americans. He was basically the same candidate in every region and with every demographic group.

JFK, however, did not have the tools available today. Through social media, the internet and search-engine advertising, increasingly smaller demographic groups can be targeted, and a distinct message can be tailored for each groiup without that campaign reaching all Americans. The candidate I may think I know might appear to be different from the same candidate that you think you know. We may vote for the same person, but we may be voting in essence for different candidates, and a little wedge is driven between us as a result. Instead of broad expanses of shared perspectives, we have a many-fissured landscape that looks different from every perspective.

Our current political process does not just exploit the divisions among us; it helps to create them.

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Bar None (concluded)

I don’t know if my neighborhood bar will return in a way that resembles its former self after the pandemic ends, but I hope that it does because I had many conversations there that expanded my life a bit. Some examples:

  1. Twenty-six years old and six foot six, Jordan said he had a beard because it hid his weak chin and his babyface. He was from Ohio, which got mentioned frequently. He seemed to be amazed that raised in Toledo and educated at Ohio State, he was now living in New York City. He wondered how long you had to live in New York before you could call yourself a New Yorker. He was a bit tipsy because he was celebrating having gotten a contract to teach middle school math in a Brooklyn charter school. He had learned about the opening while working at Trader Joe’s. He also took care of kids. He referred to this as a “manny,” a male nanny. He said he was a baseball pitcher with an 86-88 mph fastball. He had not been on the college team, but he played in a Central Park league that he said had ex-major leaguers.
  2. A tall, blonde server from southern Germany said that she was leaving to attend graduate school in Hawaii. I don’t remember what she was studying, but she was convinced that the program she was enrolling in was one of the best in the country. She was also confident that when she got her Ph.D., she would easily get a tenure track position at New York University. I bit my tongue so I would not dampen her enthusiasm, but I thought that she had a lot to learn about the academic world.
  3. I don’t know remember his name, but both his mother and father were half German and half Colombian. He said that there were many German-Colombian couples in Colombia. Although he was born in the U.S., he had also spent parts of his childhood in Colombia and Germany. He could speak English, Spanish, German, and Polish. He had lived in Poland when he was married to a Polish woman. At 33, he was now divorced.
  4. A woman came from a rear area up to the bar to order a beer. I asked who the group of young people in the back were. She told me that they had all been involved in film studies at Vassar. I asked how many of them were actually working in the industry, and she proudly replied that she had just finished co-directing a documentary about public health providers in New Mexico. She had been working on it for four years. In reply to my question, she said that it had taken six months to decide on the three providers that the film focused on. I asked for a brief synopsis and she referred to the “dog line,” a term I was not familiar with. She told me about documentary makers she admired and that her film had been selected by the Independent Lens series on PBS, but she did not yet know when it would air.
  5. A bit later a young man from the group was next to me. He was a producer of what he described as small independent films and listed three or four movies that he had been produced. I knew none of them or their directors. I said that I thought of producers as being rich. He replied that it certainly helped to be wealthy, but he was not. He said that he also produced commercials from which he made more income than from the movies. He had a new movie that had been shown at Sundance and was going to be the closing selection at the Brooklyn Academy of Music film festival that would open in a few days. I said that that must be a big honor and without looking overly proud he concurred. His film had been picked up for nationwide distribution. He had several other movies that were in their final editing phases. He recommended some recently opened commercial movies, but the one he was highest on sounded too scary for me. I told him about some of the films I had gone to over the last couple weeks that he had not yet seen. I enjoyed our conversation but have not seen him since then.
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Bar None

          Every so often these days, I have a down feeling, as if I am under a black cloud. I call this mild Covid depression, a covpression. I fret about when the pandemic will end, but before that happy day I wonder whether I will be able to return to the life that I enjoyed. I expect that many of the joys of New York City will not immediately, if ever, return. So, for example, before Covid I had been going to the theater dozens of times a year. Broadway may come back, but I especially enjoyed small, often experimental, theater productions. I was amazed how many of the companies could exist, and I expect that at least some of them will have folded by the time vaccines and herd immunity will make it safe again to sit in a place with barely enough space for a hundred seats and a stage so small that the actors had to be careful not to bump into each other.

          I worry about more than the theater in a future New York. New York City may headquarter large corporations and have powerful investment and legal firms, but my New York is a city of small businesses. On my walks, I enjoy looking into the storefronts and browsing in the cramped stationery and book stores, popping into an ethnic or upscale food place, or having lunch in an establishment not much bigger than a living room. I value the convenience of getting screws at the local hardware store, milk at a corner grocery, and wine from an establishment all within a few blocks walk from home. But, I fear, that many of these small businesses will not have survived by the time I can stroll without a mask.

          I do know that the experience in my local bar will be different even if gets back into full operation. Before Covid, I went five or six times a month to a nearby biergarten. I didn’t go to drink much. Most times I would have one or two beers and never more than three. Instead, I went on the days when I had not done some other New York activity, for I believe that every day I should do something in the City. When I had not seen a movie or play or had lunch with friends or gone to a museum or the library, I would go to the bar. I always went with a book and was content to read, but I was always hoping that I would get into a conversation with someone I would not ordinarily talk with.

          I got to know some of the staff and had regular conversations with them, and although I have only seen one of them outside of the bar, I would label them friends. They, however, were laid off when the bar could only serve outdoors. They have had to find some other way to make an income, and it seems unlikely that they will return to bartending and serving at this establishment when, or if, it can fully reopen.

Some of the people who were at the bar frequently have become friends—the Buddhist chaplain raised in an army family from New Orleans; the mixed-race public defender raised by a white mother in Brooklyn who went to law school in Wisconsin—each with a cute kid. Will they be back, or will they have found some other way to spend that occasional hour or two?

These thoughts make me hesitant about returning to the bar. I know that these absences will make me sad and will perhaps bring back memories of the pandemic’s bad times that I will, no doubt, be wishing to keep at bay. If I’m going to feel down each time I enter, I may have to give up the biergarten.

          I may go back, however, if the place continues to attract people who interest me. It is not a singles bar. It is not in a business area of town bringing in people on the make as they pour out of office towers. Its communal tables encourage comradeship. Neighborhood families, especially with small children, come and feel comfortable. People going to one of the nearby arts institutions or the sports arena stop in before or after a performance or game. However it developed or for whatever reason, the place has attracted an eclectic group of Brooklynites, and Brooklyn has a wealth of interesting people.

          Although some of the people I have chatted with are of my generation—a couple from South Dakota; a fireman returning to New York City from his North Carolina retirement home; a father from Georgia waiting to meet his son living in Brooklyn—most I meet are much younger. They are at points in their lives that I have long passed, but the myriad possibilities and paths they present hold a fascination—a writer for CNBC; a commercial real estate leasing specialist; the man with the cover band and a standing gig at a tavern in Manhattan; the advertising guy; the vegan hairdresser; the woman who worked in ESPN films; the trivia-playing woman apparently jealous of me for talking to her pregnant wife. All have offered me glimpses into worlds different from my own.

          (And next time, on September 18, a few more examples.)