Four Policemen in London and Amsterdam

Four Policemen in London and Amsterdam

Description

At 10 P.M. on a September night in 1976 Elliot Spector, a Hartford, Connecticut, policeman, was walking a downtown beat when a call came over his walkie-talkie. A woman had complained that her tenement apartment was without heat or hot water. In Hartford if a person is without water or heat, the police will call the landlord and try to work out the difficulty. If heat or water should be supplied, the police are empowered to order contractors to carry out the task and bill the landlord. The woman was living with an infant on the top floor of a “closed’ building that the landlord had stopped maintaining at the beginning of the month. Spector took the name of the landlord from some onlookers, tracked down the superintendent at a nearby building, got the landlord's telephone number, and tried to call him several times, finally reaching him about half an hour later. The landlord explained that the building had been closed the previous month and that the woman had remained. He said that he would not supply heat but would try to have the water connected the next day. Another day Spector was riding in a police cruiser. A call carne from a ghetto area bar reporting a disturbance. When Spector arrived, a man was standing motionless next to the juke box, apparently drunk. The bartender said he was involved in the disturbance. Spector approached the man in a friendly way and persuaded him to leave the bar on his own. Later that night Spector responded to a sick call at an apartment building, but the person who had made the call was not there when Spector arrived. The next call involved a thirteen-year-old girl. She had been hit by her older sister's boyfriend, who had then fled. No one seemed to care about the incident except the child. The older sister was angry with her for calling the police and refused to speak to Spector. Eventually an uncle intervened and convinced the child not to go forward with her charges. Finally, there was a report of a hit-and-run accident. One car had collided with another, but there was no personal injury. The offending driver had stopped and slipped into a nearby building. The driver of the other car, a woman, was waiting for him with a stick. After the cruiser arrived, the man emerged from the building and Spector arrested him after the complainant and another woman identified him. These incidents give a flavor of the police job in Hartford. Spector describes these calls as “not atypical” of what he does every day. They took a total of about four hours. They were all uneventful, even boring, and had no relationship to the popular image of the policeman's job, especially as conveyed on television each case the call came from a ghetto area and the callers and the other parties involved were black or Spanish-speaking people.

Source Publication

American Workers Abroad: A Report to the Ford Foundation

Source Editors/Authors

Robert Schrank

Publication Date

1979

Four Policemen in London and Amsterdam

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