COVERING THE COPS

Perhaps the most mythologized figure of modern journalism is the urban police reporter, that tough-talking, street-savvy wise-ass who matched cops drink for drink and wisecrack for wisecrack, and who got rewrite from Sweetheart.

But that reporter looked a lot better in The Front Page than on it. Coming, most likely, from a working class background, he identified with and protected the men he covered, becoming their ideological comrade-in-arms rather than watchdog or chronicler. Rarely did he report on police racism, brutality, and corruption and therefore, for middle-class America, such evils hardly existed. These days, the stereo-typical police reporter has virutally vanished from the country's newsrooms, while the police are often shown to be corrupt, brutal, and bigoted.

Today's upper middle-class, college-educated journalists have little in common with the police, and are frequently to the left of them politically. Brutal police response to anti-war demonstrations and the civil rights movement shook idealized notions of law enforcement. Officer Murphy, twirling his baton and occasionally cuffing an errant rascal for the lad's own good, was replaced by Bull Connor -- or, more recently, his heirs on the LAPD. Meanwhile, police seem increasingly isolated, abandoned by journalists and everyone else as they try to deal with horrifying levels of social decay, hatred, and bloodshed. They seem to have turned inward, talking to and trusting no one but their lawyers and each other.

Against this backdrop comes Cops, perhaps the inevitable television appropriation of the police reporter's role. Syndicated nationwide by Fox television, Cops is one of the most successful of the gritty new telecasts that offer Americans more reality than they ever imagined possible. Taped by crews carrying mobile shoulder-held video cameras, shows like Cops are what producers call "unfiltered" television -- a new wave of reality-based entertainment with serious implications for a news media already reeling from the invasion of talk shows, tabloid telecasts, newsmagazines, and cable-casts.

No reporter or producer narrates Cops; no equivalent of the journalist offers a detached perspective. The cameras ride with the police in their patrol cars, following the officers and picking up the sounds of jangling keys and handcuffs, squawking radios and creaking leather as they arrest drunk drivers, rush into vicious bar brawls, quell domestic disputes, chase burglars onto rooftops, arrive at murder and accident scenes, pursue kids in stolen cars at hair-raising speeds, and get punched, kicked, run over, spat upon, stabbed, and sometimes shot at by the people they confront. Those old-time police reporters would keel over in shock.

Some departments -- in Los Angeles and New York City, for example -- have declined to allow Cops cameras in their police cars, citing legal concerns or fears for the safety of camera crews. Many, including those in Kansas City, Hoboken, and Boston, have agreed to be subjects for the broadcast. Needless to say, the officers selected by their departments to participate are articulate, meticulously professional, sometimes even laughably solicitous. ON Cops, the police thank drunk drivers profusely for cooperating and hand out quarters to teenagers caught driving without licenses so they can call Mom and Dad to come pick them up.

But the officers on Cops are nonetheless revealing, often poignantly so. They almost pleadingly make their case to a public they know is skeptical. An office in New Jersey wonders how the wailing grandchildren of the woman he has just arrested will feel about the police who searched their grandmother's apartment and arrested her on drug charges. A California policeman frets about court rulings that allow lawsuits against individual police officers as well as the municipalities they work for, endangering everything he owns. An officer in Kansas City talks about how serious the consequences of a policeman's mistake may be -- far more serious than mistakes made by other American workers.

What is striking about these sometimes-eloquent voices is that they rarely are heard in the conventional press.

The cameras recording Cops probably would not catch a Rodney King-style beating. The officers would know better than to behave like that; even if they didn't, it's unclear whether the broadcast's producers would show it, since the program depends on the voluntary cooperation of the police. As with the old police reporters, the police point of view is what the audience sees and hears.

But Cops can be riveting, as it is when the camera moves into a woman's house minutes after she's been murdered and lies in a pool of blood, or when it looks over an officer's shoulder as he or she prowls through a pitch-black attic in search of a man they've been told has a gun. In one episode, officers rush to surround a woman who, a caller to 911 has said, is carrying an Uzi submachine gun. As the officers frantically scream for her to put her hands up, a machine gun protrudes visibly from her rear pocket. It turns out to be a realistic-looking plastic toy. The viewer can't help but wonder what would have happened to the woman -- and the officers -- if she had reached suddenly for her pocket or had not understood English or had been drunk or high on drugs.

The media have made it clear that members of minority groups fear and resent the way they're treated by some officers, especially whites from other communities. What Cops reminds us is how dangerous, terrifying, and complex a police officer's job is, and how unseemingly, it is for journalists sitting in safe and comfortable newsrooms to make self-righteous snap judgments about police work.

As angry young men screamed "assassins" at police in Washington Heights yesterday, the sisters of a man killed by a police officer wailed and fainted in the hallway where their brother's blood still stains the walls. "Oh God, Oh God," the sisters of Jose Garcia, 24, yelled in Spanish as they collapsed in the hallway at 505 W. 162nd St., their voices echoing in the room overcrowded with screaming spectators.

-- New York Newsday, July 6, 1992

In Los Angeles, New York City, Miami, Detroit, and scores of other cities and towns, police behavior has led to bitter condemnations and sometimes to rioting, destruction, and killing. Typically, the officer confronts a young male in an urban neighborhood, is or feels threatened, and wounds or kills the young man. If the officer is white and the youth black or Hispanic, the community and the media -- sometimes both -- explode.

The shooting of Jose "Kiko" Garcia in New York City's teeming Washington Heights last summer is a case in point, not only embodying the tensions between minority groups and the police, but also posing serious questions about how the media cover them.

According to the police, on the night of July 3 plainclothes detective Michael O'Keefe and two other officers spotted Jose Garcia on a crowded street and thought they saw a gun in his pocket. O'Keefe became separated from his partners and confronted Garcia alone. Within minutes, O'Keefe was shrieking for help on his police radio; by the time other officers arrived, Garcia lay dead.

For days, local newspapers, but especially local television, aired account after account suggesting that Garcia had been killed for no reason. A deputy mayor was widely quoted as saying that Garcia had no arrest record and never carried a gun, and that O'Keefe had been "abusing people for a long time. There was no reason to kill Kiko." The Garcia family's lawyer said pretty much the same thing.

On the night of the shooting, an unidentified man told WNBC-TV that O'Keefe had beaten Garcia "until he couldn't stand up, and then just pulled out a gun and killed him. No reason." The reporter, shaking his head sympathetically, never questioned his account in any way.

Other eyewitnesses told reporters that O'Keefe beat and kicked Garcia through the inner hallways and lobby of the apartment building into which he had pursued him, then shot him three times as he lay helpless on the floor. Several people said they saw O'Keefe using his radio to beat Garcia and heard Garcia screaming "Mommy" and "Why are you doing this to me?" in Spanish. "He's laying on his face in blood, and then the cop takes out his gun," one supposed witness told New York Newsday. "I ran back to my apartment, and then I heard the shots."

Some neighbors claimed that O'Keefe was not only a brutal cop, but that he had a reputation for stealing from drug dealers.

Not surprisingly, the shooting and its subsequent coverage sparked several days of disorder, looting, and destruction. O'Keefe was burned in effigy, and Washington Heights residents threw trash cans, bottles, and rocks at officers, smashed windows, and burned police cars.

Two months later, a Manhattan grand jury cleared Officer O'Keefe of any wrongdoing in the shooting of Garcia, who, it turned out, did have a criminal record involving drugs. The shooting occurred in a building sometimes used by drug dealers. Garcia did have a gun, said the grand jury, and O'Keefe was justified in feeling that his life was in danger during the violent struggle between the two men. Pathologists found cocaine in Garcia's system at the time of his death. There were no bruises or marks on Garcia's body to suggest a beating, nor were there any signs that O'Keefe's radio had been used to beat Garcia.

The audio tapes of a panicked O'Keefe shouting for help were shockingly at odds with accounts that had O'Keefe mercilessly beating Garcia. Moreover, the grand jury found, those eyewitness accounts would have been impossible given lighting, sight lines, and the witnesses' supposed locations. Other witnesses wouldn't testify, recanted their original testimony, or disappeared. Nor did the grand jury find any evidence to support charges that O'Keefe was brutal or corrupt.

The most detailed media account of O'Keefe's version of events did not appear until two months after he had been exonerated by the grand jury. In a November 2, 1992, interview in New York magazine, O'Keefe described being cut off from his partners in a brutal battle with Garcia that saw the two men fighting desperately for Garcia's gun, O'Keefe screaming for help over his radio as Garcia pointed the barrel of his gun into the police officer's face. "I thought I was going to die," O'Keefe told the magazine. The officer said he grabbed Garcia's wrist, drew his gun, and fired a shot at point-blank range into Garcia's stomach.

Two days after the shooting, in an effort to calm the Washington Heights community (the Democratic National Convention was only a week away), Mayor David Dinkins visited Garcia's family, enraging many of the city's police officers. The mayor's call for an all-civilian review board enraged them further: in September, more than 10,000 cops and supporters demonstrated at city hall in protest. Some of the officers and their off-duty supporters staged, in effect, their own riot, storming police barricades, blocking the Brooklyn Bridge, shoving reporters and photographers. Some were overheard shouting racial slurs.

The protest touched off another wave of condemnation of the police from politicians, community critics, and journalists. THUGS IN BLUE was one tabloid headline. Columnists and editorial writers cited the cops' behavior as yet another example of why minority groups were right to distrust and fear the police. "All those years when we gave police the benefit of the doubt seemed extraordinarily naive in retrospect," wrote Anna Quindlen in The New York Times.

The media's outrage was certainly appropriate. But no New York City news organization acknowledged that it would also have been appropriate to point out the errors of its coverage of the Garcia shooting, apologize to O'Keefe, or explain to readers and viewers why much of their reporting had been false and misleading.

Everything about the shooting -- the time of year, the place it occurred, the ethnicity of the officer and of the person he shot -- cried out for journalistic restraint. Reporters know that eyewitnesses at crime scenes are often unreliable, excitable advocates for one side or another, sometimes so anxious to be on television that their accounts become more melodramatic than what they actually saw. Reporters also know that some politicians exploit police-community tensions. Besides, police brutality lawsuits can involve enormous amounts of money -- some damage settlements have reached into the millions -- so that principals and attorneys often have financial stakes in eyewitness accounts and in the outcome of investigations.

Add to the threat of violence and civil disorder and there are lots of reasons for reporters and editors to be extraordinarily cautious about explosive eyewitness accounts of police-community confrontations offered in the heat of the moment. New York's media, prodded by the city's first black mayor, had helped to squelch rumors and maintain calm in the wake of the L.A. riots last spring. But there seems to be less restraint or caution when police shootings are involved.

"So what were the Washington Heights riots all about?" The New York Times disingenuosly wondered in an editorial following the grand jury report. The editorial cited a number of factors that might have led to the unrest -- drug gangs trying to force a police retreat, past complaints of police brutality. Coverage of the shooting was not on the list.

Among the questions the press faces in dealing with its coverage of the police is whether or not the overwhelming focus on brutality and racism obscures fundamental issues about urban policing:

* Has violence in some urban neighborhoods escalated beyond the ability of police departments to cope with it? In Newark, young -- sometimes pre-adolescent -- thieves in stolen cars ram police cruisers for kicks. They taunt police officers, who are prohibited from engaging in high speed chases. In November, four people were killed in one night by joy-riding kids whose stolen cars crashed. In New York City, 430 children under the age of sixteen had been shot in the first ten months of 1992, 73 of them bystanders. In the first seven months, according to city officials, 51 children under sixteen became homicide victims.

* How should police best deal with inner-city males in areas where violence has escalated dramatically? Gun control advocates say there are as many as 150 million guns in America. Scholars and authors like Andrew Hacker (Two Nations) and Christopher Jencks (Rethinking Social Policy) have begun to document the conditions that overwhelm many urban police departments. The new statistics hardly excuse police brutality, but they at least partly explain why police officers and young males are increasingly confronting one another in violent situations: more kids have guns and are using them more frequently.

Federal researchers report that by the late 1980s, as the drug epidemic swept America's cities, more teen-aged males in urban neighborhoods began dying from gunshot wounds than from any other cause. Death from guns among all U. S. teenagers shot up by 61 percent from 1979 to 1989, but among black teenaged males in major cities the increase was a staggering 233 percent. A study by the National Crime Analysis Project at Northeastern University found that from 1985 to 1991 the number of sixteen-year-olds arrested for murder climbed by 158 percent, while homicide arrests of fifteen-year-olds more than tripled.

* Can white police officers who live in outlying areas control minority urban communities? Should cities enact police residency requirements, thus increasing the number of minority officers? Should different kinds of policing and patrolling be considered, using neighborhood security aides, social workers, parent-training programs, school-based tutoring, parents, even teen-agers?

* Should states of emergency be declared in neighborhoods where children are being slaughtered? Should federal troops or state militias reinforce beleaguered police departments? Should the media deploy more of their own resources to covering violence committed by and upon urban children, thus demonstrating -- and pressuring the government to demonstrate -- that their plight is as important a story as suburban car-jacking?

The police themselves often aren't much help. Cops may resent reporters, but journalists remain the best and most credible vehicle for exploring and explaining police work. Police departments need to be more forthcoming more quickly when their officers are involved in shootings and confrontations, not wait weeks or months for official reports, as happened in the Garcia case.

As Cops makes clear, the more the public sees of their work, the more comprehensible their work becomes. In October a New York Times reporter, trying to explain the pressures that had led to the unruly police demonstration outside of city hall a month earlier, asked for permission to spend a week with the police in a Brooklyn neighborhood. But departmental officials would agree to allow only one night on radio car patrol and one day on foot patrol. Even though the reporter asked to be assigned to a tough, high-crime precinct, the department insisted that she be assigned to a safe, low-crime precinct. Even there, precinct commanders had to intervene before the reporter was permitted to a second day on car patrol. Despite the limitations, the piece was revealing and compelling, in much the same way Cops is, belatedly conveying the violence and tensions of urban policing.

Broadcasts like Cops are moving into a vacuum that would be better filled by journalists. The press needs to move closer to where it belongs on one of the biggest and most important stories in American life: into the middle, prepared to challenge the police when appropriate, but also willing to capture and put into context the environments in which they work.

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