The Compassionate Cop

Patrolman John Bodkin, 34, and his partner, Charles Anderson, 43, are called to investigate a domestic spat on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Inside the apartment they find a young Negro couple. One look convinces Bodkin that the husband is coiled like a spring, ready for battle. Pointedly, Bodkin, who is white, detaches his nightstick and hangs it on a chair out of reach. He takes off his hat. "Do you mind if I smoke?" he asks. "I'm a cigar smoker, and some people don't like the smell of cigar smoke in the house." Stunned by this unexpected show of courtesy, the man nods assent. The fight drains out of him. "Eventually," said Bodkin, reporting on the outcome, "they shake our hands. We never had another call from them."

This case history--and hundreds more like it--comes from Manhattan's 30th Police Precinct, which must keep order in an unruly and explosively overcrowded ghetto neighborhood on the Upper West Side. About 85,000 residents, mostly blacks and Puerto Ricans, are jammed within its boundaries, a population density of more than 110,000 per square mile. What police, with typical understatement, call "family disturbances" are as much a part of life there as rats, drug addiction and uncollected garbage.

Domestic squabbles are handled by members of the precinct's so-called Family Crisis Intervention Unit. The officers have been specially trained to subdue arguments with stratagems not always employed by men in blue: consideration, understanding, compassion and gentleness. "I pick up things much quicker now than before," says F.C.I.U. Patrolman John Timony, "because I'm looking for them. You're actually trying to help people now, whereas before you were simply trying to calm the situation."

Police Mystique. The F.C.I.U. was founded on the urging of Morton Bard, 46, a psychologist at City College of New York who believes that policemen constitute an unexploited and unparalleled human resource in the fields of social welfare and mental health. Police departments are one of the few human rescue services available 24 hours a day every day. As Bard says, "Most doctors won't make house calls, but all cops will."

Bard got a $95,000 grant from the Justice Department to finance his program. Enlisting police cooperation was no problem, but maintaining it proved more difficult. Police duty is traditionally defined as crime prevention and law enforcement--functions that take only 10% to 20% of a policeman's time. Among his many other duties--directing traffic, recovering stray pets and children, maintaining order--none is more thoroughly unpopular than intervening in personal quarrels.

"The police mystique," Bard has written, "places its highest value on a masculinity usually defined by toughness, imperviousness to feelings, and a tight-lipped readiness to neutralize conflict by a quick draw in the middle of Main Street." Until very recently, getting into a gun fight was the fastest way for a New York patrolman to win promotion. Family crisis intervention, in contrast, has been largely unrewarded.

Against the stubbornness of traditional police attitudes, Bard arrayed some telling arguments. If settling family brouhahas ranks low in police esteem, it ranks high in hazard. According to the FBI, intervention in domestic and neighborhood arguments account for 22% of police fatalities incurred on duty. Could it be, suggested Bard, that simple ignorance of psychology contributes to those distressingly high statistics? While the average recruit gets about 200 hours of training, it is almost entirely concentrated on conventional law enforcement; virtually none of it is devoted to resolving conflicts.

Non-Prejudging. These and other arguments convinced New York Police Commissioner Howard R. Leary. In July 1967, the two-year experiment got under way. From 42 volunteers, 18 patrolmen--nine black and nine white --were selected to take a cram course in appropriate behavioral sciences at City College's Psychological Center, which is directed by Bard. Part of the curriculum included the staging of mock family disputes, using professional actors. The student policemen, by their unrehearsed intervention in the quarrels, wrote the last act. They were judged on their performances.

Along the way, the officers learned a lot about themselves. "Officer G, at the beginning of the project," went one center report, "felt strong urges to retaliate when cursed. Near the end of the project, he saw that when a father called him a m-- f-- , that was a sign of the man's frustration and feeling of impotence." Says Patrolman Joseph D. Mahoney, summing up some of the new insights he himself gained: "You don't prejudge anybody. You never take sides. And you remember that you're in somebody's home, no matter what's going on."

By any measure, the experiment was a remarkable success. While the precinct's homicide rate jumped 350% during the two years, not a single violent death occurred among the 962 families visited by the F.C.I.U. In conventional handling of domestic disputes, police are deluged with complaints of brutality. In the course of answering some 1,800 calls, Manhattan's new unit had only one trivial complaint. None of its patrolmen have been injured on duty. Moreover, the walls of hostility that separate the cop from the community are showing unmistakable cracks in the 30th Precinct. Indistinguishable except for its identifying number (1706) from the twelve other police cars patrolling the area, the F.C.I.U. vehicle is now recognized by nearly everyone in the district. The stony glances that generally follow a squad car down the block are sprinkled with friendly smiles.

National Impact. As a result of Bard's experiment, the New York police recruit now gets ten hours of instruction in crisis intervention, where before he got none. And Commissioner Leary last month announced an expansion of the recruit training course from 18 weeks to six months. "Being a policeman is a much more difficult and complicated job than it used to be," he said. Much of the new curriculum will include "training in the sensitivity that policemen need in dealing with people."

Bard's report on the F.C.I.U., written for the Justice Department, will be distributed this month to law-enforcement and community health agencies all over the country. The effect may be far-reaching, since Bard has done nothing less than revise the role of the cop. He is challenging society's definition of the policeman as an intractable enemy, concerned mainly with making arrests when ordinary sinners overstep the stern line drawn by the law. The 30th Precinct's F.C.I.U. has been recommended by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders as an effective and exemplary instrument for all police departments.

For all his success, Morton Bard remains an activist busy spreading the gospel. On another grant, he is repeating his program in the New York Housing Authority Police Department, an independent force of 1,400, with responsibility for the 600,000 residents of Manhattan's 150 public-housing developments.

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