Fink's Peace

New York City's Mayor John Lindsay calls Joseph Fink "my favorite hippie." The truth is, Fink is something of a square. He does not freak out, sport beads or let his hair hang to his collar. Instead, Fink wears the badge of a deputy inspector in the New York City Police Department. As head cop in the bohemian quarter of Manhattan's Lower East Side, Fink mans a little-known frontier of the law: preventive enforcement. At a time when young nonconformists tend to see cops as oppressors, call them pigs to their faces and even fling excrement at them, Fink stands all but alone as a policeman who has learned how to handle the discontented young.

Fink's secret is community empathy, an element that is an absolute essential to keeping the peace in his Ninth Precinct. He describes his melting-pot enclave of less than one square mile as "a bouillabaisse" in which "all these people are cooking but never assimilate."

Besides its ethnic and racial tensions, the precinct is also a hunting grounds for muggers, who roam its subways, tenements and littered alleyways. Compounding the problem are the hippies, who have taken over the East Village area. There are also scores of "plastic (artificial) hippies," who come only on weekends or during school vacations and then go back home.

Easy to Spot. Rather than harass the hippies, Fink opens the doors of his precinct house and invites them in to "rap" (chat, deriving from "rapport") about their complaints. He does them favors, offers them free tickets to local shows, once wrote a letter of recommendation for a scholarship-seeking hippie who wanted to return to college. Above all, he speaks their language; when rapping with a hippie, for example, Fink usually calls his own police "the fuzz."

The son of a Polish immigrant who had a tailor shop in the Lower East Side, Fink likes to stroll through the neighborhood where he played as a boy. He has trained his men to look the other way when hippies panhandle tourists. In return, their leaders cooperate with police in returning runaway minors to their parents, and help Fink keep track of narcotics in the neighborhood.

Since the shocking twin murders of James ("Groovy") Hutchinson and Linda Fitzpatrick last year, Fink has set up a force of seasoned detectives to protect hippies from muggers, pushers and sex perverts who prey on them. Known as "the Hippie Squad," the plainclothesmen mingle with the hippies in their hangouts, usually grow their hair long, and have beards. Even so, they are easy to spot: they tend to have paunches and wear white socks and the black shoes that are part of the regulation police uniform. But since the Hippie Squad is part of Fink's protection program, the kids don't seem to mind having the fuzz around, except when they bust a pot or acid party.

A college dropout during the Depression, Fink went back to City College in 1956, and is now working on his master's in public administration at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He talks to his men as if they too were in the classroom. "You can't go out there with the idea that hippies are a problem," he lectures his men at roll call. "You can't stand there with a stolid countenance. Don't wait for them to break the ice. You have to initiate the communication."

Mother's Recipe. Communication is not always easy. As more and more East Village hippies have become politically activist yippies--a trend that Fink welcomes as a sign of growing social involvement--they have begun to distrust him and his men. Abbie Hoffman, one of the founders of the Youth International (Yippie) Party, likens Fink's recipe for peace keeping to that of a Jewish mother: "He throws a lot of chicken soup on the problem and hopes it will go away." Yippie agitators calling themselves the Workshop on Tactical Street Action have taken to trying to provoke Fink's men into breaking up their rallies.

During one such gathering last month, they succeeded. Fink's peace seemed on the verge of blowing up after one cop bloodied the scalp of a yippie who was resisting arrest. But the next day when 150 Workshop demonstrators marched into St. Mark's Place seeking revenge, Fink was there to supervise them, along with five of his men. For all their noisy speeches, they could not persuade the spectators to turn against the police. As a benevolent Fink looked on, the rally soon fizzled out. Even when 20% of Fink's men called in sick during New York's police slowdown, East Village dissidents remained quiet--though the yippies gleefully passed out flyers thanking the cops for "a welcome example of disruption."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.