ON PATROL, IT'S ALL ABOUT RESPECT

Cat and mouse. Officer Megan Tucker has played this game often, and
this evening she was playing it again with a young man she suspected
of dealing drugs.

She steered slowly past him. He pointedly ignored her, looking down at
something in his hands. Officer Tucker couldn't see what, but she
could guess. Today's drug dealers carry hand-held, text-messaging
pagers so they can relay the word, "The boys are out" -- street jargon
for the police.

An officer for five years, Tucker is a second-generation Covington
cop, and like her father before her, she's spent many a night
patrolling the Eastside.

"A lot of officers get burned out here, but I asked for it," Tucker
said.

That's because the things Tucker likes about police work are magnified
in the Eastside: the variety, the excitement, the relative autonomy in
the field, the bond with other officers and, along with all that, the
daily opportunity to help the community, one good deed at a time.

In this sense, Tucker is very much her father's daughter. Jim Tucker,
himself the son of an FBI agent, served 22 years on the Covington
police force before retiring in 1998, and his hulking, bearded figure
was a staple on the Eastside as he worked vice and homicide.

On any given night, he might be found seated on a park bench, the
collar of an overcoat hiked up to hide his head and looking to all the
world like another vagrant. He was all eyes and ears, watching the
street . The neighborhood appreciated the vigilance.

"A lot of people really liked my father. Even some of the hardened
criminals say, 'Are you Jim Tucker's daughter?" Megan Tucker said.

Now she's the officer the neighborhood knows. Stopped at an
intersection, three girls run to her cruiser yelling, "Hey Tucker!
Give me a dollar!"

She does, reminding them to say "please" and "thank you." Officer
Tucker knows the girls' names, addresses and family
circumstances.

It's the kind of policing her father taught her. His advice, once he
accepted he could not stop her from strapping on a bulletproof vest
and pinning on a badge, was straightforward: "He told me to treat
everybody with respect. That's all anybody wants -- including the police."