… bastard who was trying to give a kid an even break when I caught him running from a mobile home with the goods. The idea wavered when the owner stumbled out with a busted head.
… fool trying to tarn kids over to their parents. I call and talk to some kid’s little sister saying mommy isn’t home and, oh, by the way, mommy wants to know what Jonny did. So the kid goes to jail to lose his rights, his scholarship, and his future career.
… motherfucker buying the coke for the scared kid who threw piss on me from a can. I let him go becuase no parents show.
… idiot who fought on off-duty cop to save derelict with a lip from a belting.
… whose a State police officer that is just like every city and federal officer across the United States. Just a guy trying to protect people from themselves.
… who wants to stop working in this lousy business but can not. I can not let some trigger-happy cop take my badge. I can’t let people kill the loser when he is down. I can’t let you kill because of hate, carelessness or indifference. I’ll die one day protecting the losers you and the Society of Man hate so much because I’m a loser too. If there is anything lower than Black, it’s Blue.
… who personally likes your writing about reality. In your stories I don’t escape reality, but see an end to this senselessness. Either good or bad wins in your story and with the end I’m satisfied because I’m so tired of the war. But I’m one who’ll never agree that all
cops are bad, and one who’ll probably die by your hand or others like them either physically or spiritually in the street.
Whew! Occasionally, gentle readers, the mail gets heavy in here. The letter from the nurse I quoted in PAINGOD [Pyramid V3646]. The suicide note from the woman who said one of my stories kept her going a few weeks longer than she would have hung on otherwise. The unsigned letter from the Viet Nam vet who confessed to all the people he’d shot up in free-fire zones. The crazed postcard from the Fundamentalist loonie who vowed he’d kill me because I was obviously the antichrist. My patriotic whiplash correspondent with the scoop on Kent State. And now this one.
Listen, friend, if you’re out there, and you’ve picked up this book, let me tell you I neither hate nor fear you. Even swathed in Blue, m’man, you come across filled with pain and concern. I would like to meet you some day. But only when you’re off-duty, when you’re not packing heat.
I know damned well there are cops like you. I’ve met a few; and they always wind up like Serpico, brokenhearted or bust-headed. Because police these days aren’t like police when I was a kid in Painesville, Ohio, in the Forties. Friend of mine, a lieutenant of homicide, got a trifle bombed one night, sitting around rapping with me, and he let slip one of the most scary things I’ve ever heard. He said, “Harlan, it used to be, when a cop said ‘them or us’ he meant us were the good people, the cops and the decent citizens and the responsible business community, anybody on the side of Law and Order, the way it used to be in those Frank Capra films. Them meant bank robbers, homicidal maniacs, rapists, guys who torched their own stores for the insurance, murderers, all the kooks. Things’ve changed so much, these days when we say ‘them or us’ we mean anybody with a badge is us … all the rest of you are them. ”
There are lines written by Maxwell Anderson in the Kurt Weill musical tragedy version of Alan Paton’s book CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY — the stage production is, of course, LOST IN THE STARS — in which the chorus sings of the condition of fear that existed (and exists) in South Africa, the fear of the whites for the blacks, the fear of the blacks for the whites, and the lines are, ‘It is fear! It is fear! It is fear! It is fear! / Who can enjoy the lovely land, / The seventy years, / The sun that pours down on the earth, / When there is fear in the heart? … Yes, we fear them. / For they are many and we are few! … Yes, we fear them, / Though we are many and they are few! … Men are not safe in the streets, / Not safe in their houses. / There are brutal murders, robberies. / Tonight again a man lies dead. / Yes, it is fear. / Fear of the few for the many, / Fear of the many for the few.”
That is the condition of existence under which we sustain ourselves in this country, tied umbilically to our police. I’m not fool enough to lay it entirely on the police, the crushing responsibility for this fog of uneasiness through which we feel our way, always on edge, always angry, more than a little mad. Police are just postal people, milkmen, sanitation workers. They are employees of city, state and federal government. Only a lunatic would shoot down a mailman. But they are something else. They are representatives of the System. They are the visible fist at the end of the long arm of government, the status quo, order, the establishment need to keep waves from being made. And in an era when big business, the corporate giants, the megalopolitan conglomerates serve their own ends much more ruthlessly than ever they served the needs of the people they no longer even think of as consumers (we are now only “economic purchasing units”), the police find themselves — reluctantly in many cases I’m sure — cast in the roles of thugs, strike breakers, assassins and harassers for the extruders of plastic, the smelters of ore, the manufacturers of aerosol sprays, the foreclosers and the short-sellers.
Police represent (and in many cases cannot seem to get straight in their heads) not justice, but retribution. Those who were in the dissent movement in the Sixties and early Seventies understand that terrifying fact. They still cling to the naive belief that they work for the Law and the Order, and here in Los Angeles the black-and-whites bear a colophon that reads, “To serve and protect,” yet they no longer assume responsibility (as beat cops used to do) for averting rancor between antagonistic neighbors, for helping drunks out of the gutters to “sleep it off” in a cell till they can be taken home tomorrow, for dealing sympathetically with a woman who has been raped, without asking, “Did you like it?” or “What did you do to encourage him?”
Yes, there are cops like the man who sent that letter you’ve just read, but dig the tone of submerged guilt and misery in that poor guy’s letter. He knows. And why should a man obviously sincerely dedicated to making the world just a tiny bit better, have to feel such pain? Why should he have such a hard time doing the job of easing the anguishes of everyday life for the people he meets? Why do we suddenly totemize and revere the snipers of the S.W.A.T. teams?
The complexity of the problem is staggering. In trying to do a television script for NBC on the uses of psychiatry in prisons, I found myself being drawn off into one convoluted area after another. It isn’t possible to just point the finger at the cops, or the CIA, or Nixon, or the Military-Industrial Complex and heave a sigh of relief. The fear is omnipresent. And it comes from a realization that we are the villains. And even that’s too easy a platitude. I wrote in the introduction to one of my books that they are the Bad Guys: the ones who throw Dr. Pepper cans in the bushes; the ones who get their back bumper tapped at a stop light and scream whiplash; the ones who hate all kids, or all adults, or all blacks, or all whites, or all rich, or all poor; the ones who won’t come to the aid of someone screaming in an alley; the ones who are “only doing their job” and can’t break or bend the pointless rules. They are the Bad Guys.
1
I’m not anti-women. this not expresses only my own opinion and not police officers in general. Further, I’m male.