Cambridge Police

I've not seen many American cops and robbers shows - a few episodes of the The Wire, distant memories of rolled-up jacket sleeves in Miami Vice, a couple of Die Hard movies. I've not seen many but even those few are enough to provide some of the dominant stereotypes... We've amused ourselves trying to find examples of those stereotypes around Cambridge.

 (Slightly overweight) Keanu Reeves look-alikes... (I have yet to see a female cop since arriving in Cambridge three months ago. Go figure.)

... wearing reflective shades... (The sartorial effect suggests the quiet threat of the highway patrolman in Psycho - see image - rather than a practical response to the winter sunshine).

... drinking coffee and eating donuts... (we stayed at a hotel for our first two weeks here, and each morning two squad cars would pull up and four cops would saunter through the hotel, help themselves to coffee and pastries, and then return to their cars. The first morning, in a burst of enthusiasm, I pointed them out to my children and said, "Look, girls, that's what an American policeman looks like." The cops didn't return my smiles.)

... in black and white chevrolets. The Cambridge Police drive low-slung chevvies which crunch over potholes and cruise slowly backwards and forwards through Harvard. Sometimes they stop when me and the girls are on a pedestrian crossing.

We lived in Newcastle-upon-Tyne for the past three years and the policing in that area was phenomenal. We had local bobbies riding around on bikes and stopping for friendly chats with children, police walking around the city centre, widespread Neighbourhood Watch and education programmes. The Newcastle police force is, inevitably, facing massive cost cuts which will affect the way that it polices the area: chatting to children and cycling around Tynemouth don't fit comfortably into the economics of efficient policing. That's a shame. 

In Cambridge, Massachusetts, policing policies are different. When an old man tripped and fell outside the hardware store last week, someone called 911. Within 5 minutes, an ambulance, a squad car and two fire engines had arrived at the store. They always send out all the emergency services to any 911 call here, just to be on the safe side. The costs aren't relevant: I have been assured, by two people who work within the Cambridge P.D, that the force is "loaded". One of the major sources of police funding is generated through road traffic management: any building work which affects traffic flow needs to employ a police officer to be on-site. There is a lot of building work in Cambridge. This is where the police are at their most visible. I have not seen any cops on foot (except when walking through the hotel lobby) or on bicycles. I have seen many many cops standing around near building sites. 

Last weekend, I took the girls to their favorite park. While they played about on the monkey nets with some other children, I chatted to Billy. I liked him. Although our views were poles apart, we chatted amiably while sharing the parenting: taking it in turn to rescue the children when they got stuck on the ropes, pushing the smaller ones on the swings. He was interested in the news and told me that he had been particularly shocked by the recent riots in England, finding it laughable that such a furor had erupted from the police's shooting of one man. I talked about how hard it is to be a young person in the UK at the moment; he agreed and reflected that he knew only a few "bad" kids. I talked about my experiences as a teacher and a volunteer youth worker, musing on the effect of bad parenting and poverty upon children's life chances and behaviors. He told me that he had shot one of the "bad" kids the previous week and that it was the closest he had come to killing a youth for nearly 20 years. 

(Billy was slighly overweight, looked a little like Keanu Reeves, and had a pair of shades visible in his jacket pocket... I should have realised.)

I know nothing about guns (ok, I actually know nothing about quite a lot of things that are fairly fundamental to American culture - baseball, the Vow of Allegiance, how the medical system works - but I know particularly little about guns). I told him that I couldn't do his job - I would be too scared of getting shot, too worried about making the wrong call, too preoccupied with trying to see the good in each person. He replied that it really wasn't that difficult. The "bad" kid last week had put other people at danger. He was brandishing an item which looked like a gun (it wasn't a gun, but that wasn't the point). Billy had no option but to shoot him. Did he, I asked, shoot to disarm him? Billy laughed - that wasn't possible. No marksmen could shoot with the accuracy to disarm someone. You shoot them, he told me, to stop them being a danger. If they die, too bad. He could see the concern on my face and got out his bullets to reassure me. The Cambridge Police use hollowpoint ammunition which has greater "stopping power" than full metal jacket. That means that you only need to shoot your adversary once. One of these bullets will, Billy told me, stop anyone. You don't need to shoot them four or five times to stop them. It's safer. I nodded but I'd run out of words. I couldn't be a cop. I'm not that brave. And I'm not able to stand in a playground with my children playing about a climbing net within feet of where I am and feel ok talking about guns and ammunitions and shooting "bad" kids. 

In Wednesday's papers, there was the story about a retired police lieutenant and a young off-duty police officer responding to a woman's calls that the local pharmacy was being burgled. Both men had guns. As they struggled with the robbers, the retired police lieutenant was heard to shout "Who's the good guy?" and then, in the confusion, shot the off-duty police officer. He died. I don't know what kind of bullets that they used.