THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 19, 1995 TAG: 9511180514
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Random Rambles
SOURCE: Tony Stein
LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines
I didn't know Dan Eaker, the Chesapeake policeman killed a couple of weeks ago, but I wish I had. He was a fine officer and something more than that.
Bob Carroll, band director at Great Bridge High, lived next to him. ``He was a good neighbor, a good all-round guy and a real nice person,'' Carroll said the other day.
And in this post-Mark Fuhrman era, we need to remember that the Eakers are much closer to the rule and the Fuhrmans are few and far between. Sure, there are bad cops. And bad anythings you can name. But a collection of celebrity defense lawyers laid down a Fuhrman smoke screen to hide a mountain of damning evidence and it worked.
Not only, I think, did a guilty man walk. The rotten smell of Fuhrman and the myth of conspiracy the Simpson defense perpetrated infected attitudes about police officers all over the country. Granted, I am white and middle-class, thus insulated against the attitudes African-Americans say they experience. That said, I stand by my basic point that the average cop on the street is a man or woman doing the nastiest job in our society with integrity and diligence.
For a cop, courage is a given. The moment they pin on the badge, they put themselves in harm's way. Eaker was killed when he stopped to help a man parked on a narrow road, and a car hit him. The last policeman killed on duty, John Cherry, was stabbed by a deranged woman as he tried to disarm her without hurting her.
My own father was an auxiliary police officer in New York during World War II. He and his partner walked up to a parked car one night and the driver jumped out with a gun in his hand. He put the gun in my father's stomach and pulled the trigger. The gun misfired and my father survived to make the arrest.
It's the nature of the job. On every street, behind every door, there is the potential for sudden death or injury. But cops buck the odds every day. Naturally, we're always glad to see cops and we always thank them for their help and we cheer when their inadequate pay gets bumped up a notch.
Sure we do, just like we send valentines to the Internal Revenue Service along with our tax returns.
Quick case in point, again involving my father: He and his partner answer a domestic violence call. Husband is beating wife. My father grabs the husband and wrestles him to the floor. So the wife starts walloping my father with an umbrella and yelling at him to leave her husband alone.
And state troopers have often told me about the anger and frustration they feel. Anger when they have to deal with a drunk driver who has left twisted metal and twisted bodies in his path. Frustration like the trooper who warned a carload of four men that there was a nasty curve on the highway ahead. He wouldn't spoil their leave by giving them a ticket. ``But it's a bad dogleg curve,'' he said. ``Be careful.''
A little while later, he was helping paramedics take the men's bodies out of the wreckage of their car. The driver had tried to take the curve flying low.
I started my newspaper career as a police reporter in Lynchburg in 1951. I was a smart-mouth from New York City, something of a space alien to the cops in this quiet Southern town. They had to get used to me, and I had to get used to them. ``Getting used to'' included learning that ``Tolliver'' was ``Taliaferro,'' that ``Amust'' County was ``Amherst'' County and that ``Langern'' Road was ``Langhorne'' Road.
But those Lynchburg cops were kind and patient and friendly. They helped file down my raspy New York edges. Meanwhile, I was learning about the way danger can erupt in a policeman's day with the suddenness of a grim jack-in-the-box. Like the day the officer who teased me about my Yankee accent told me two hours later how it felt to look down the barrel of a shotgun. He had just persuaded the crazed holder of the shotgun to put it down and surrender.
Or the time there was a report of a man with a rifle on the roof of a building in Norfolk. I was running down the street to get there when a cop on a motorcycle ordered me off. No matter that he was a prime target. His job was to keep the rest of us safe, and he was doing it.
I've written about some of these things before, but I watched O.J. Simpson's lawyers indiscriminately throw mud, and it made me mad. I am not naive. Not every cop wears a halo as well as a badge. We send them out there every day, though. We tell them to react in every case with proper social and legal finesse.
We ask them sometimes to make instant decisions about defending themselves, decisions that can later be microscoped in circumstances far removed from the pressures of the moment.
As I've said, we ask cops to do the dirtiest job in our society. The overwhelming majority do it well. by CNB