To research his book on police Mark Baker had to pass a few tests.
”A couple of times I was taken to morgues and shown nice green, ripe corpses to see if I would barf on my shoes,” said the 34-year-old author of
”Cops” (Simon & Schuster, $16.95).
Another time, officers in a small suburban police department decided to give Baker ”a dog demonstration.” Baker was driven to a parking lot, where an officer put on one of the big leather sleeves police use to train dogs.
”Then he called this little German shepherd that was about a year old and weighed maybe 50 pounds,” Baker recalled. ”The dog ran across the parking lot and grabbed his arm. The policeman shook the dog, and it didn`t let go.
”So they said, `Okay, you try it.` I walked across the lot. When I turned around, another car pulled up, and this guy got out with a monster dog. He was huge, big teeth and everything, and he came racing at me. Obviously, the idea was that I would run and hide. Believe me, I had the impulse to do that. But I realized these dogs are well-trained. If you stand real still, they will just try to scare you to death, not hurt you.
”The dog grabbed the leather arm and just about knocked me down. It dragged me around a little bit. But I planted a big smile on my face and acted like, `My, my, isn`t this funny.` ”
Baker, a former editor of Hustler magazine and Penthouse Forum magazine, survived every initiation he encountered in the year he spent interviewing 100 police officers. But he never truly gained entree into the fraternity of law enforcement.
”I never felt that very many of them totally let down their defenses,”
he said. ”That`s just the way cops are. They like you, they feel comfortable with you, they might even be your friend. But you`re still not a cop. There`s still the possibility they`re going to be put in a position where they have to be `us` and you are one of `them.` So they always keep that last little screen up.”
Baker tried to peek behind the barrier by letting the officers tell their own stories. His book is an oral history similar to his 1981 book ”Nam,” a memoir of Vietnam veterans.
Now, using dozens of transcriptions of tape-recorded conversations, Baker has created a patchwork image of the men and women who are among the most visible and least understood public servants. He granted them anonymity in exchange for candor and accepted their stories without corroboration.
To this day he refuses to disclose where, when or how the interviews took place, but he defends his methods by pointing to his results.
”Police officers don`t like to talk to people outside the police department very much,” he says. ”They don`t talk to reporters because they know reporters are going to use their names. They`re afraid of newspaper and TV people. They see them as ready to chew them up and spit them out.
”Police officers don`t want their wives to know everything they do. Sometimes, they don`t tell each other because they don`t want to be seen as less than macho. So this was kind of a confessional situation where they could tell me what they wanted to tell me.
”This is not a big sociological study about what we`re going to do to fix the police departments in America,” Baker continued. ”I didn`t intend it to be.
”I don`t make any claims for the book being the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I`m sure there are some exaggerations, possibly some outright lies. I definitely think there are some apocryphal stories, stories passed down from generation to generation. I also think that because I gave them anonymity it did more to reveal the truth about their lives than to hide it.”
What he found in conversations with big city, suburban and rural police were the contradictions that make the job so difficult for outsiders to comprehend: hours of boredom and paperwork broken by instants of terror and violence, the power of the badge and the gun frustrated by a judicial labyrinth, a fickle bureaucracy that alternately protects and threatens its members, a public that demands protection yet second-guesses every move and, finally, beachheads of idealism eroded by waves of inhumanity.
The people in Baker`s book are a far cry from ”Miami Vice” or ”Prince of the City.” Their heroism and corruption are played out in little ways. If there is a single impression left by the police officers represented in
”Cops,” it is defensiveness. But coupled with the fear of being misunderstood is a certain cynicism.
As one officer told Baker, ”The most important thing to remember is this: The street is there now. It has been there for a hundred years. It`ll be there a hundred years after you`re gone. It`s not going to change. You`re certainly not going to change it. The street rubs off on police. They never rub off on the street.”
This resignation is played out in episode after episode in ”Cops,”
although a certain bravado, sensitivity and humor flicker through. One group of cops indulged in ”the sport of kings” by surrounding a crap game, diving on the pile of money and passing it out to poor ghetto kids.
Another policeman, sprayed with the mother`s milk of an enraged gypsy, became the butt of departmental jokes.
”They kidded me about filing charges: Aggravated assault with a breast.”
Baker`s favorite anecdote is the story of the woman who complained that her next door neighbor was exposing himself. When officers arrived they discovered that the man`s bathroom window was visible from the woman`s apartment, but when the fellow came home from work and went to shower, he could be seen only from the shoulders up.
No, no, the woman insisted, climbing on a stool and looking down into the man`s privie.
”The officers climbed on the stool, and sure enough you could see the man naked,” Baker said. ”They left, and one of them told the lady the only thing she could do to solve her problem was cut the legs off the stool.”
Despite its occasional levity, police work, as Baker came to understand it, is frustrating and thankless. And though they never accepted him fully, many officers craved a sympathetic listener.
”The saddest thing was a cop who really told me more about his personal life that he should have,” the author recalled. ”He was seeing a
psychotherapist, and he was in a talking therapy mode. He was really brutally honest.
”He left about 2 in the morning from the place I was staying. He showed back up about 6. He was frantic because he realized he`d told me all this stuff, and he was afraid for his life and his marriage. I just said, `Here, take the tapes back. It`s your story.`
”You want some incredible philosophical truth about police work? It`s a dirty, grimy job that most of us wouldn`t do, and sometimes I don`t know why the people who do it, do it.
”Basically, we think it`s all rapes, robberies and murders, but that`s not what cops usually deal with. They`re dealing with the societal awfuls the rest of us in middle-class society don`t want to see.”
The best example of that may be the domestic squabble, a police officer`s most depressing and, perhaps, most dangerous call.
”You go to a domestic fight, and the guy is beating his old lady up,”
an officer recounted. ”Her teeth are busted out, and her eyes are all swollen. You ask her, `Do you want to file charges?`
” `No, I love him.`
” `How many times has he done this to you?`
” `Ten or 12.`
” `Do you want to file charges?`
” `No, I love him.`
”You can`t do nothing for these people. There`s nothing in the world you can do. A month or so later you go back, and he`s blown her away. If she could say it, she`d say, `No, I love him.` But she can`t. She`s dead.”
In the real-life version of cops and robbers perspectives often get confused.
”Undercover is a very strange way to do police work,” a detective confided, ”because you identify with the bad guys. It`s a strange feeling to be trusted by someone and then betray them.
”I knew one guy whose kid was retarded. A lot of the money he was using for special schools for his kid. I knew it was stolen money. But I also knew he wasn`t going out whoring it. He was a family guy.”
Almost everyone enters police work with a sense of idealism, but, as one officer told Baker, ”Whatever sacred cows you may have been feeding all those years are usually slaughtered after a very little while. That`s probably the greatest single tragedy that every cop faces. You find out that nothing is on the level. You find out that people die for nothing.”
You also find out that the great majority of the job is taken up filling out forms or issuing parking tickets or cruising and drinking coffee.
”Police work is basically 99 percent pure bull—- because there is just not that much going on,” a cop said. ”But it is punctuated by 1 percent of just sheer terror. And it happens just that quick. You ride around for five or six shifts in utter boredom, worried to death when that is going to happen.” When it does, and you respond correctly, you end up accounting to your own conscience.
”All the guys are patting you on the back and congratulating you,” said an officer describing what happened after he shot a criminal. ”Making jokes about the poor guy. Taking bets about when he`s going to die over in intensive care. I never told anybody, but I didn`t feel good, I didn`t feel proud. I was glad it was him and not me; otherwise all I felt was empty.”
Baker unearthed plenty of racism, sexism, corruption and brutality in his conversations, most of it dutifully recorded. There is the story of the man who hurled ”Carolina pancakes,” a mixture of lye and shortening designed to stick to its victim and burn, at several cops. After the officers subdued the man, they ”beat the hell out of him” and ”crucified” him on a holding cage in the precinct.
”What they did was put a hand cuff on either hand and hung him up on the cage with his arms spread,” an officer told Baker. ”They cut out a crown of thorns from a piece of paper and tacked it to his head. Put his feet together like Christ and tied them with a shoelace. The guy had a beard. I genuflected when I walked in.”
A lot of what Baker heard shocked him.
”But you can`t sit there and go, `My God!` because they say, `Get rid of him. I ain`t talking to him.` So you just sit there and hold it in and get on with it.
”I don`t know if I want readers to feel better about the police,” he added. ”I think the community gets the police department it deserves. If the community cooperates with the police and polices the police, it will have a better department.
”If the community is willing to look the other way when ethnic minorities are abused or while people get beat up, it`s going to happen. If they`re going to cooperate with a certain amount of corruption because it keeps them from having to pay their parking tickets, it`s going to happen.
”What I`m hoping is that with this book people will understand that police work is more than an institution, that it`s made up of human beings.
”They don`t go to an island somewhere and get these people called cops. They`re the sons and daughters and wives and husbands of the people who live here.”
