Race-Mongering a Half-Century Later

Race-Mongering a Half-Century Later



After reading about the gruesome murders of two New York City police officers, I was reminded of my early years as a cop.

On a cold, blustery night in February 1964, at the tender young age of 21, I walked my first “beat” as a rookie in a high-crime area of Brooklyn. After graduating from the four-month Police Academy course, I was assigned to the 79th Precinct in the middle of the predominantly African-American section known as Bedford/Stuyvesant.  Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were murdered on the same street where I walked that first midnight-to-8 am tour of duty.  Fresh out of the classrooms and exercise areas of the Academy, I was thrust into a world that no amount of academic training could prepare me for.  I stood roll call with about 30 veteran cops in that old station house on Gates and Throop Avenues, as the duty sergeant performed a quick uniform inspection and told us to “be careful out there.”

So here I was, my first time in the official blue uniform, walking hurriedly toward Myrtle and Tompkins Avenue, where I’d be doing foot patrol under the elevated train structure on Myrtle, from Nostrand to Stuyvesant Avenues, for the next eight hours. My first introduction to this new world began about 3 am, when I was making another round trip from one end of my half-mile post to the other.  Hands shoved deep in the pockets of my thick blue overcoat, I pushed against the icy wind and felt thankful for the wool sweater I had donned as extra padding under the knee-length garment.

About a block away, I could see what looked like a large bundle lying on the sidewalk, something that wasn’t there twenty minutes earlier, when I had made my last trek past that end of the street.

The closer I got, the faster I walked, until it became clear that it was the supine body of a man, with a knife sticking out of his chest.  He was sprawled on the pavement, just a few feet from a bar that I’d walked by several times that night.  I remember kneeling over him and seeing a bit of steam coming off the warm blood that was oozing from around the handle of the dagger, embedded up to the hilt.  A quick check of his pulse assured me that he was gone.  The cheerful music emanating from the bar, only a few feet away from a murder victim who wasn’t even cold yet, added a surreal quality to the grisly scene.

When I queried some of the people in the gin mill, I received the expected responses.  “He wasn’t in here, officer,” said the bartender, grinning like a Cheshire cat.  “It’s a damn shame that people ain’t safe on the streets no more,” said a giggling patron as he gulped a shot of whiskey.

It soon became evident that life was cheap on the streets of that hellhole, where cops from mostly middle-class families would get culture-shocked by a segment of the population that viewed them as an abhorrent occupying force rather than benevolent guardians of their safety.  Sadly, a half-century later, that seems to still be the prevailing view.

During the violent decades of the sixties and seventies, we had our version of today’s race-hustlers.  There was Malcolm X, H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, and a cadre of other radical blacks who waged war on blue uniforms.  Cops were always being publicly threatened by thugs who called themselves the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army (BLA), and an assortment of other titles used merely as political cover for savage criminal behavior.

On May 21, 1971, Patrolmen Waverly Jones and Joseph Piagentini were shot in the back in an ambush on a street in Harlem.  The BLA boldly proclaimed credit for the cowardly attack, once again citing their hatred for whites in general and white cops in particular.  But it wasn’t only skin color that motivated their malevolent acts; Jones was black, and Piagentini was white.  No, their homicidal behavior was a result of a revolutionary fever that emerges among the malcontents of society every couple of decades.  The police are the symbols of law enforcement that stand in the way of those who seek to terrorize their communities while masquerading as their saviors.

In January 1972, Patrolmen Rocco Laurie and Gregory Foster were fatally shot as they walked out of a diner in the 9th Precinct in Manhattan’s East Village.  Foster, 22, was black, and Laurie, 23, was white.  Their young lives were snuffed out by sub-humans who were undoubtedly released from their cages by a permissive system that continues today to put savages back on the street, creating an imminent threat to unwary citizens.

The creature who executed Liu and Ramos was another example of a system so overwhelmed by the sheer volume of criminality that it can no longer keep the predators from the prey.

In that same 79­th Precinct, on April 2, 1978, police partners Norman Cerullo and Christie Masone were shot dead by 2 men carrying 9 mm semi-automatics, after the officers stopped them for questioning on Willoughby Avenue.  Over the course of about a dozen years, the BLA fatally targeted 16 police officers around the nation.

People often ask me if I’m glad that I’m not a cop these days.  Yes, I’m thankful to have survived 20 years in an urban jungle that, thanks to a loving family in suburbia, provided a daily civilized break from a feral environment that could have severely impacted my emotional balance.  My heart hurts for those grieving families who lost their loved ones at the hands of a maniac whose homicidal act was precipitated by the latest version of race-hustling, spewed by cretins whose names are not worthy of mention.

A cop’s job will always be perilous, because there’ll always be evil in the world.  It’s tough enough to deal with that evil when we meet it on the street.  But when we hear from the provocateurs, fanning the flames of every violent black/white encounter, it jeopardizes everyone’s safety.

Moreover, having a man in the Oval Office waving a fan that carries a lot more wind is very alarming.  Then there’s that feckless wimp in Gracie Mansion, holding hands with and taking advice from the lowest specimen of bacteria that ever escaped a Petri dish.

Cops have always had to deal with vicious rhetoric from fraudulent opportunists in the black community.  But I never thought I’d see the day when the president of the United States played the race card as vehemently as some of the worst rabble-rousers in the country.  Add to that a New York mayor with a condition known as contraction of the cojones, and it’s nearly impossible to enforce the law.  With so much opposition facing cops these days, I can only emphasize what my first sergeant said to us before my first tour of duty: be careful out there!

 By Bob Weir