Hold On A Minute

We ask police officers to do a lot in this country. They're required to do everything from writing parking tickets to charging into a criminal's gunfire to rescue a hostage. We always want them around, and if we need them, they never arrive fast enough. But if we see their cruisers in the neighborhood too often, it feels like a "police state" and we get offended.

Before we let someone become a cop, we perform lengthy background checks and, in some states, lie-detector exams. We put them through months, often years of training, on everything from shooting a pistol to diversity awareness. We hold them to vastly higher standards of personal and professional conduct, and we depend on them in our darkest hours. And if we get into a traffic accident that was someone else's fault, we can be expected to trumpet a cop's credibility to the heavens if they happened to witness it.

And yet, as soon as a mistake is made, and an unarmed person is killed by police officers, everything goes out the window. The cops must be brainless, musclebound bozos with no respect for the law or human morality. The term "police brutality" is instantly deployed, and suddenly, the cops are a metaphor for all of the larger ills of society. We can't have them fired or imprisoned fast enough, and this is all before it even goes to trial.

In one sentence, it infuriates me that we hold our police officers to lofty standards of credibility and suddenly abandon it as soon as there are any questions about that officer's conduct.

Are there bad cops? Hell yes. Should they get crucified in the press and should they suffer criminal penalties? Again, hell yes. See the files of Abner Louima or Rodney King. Cops like that deserve whatever they get, for betraying the public's trust.

But when something like what happened in New York or New Orleans occurs- where the facts are hazy and the situation is clearly volatile- why do we automatically assume the cops are at fault? Simply because the victims weren't armed? Cops are trained and retrained throughout their career to recognize the signs of someone who's about to pull a gun or otherwise attack them. Mistakes get made, yes- but when a cop makes a horrible mistake, he's reacting to something else that's happening. Reckless negligence or obvious intent to murder someone are pretty easy to detect.

How easy, you might say? In 1972, Patrolmen Phillip Cardillo and Vito Navarra, two New York City police officers, received an "officer down" call at 102 W. 116th in Harlem. Nobody ever drives slowly to a 10-13. They arrived and saw that it was a Nation of Islam mosque from which numerous fake 10-13 calls had been made by the Black Liberation Army, a radical group formed during the civil rights era. Still, they went inside and heard sounds of a scuffle.

It was an ambush. Dozens of men assaulted both officers, cutting off the door and blocking any hope of escape. Navarra and other responding officers were beaten savagely as hundreds of people stormed the block. Police cars were flipped. A reporter was covered in lighter fluid and set on fire. And Officer Phillip Cardillo was shot with his own gun in the mosque to which he'd been lured. It took him a week to die. The police commissioner later apologized to the Nation of Islam for the intrusion into their building. The NYPD was never "granted" access to the crime scene because the commissioner (in a flagrant untruth) said it had been illegal for the officers to enter a house of worship. No one was ever convicted of Cardillo's death.

You see, that is what I would call an obvious intent to murder somebody. And yet, when a city is coming unglued in the aftermath of a natural disaster, we assume that seven decorated police officers were thirsting for blood when they shot that poor man in New Orleans.

Jesus Christ. When things haven't been fully investigated and the truth is still murky, police officers deserve something approximating the presumption of innocence that we supposedly provide everyone else.