A coupla weeks ago I was early to arrive at my intro to making arty junk out of scrap metal class so I rode around the empty neighborhood for a bit. I like to look around like this and the day was particularly nice. I was taking pictures as I rode along and the sun was setting bringing the light in a very special way. Cool quiet cobbled streets and decrepit crumbling warehouses. Very much my scene, and the Gowanus Canal in the background looking surprisingly pastoral in the early evening light. I set my camera to continuous exposure and shot my shadow as i rode towards the end of a dead end street, hoping for a stop motion silhouette movie. Up a driveway and onto the sidewalk, past a shuttered warehouse door with its' solid roll gate tightly down providing a nice textural background for the snapshots. I looked to my right and there was an NYPD squad car keeping pace.
"What are you doing?"
I laid down my bike and walked to the driver's side to show the cop some of the pics. " I don't wanna see that, just tell me what you are doing!" at this point i am thinking "Ok be cool he's just doing his job" so i smile and tell him about the continuous function on the camera and the cool pictures i am taking. "Why would you want to do that?"
Huh?
"You are photographing a sensitive installation"
Whaaattt???
Oh man was it hard to keep from arguing with johnny law. Instead, i looked around at the mixed use zone I was standing in. The a fore mentioned roll gate was adjacent to someone's single-family house (nice planters in front, bike chained to the fence etc.) and at the end of the block across the canal there's a large black pipe, maybe 20 inches in diameter that runs along the canal which maybe brings fuel oil to the delivery company somewhere there (this is a guess cos i saw the trucks and smelled the oil) "Oh sorry i had no idea. So you want me to stop?" "Just don't take pictures right here this is a sensitive location"
This is where I should have just left, but as he turned the car around I said "Great light right now, the magic hour you know" or some dumb thing like that. He stopped the car and asked his partner what I had said and she told him. He shook his head and said
"By the way, no bike riding on the sidewalk" and took off back out of the dead end.
Now I realize that in the grand scheme of things this is a small niggling unimportant occurrence. Also, my friend Mary was along for the ride and she always brings out my "sensitive" side, but god damn! Why can't the police be nice for once? I was compliant immediately, I was nice about it, I posed little to no threat. WTF?
As I walked my bike back to bond to go to my class I thought "You know, if the PO-lice were just nice about it (whatever it is) rather than gruff snippy jerks, at least to start, they might get a better result dealing with the citizenry" I will grant that I have met a couple of nice cops, but by and large they seem to be mean and short with people as a matter of course regardless of the situation. this was the case in the small town i grew up in as well as here in NYC. Do i assume that this type of personality is a prerequisite for the job? I hope not cos that seems counter-productive for the law enforcement effort.
In NYC police cars have this motto painted on the door: "courtesy, professionalism, respect" A good motto I think. It does take a certain minimum intellect to take this motto seriously both as a civilian and i would imagine as a cop. I think the meaning of it should go both ways. I know it is a hard job, one of the hardest in certain ways, but honey versus vinegar! I mean come on! Why be creepy if you can choose to be nice about it? You know what i think? The people who should be cops wouldn't do the job for any amount of money, and the people who are cops (at least some of 'em) come to the job for the wrong reasons.
What really sucks is trying to figure out whether I should teach my three-year-old son to trust law enforcement or not. for me this experience, insignificant though it may be, raises the question: how do we want to live? if for instance the cop pay scale was started high enough, it might entice some of the "best and brightest" we always hear about to join the force.