What Was a Cop to Think?

MANNERS & MORALS

Cops and jailers, by & large, have a rooted belief in the therapeutic value of a punch to the jaw or belly. Drunks, for instance, have a way of becoming much less troublesome if they are slapped around a little. Desk sergeants are always having trouble with smart guys who want to argue; jerking them across the desk and belting them across the jowls usually makes them good as gold. Then there are characters who don't want to talk at all--until they have ricocheted off the walls a few times.

A cop associates professionally, as it were, with perverts, hopheads, gunmen and bums of all kinds, and he sometimes gets in the habit of popping them a few times, in the privacy of the station house, just for their own good. Being human, he may take a certain natural satisfaction in his prowess and may even decide that he is helping create a better world. He is encouraged in this by the fact that society seldom pays any attention; society, in fact, seldom hears the sound of scuffling, the grunts and the thud of fist on flesh.

Out of the Car. But last week in New York, some of these normally inaudible sounds were accidentally overheard. Cops started punching the wrong people and the people started yelling. The first was a Bronx candy dealer named Samuel Grossman. He complained that a patrolman had jerked him out of his car, accused him of annoying a woman pedestrian, and punched him in the face.

Just before dawn one morning after that, Mrs. George Kronshein, night supervisor at Brooklyn's Harbor Hospital, telephoned the police. She said that a drunken copper had barged into the nurses' home, mauled her, and then staggered noisily into a women's ward. A patrol car arrived and took the cop away.

Into the Jug. Then, one morning, an Associated Press photographer named Murray Becker arrived in the Mayor's office wearing a mouse under one eye and holding his press card like a hand grenade. He had been waved to the curb by a cop for blowing his horn too loudly in traffic. Becker, who was driving his wife home from the New York Yankees' victory dinner, had made an attempt to square things. He told the policeman: "Look, officer, I'm a working newspaperman. We were in a hurry. I'm sorry."

The cop, he said, replied: "Oh, one of those wise guys that carry a pocketfull of passes and think they can get away with anything."

Said Becker: "Give me the God-damned ticket and forget it."

Then, he charged, the cop dragged him out of the car, took him to the nearest station (leaving his wife sitting in the car), belted him around the head, broke his glasses, and had him heaved, bleeding, into the cooler.

That did it. By week's end, two of the cops were suspended without pay, the newspapers were black with the story, and Mayor Bill O'Dwyer had directed the prosecuting attorney to investigate the third policeman and to take the photographer's case to the grand jury. New York's Police Commissioner Arthur W. Wallander cried: "There must be no more assaults on our good people. . . . Courtesy must be the watchword of this department. . . ."

It was enough to make a cop lose his faith in the power and prerogatives of the uniform.

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