CRITICS OF COPS STILL NEED THE COPS

WASHINGTON- Here's a twist. The Rev. Al Sharpton is complaining that the New
York City police have not acted aggressively enough.

Yes, this is the same Rev. Al who has charged police from Poughkeepsie,
N.Y., to Riverside, Calif., with behaving too brutally.

The shoe is on the other foot in the wake of the nationally publicized
assault on more than 40 women by roving mobs of grabbing, groping and
robbing hooligans in Central Park following the city's Puerto Rican Day
parade last week. Some of the women say they tried to summon police to the
scene but were ignored.

A few days later, there was Sharpton facing television cameras with two New
Jersey women who were announcing $5 million lawsuits against the New York
Police Department for failing to protect them.

Critics of the flamboyant Sharpton find this latest twist to be darkly
amusing, but who says civil-rights organizers don't want good police
protection, too?

Even so, lax police do have their apologists, who blame the likes of Al
Sharpton for the problem. Some pundits, including The Wall Street Journal's
editorialists, have suggested that police may have softened their
enforcement precisely because the event included lots of blacks and Latinos
and they didn't want to risk any more complaints from the likes of Al
Sharpton.

Some police agree, judging by the 28 cops that the New York Post says it
interviewed anonymously after the Central Park episode.

"During the St. Patrick's Day parade, there's a real big crackdown on
alcohol," a man identified as a 13-year veteran told the Post. "That doesn't
go on during the Puerto Rican or West Indian parades unless its extremely,
extremely obvious."

Now there's a twist. Maybe hooligans arrested at the St. Patrick's Day
parade should charge reverse discrimination.

"I've seen people smoking weed at the Caribbean Day parade, and they [the
bosses] say lay off doing anything," another officer told the Post. "They
just want things to run smoothly."

Maybe so. But there's a big difference between youths who are openly smoking
marijuana and youths who are attacking women who are minding their own
business. The former is arguably a victimless crime. The second victimizes
not only the person who is assaulted, but also everyone else's sense of
well-being.

Police were nowhere in sight based on some of the amateur videos of the
attacks shown repeatedly on national television news. A lot of New Yorkers
must be looking at those videos of terrified young women and wondering:
"What are we paying our police to do?"

It's an important story for the rest of the nation, too, not only because it
is so bizarre but also because New York City is credited with being a leader
in reducing crime rates since the mid-1990s. Times Square, for example,
after decades of decay into crime and sleaziness, has re-emerged as a major
family tourist attraction, complete with a Disney store.

The need to restore and preserve the public's sense of safety energizes the
zero-tolerance approach to law enforcement that has helped make New York
City the nation's most important crime-fighting laboratory in the 1990s. If
you can reduce crime there (to paraphrase Frank Sinatra's hit, "New York,
New York"), you can reduce it anywhere.

For most of the '90s, that's what happened. The most dramatic drop occurred
when William J. Bratton was New York police commissioner from 1994 to 1996.
Under Bratton, police pinpointed high-crime areas and cracked down on
"quality of life" crimes as petty as graffiti, panhandling, prostitution and
turnstile jumping. It worked.

Unfortunately, the city also has experienced a few tragic cases of civilian
deaths like when African immigrant Amadou Diallo was shot at 41 times by
police. The accused officers were acquitted after testifying that they
mistook Diallo's wallet for a gun.

I don't know whether police have become less aggressive in response to
"political correctness," but cases like Diallo's show us what happens when
they are too aggressive.

Police officers have a tough job, but it is not made any easier by a
populace that is frightened or resentful of them.

To do their jobs better, police should have more selections on their
crime-fighting menus than a) excessive force or b) complete indifference.

Otherwise, they should not be surprised to see more of Al Sharpton, standing
indignantly at more TV news conferences. Bad cops provide him with some of
his best material.