Your Choice, Citizen

Following Alexander the Great’s conquest of Persia, members of the Persian elite were required to prostrate themselves before their new ruler. Polyperchon, one of Alexander’s generals, sternly rebuked one of the Persians whose self-abasement was seen as inadequate.

“Come on, don’t just touch the floor with your chin,” demanded Alexander’s arrogant underling. “Bang it, man! Bang it!”

Police union commissar Patrick J. Lynch displays more than a hint of that attitude in dealing with a public that at long last has become disgusted with routine and impenitent criminal corruption on the part of the state’s consecrated dispensers of violence.

For Lynch – whose views are very commonplace in law enforcement – any attitude toward police other than abject, servile gratitude is unacceptable, and perhaps even criminal. This is true even of those who preface modulated discussion of unambiguous criminal misconduct with the familiar disclaimer: “Not all cops are bad.”

“Proclaiming that `not all cops are bad’ implies that rational people might somehow believe the opposite,”Lynch whined in a recent column for the New York Post. “It lends cop-haters a credibility they don’t deserve. And it minimizes the dedication and professionalism that police officers display, day in and day out, by implying that it’s the exception rather than the rule.”

More