EDITOR’S PAGE

“Your article about Rodney Clark was terrible. Call out to Southeast Patrol and arrange to ride in South Dallas for a couple of nights.”

-Anonymous letter to D Magazine,

June 1987



As a matter of fact, we have. Through the years D has written numerous stories about policemen, and a number of them have involved riding in squad cars, Just last October. Richard West sketched a stirring portrait of a West Dallas beat cop struggling to balance the proverbial “5 percent terror” against endless routine demands on his time. I spent a thrilling night several years ago cruising with DPD’s DWI squad looking for drunk drivers. We’ve written about cops who were decorated, cops who were feared, cops who’ve gone bad, and cops who’ve gone underground.

Stories about police officers invariably provoke an emotional outpouring of praise or rebuke. Our recent feature on the Dallas police officer who provided damaging testimony against a slain fellow officer, Gary Blair, in the trial of Blair’s accused killer (“The Private War of Rodney Clark,” June 1987), was certainly no exception.

Obviously, the story touched a nerve. The Dallas police force is fiercely proud-and in a great many respects, justifiably so. But at the moment, frustration is rampant; morale is low. Many police officers view the press- and certain public officials-as hostile. The Rodney Clark incident, and our telling of it, was viewed as just one more headlock in the grip of what some see as “cop-bashing.”

For sure, a devastating series of events in a relatively short period of time has cast the Dallas police in a shadowy darkness that is not altogether deserved. Hazy perceptions that arise from half-stories and half-truths converge in a chiaroscuro of negatives; Cops are trigger-happy. Cops are racist. Cops are insensitive. Cops cloak their mistakes in a brotherhood of silence.

Alas, controversy and police work are old companions. Long before Serpico, cops squealed on each other, cops got disillusioned, cops bowed to the excruciating pres-sure of their work. But these have always been exceptions to the rule. The vast majori-ty of police officers are diligent, honest, idealistic public servants. When journalists write stories critical of cops, they often write from an underlying assumption that their readers understand that bad apples don’t spoil the whole crop. Still, readers- especially readers who are police officers- sometimes miss the subtlety.

A common thread that runs through many contemporary depictions of police-from “Hill Street Blues” to stories in the Dallas Times Herald-is that police officers create their own culture-a culture that doesn’t welcome outsiders. Only cops can really understand other cops. Yeah, and you try walking through the darkened streets of South Dallas, and see if your trembling hands don’t hover somewhere near your gun.

In truth, this is a powerful line of reasoning. Most of us aren’t out there answering service calls in the black of night. Violence, even the fear of violence, probes deep, dark places in the souls of men. Who among us hasn’t planned a vicious retribution against any criminal who dared to invade our home or harm our family?

And yet, we expect policemen to be somehow masters of fear and other emotions. We want them to be trained to resist the baser impulses of, say, a self-styled vigilante like Bernhard Goetz. In some ways, it is an unreasoned form of hero worship.

And what are the consequences of our love-hate relationship with our men and women in blue? One is the situation in which we find ourselves right now: a season of escalating crime and an increasingly demoralized and distracted police force. Time spent reacting to criticism is time away from the mission of the police department-fighting crime.

When police officers are distracted, they say, mistakes are made. When police officers are disillusioned, mistakes are made. An emotional series of half-page newspaper ads issued by the Dallas Police Association last spring in defense of Gary Blair offers evidence of communal pain. That Dallas police officers are fed up with being portrayed in a bad light is abundantly clear.

None of this absolves any police officer from blame for brutality, unwarranted use of deadly force, racial insensitivity, or any other abuse of power. It simply shifts the spotlight for a moment from the few who offend to the many who defend.

The strategy employed by those charged with stemming the tide of negative perceptions about the police is to counter emotion with facts. When, for instance, both papers came out with front-page stories indicting the Dallas Police for being the deadliest force in the nation, the DPD followed up with its own. more comprehensive study of the use of deadly force in the thirty-three largest U.S. cities. The police study drew percentages not only on shootings per capita, but in correlation with numbers of calls for service, numbers of sworn officers, numbers of major crimes, and numbers of square miles covered. In all areas of comparison except per capita shootings, Dallas’s ranking fell closer to its position as seventh largest city in the U.S.

Perceptions are slow to change. Positive articles about the many fine community outreach programs already in place in the police department help tell a more complete story. But they cannot erase mistrust in communities like South Dallas. As painful as it is, the Dallas police must continue to work hard to change attitudes there. I am impressed with the way Chief Billy Prince has walked the line between defending the honor of the force and remaining genuinely open to suggestions for its improvement. His is an unenviable task of appeasing an outraged community while not offering it a sacrificial lamb.

As citizens, we too must work to probe thehalf-truths, to look beyond the sixty-secondnews spot. In the meantime, all those valiantcops out there can take heart from the outpouring of local support that follows eachnegative story. Surely many of you wouldagree with this statement from “Drugs AndThe Police” in the March 1976 issue of D:“One observation that occurs to us may saymore about the events of the last few weeksthan anything else.. .when the headlines dayafter day announce accusations against police officers instead of the arrests of heroindealers and other criminals, something issadly, desperately, wrong.”