I try to find topics to write about 5 days a week, sometimes 6, because I know people like reading this blog, and I sure like writing it. I generally base my topics on the news. The only news today that relates to our concerns is that California’s study group on reparations has decided to limit them to descendants of slaves. I’m not going to take a position on this, yet, because we don’t know the details. Instead, I’d like to get a little personal and talk about what has shaped my attitude toward cops.
I grew up in a tough neighborhood in the South Bronx in the 1950s. I had guns pulled on me before I was 12 years old. One time, about that same age, I was cornered by two bigger kids who clearly wanted to beat the shit out of me, a scrawny little Jewish kid. I managed to escape their clutches because I was a really fast runner, but they were catching up to me when I spied a police car. I flagged it down; the cops took me home. I was really grateful to them.
On the other hand, I knew cops weren’t angels. A few years later, when I’d gotten into smoking pot, I met a kid on the subway. We went into the men’s room at the West 4th Street station in Manhattan to get high. Suddenly, two cops burst in. They took us to a kind of holding cell in the subway, which consisted of sheet metal walls on three sides. When they discovered that the other kid had the bag of pot in his pocket and I didn’t, they let me go. Once I was outside the cell, I heard thumps and screams: the cops were throwing the kid against the wall. I assumed they wanted to know where he’d gotten his drugs.
I had plenty of run-ins with cops after that. I was arrested in Provincetown in 1967 for “loitering,” a trumped-up charge I fought in court and won. The next year, in Worcester, Massachusetts, I was again arrested, this time for possession of pot and amphetamines. I lost that one, but they didn’t send me to jail; they just fined my parents.
Despite these encounters with cops, I never developed an anti-cop attitude. In my thinking about life and society and my role in all that, I figured out that cops were the good guys. They were the thin blue line that protected the rest of us.
That’s still how I feel. I don’t claim that cops are saints. But I’ve watched the situation in Oakland for decades, and as far as I’m concerned, OPD has made enormous strides, especially after the Riders scandal. I don’t think we can expect cops to be Mother Theresa. There are always going to be a few bad apples. But I sincerely believe, with all my heart, that OPD wants to make, and is making, tremendous progress toward impartial justice. Chief Armstrong is a great, inspirational leader who is taking his cops in the right direction.
All this won’t stop critics from slamming OPD anyway. The situation isn’t helped by our local media, who obsess on “police misconduct” or “brutality” every chance they get. The San Francisco Chronicle and KTVU news are particularly guilty in this regard: whenever a cop gets into it with a suspect—which is rare--these media outlets headline the incident in the most sensationalist terms. The suggestion is that if a cop shoots or hits someone, the cop must be wrong. These media outlets can’t bring themselves to acknowledge that cops put their lives on the line every day, and when someone threatens them, they’re entitled to defend themselves. Yet somehow, the same news outlets never pontificate about the murders that occur on an almost daily basis in Oakland. Why is that?
I was a working reporter for thirty years. I know how the game is played. The old adage “If it bleeds it leads” still applies, only this time around it’s called “If you can blame a cop for brutality, it will help ratings.” All it takes is to have a handful of people picketing someplace and, voila, here come the cameras and eager young reporters, ready to win a Pulitzer for exposing police brutality. Sometimes I wonder how cops can stand it, and why the public puts up with it.
Steve Heimoff