What’s your degree? ... Sociology? You’ll go far. That’s
if you live. ... Just don’t let your college degree get you
killed.
— Clint Eastwood as Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry, 1971
Most days I don’t miss being a cop; being a professor is a better
job. But I do miss working with people willing to risk their lives for
me. And as a police officer, I would risk my life for others, even for
those I didn’t know, and even those I knew I didn’t like.
That’s part of the job. There is something about danger and sweat
that makes a beer after work particularly cold and refreshing. You can’t
learn this in a book.
I don’t know of any other Princeton-grad police officers. That’s
a shame, for both police departments and Princeton grads. Elite colleges
should envy the true racial and economic diversity of an urban police
academy. Police departments should envy the intellectual rigor of Princeton.
I do not come from a family of police; my parents were teachers. None
of my friends was an officer. I had few dealings with police. I was part
of the liberal upper-middle class raised with the kindly lessons of Officer
Friendly.
As a Harvard graduate student, I was planning a comparatively mundane
one-year study of police socialization as Ph.D. dissertation research.
But the Baltimore police commissioner who had approved my research was
out, and in a very tense meeting with the acting commissioner, I was asked,
“Why don’t you want to become a cop for real?” I wondered
aloud who would hire me knowing I would quit after a year and write a
book. He said that he would.
My goal wasn’t to write a kiss-and-tell. The only real scandals
I saw were living conditions in the Baltimore ghetto and a general lack
of support for hard-working police officers. Good behavior, while not
universal, is the norm. This is not to say that police, myself included,
are angels.
I wasn’t a police officer for long — just six months in
the academy and 14 months on the street. But you learn quickly in the
Eastern District, where much of the HBO show The Wire was filmed. With
less than two weeks on the street, I was the primary officer responding
to a shooting. Officers with 30 years in a safe suburb might wonder if
they can handle East Baltimore. I know I can handle anything.
Police officers primarily are concerned with staying safe, staying out
of trouble, and not jeopardizing their pensions. Policing certainly is
a job like no other. But for most police — day in and day out and
for better and for worse — the job is just a job. Ultimately I felt
I was judged as all police are: by work performance and personality. On
the street I received no hazing, and I had no problem receiving backup.
As far as I know, co-workers did not mind riding with me as a partner.
Police officers wished me luck on my book and urged me not to forget them.
I haven’t.
Baltimore police officers rarely gave me flak for being a Harvard graduate
student. I got more flak from college grads for being a police officer.
Maybe it took being a police officer to make me really appreciate the
privilege of an elite Princeton education.
I saw my strengths as dealing well with people, calming situations,
and writing good reports. As my sergeant put it, “Pete’s not
a fireball on the street, but he’s got his act together.”
I could handle action but looked forward to slow nights. Bad weather kept
people inside and the radio quiet. My primary goal, like most police officers’,
was to return home safely every day.
Living in Baltimore, I was required to carry my gun both on and off
duty. I never fired a shot outside of training. Only rarely was my service
weapon — a charged semiautomatic 9mm Glock-17 with no safety and
a 17-round clip — pointed at somebody. I occasionally chased people
down alleys and wrestled a few suspects. I used Mace on one person, but
did not hit anybody. I tried to speak softly and carry a big stick. The
department issued a 29-inch straight wooden baton just for this purpose.
Young police learn that the job has more to do with public control than
public service. Police attack drug corners as if they were brush fires,
stomping out one only to see it flare up again as soon as they move on
to the next. Drug dealers are just the kindling. Police do what police
do best: lock people up. Our nation’s poorest and least wanted are
swept off the streets, sorted by the courts, and collected in our jails
and prisons. But sooner or later they all come back. Right now, with drug
prohibition, drug dealing is an unregulated free-for-all. It’s not
a matter of getting tough — we are tough. But we can regulate street
drugs, just like we regulate more popular drugs like alcohol and tobacco.
I worked in a ghetto. If you really want to learn about the ghetto,
go there. Visit a church, walk down the street, buy something from the
corner store, have a beer, eat. But most important, talk to people. When
the subject turns to drugs and crime, you’ll hear a common refrain:
“It just don’t make sense.”
Twenty months in Baltimore was long enough to see five police officers
killed in the line of duty. And there were other cops, friends of mine,
who were hurt, shot, and lucky to live. A year after I quit the force,
my friend and academy classmate became the first Baltimore policewoman
killed in the line of duty, dying in a car crash on the way to back up
another police officer. Crystal Sheffield patrolled opposite me in the
Western District.
When she died, I returned to Baltimore, hitched a ride in a police car
from the train station to the funeral, and stood in the cold rain at attention
in my civilian clothes with my uniformed fellow officers. Police funerals
are one of the few events that bring together law enforcement. Funerals
give meaning to that often-clichéd concept of Blue Brotherhood.
At an officer’s funeral, police-car lights flash as far as the eye
can see. Thousands of police officers wearing white gloves and black bands
on their badges stand at attention. Guns are fired in salute. Bagpipes
are played. A flag is folded. The coffin is lowered into the ground.
At the end of a police funeral, a dispatcher from headquarters calls
for the fallen officer over all radio channels. The response, of course,
is silence. After the third attempt the dispatcher states the officer
is “10-7.” Ten-seven is the rather unsentimental radio code
for “out of service.” Ten-seven usually refers to a car, an
officer handling a call, or an anonymous murder victim on the street.
To hear your friend and colleague described as 10-7 is heartbreaking.
In this way the few officers left working the streets know the burial
is complete. A few seconds later a routine drug call is dispatched or
one bold officer reclaims the radio airwaves for some mundane police matter.
A car stop. A warrant check. A request for a case number. Sometimes it
just don’t make sense.