I had to hustle up the stairs to the auditorium so I wouldn’t be too late. Man-oh-man, was I out of shape. I made a mental note to work on that. I’d run only a short distance and up one flight of stairs, and I thought I was going to die. I was going to have to do something to get back in shape. As much as I hated it, I knew I’d have to start running again. Running up those stairs hurt; I mean, it really sucked.
I was standing in the hall just outside the main entrance to the auditorium, huffing and puffing, half-bent over, trying to catch my breath, and straining to hear if they’d started the meeting yet. Someone suddenly opened the door. I jumped to attention as if nothing was wrong, trying with everything I had to appear as if I wasn’t breathing hard.
“Hi, Alan,” the person coming out of the auditorium said.
“Oh! Hi, Paul, how’s it going?” I said in as normal a voice as I could muster.
“Good… good,” he replied. He shuffled hurriedly down the hall, glancing momentarily over his shoulder as if he wasn’t sure I was okay. As soon as he disappeared around the corner, I bent over and started sucking serious wind again. I was still trying to compose myself when he came back. I quickly straightened up, turning my head from left to right as if I was looking for someone.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Let’s get inside. Maybe I can still find a good seat.”
“I think you’re out of luck there,” he said with a slight shake of his head. “There’s nothing but wall space left, and not a whole lot of that.”
He was right; I got to stand against the wall, next to the exit, elbow to elbow with about a hundred other people who seemed to have suffered similar misfortunes managing a timely arrival. Luckily for me, there weren’t a lot of people coming in or going out. Everyone pretty much stayed put.
The Mistress of Ceremonies concluded her opening remarks and started to introduce the chief as I wiggled to get comfortable. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, looking to her left and extending her hand in a gesture of welcome, “I’m happy to present Dr. Matthew Dylan, our new chief of police.”
The room was gently roused with appropriately polite applause. Then the chief strode across the stage. He must have been standing right at the entrance, but I hadn’t seen him until he stepped out onto the stage. Maybe it was because I was too involved in trying not to look too conspicuous while attempting to find a comfortable position against the wall.
Chief Dylan was an imposing figure, not altogether unlike the Matt Dillon I remembered from the old TV show Gunsmoke. The theme to Gunsmoke started turning over in my head.
“Matt Dillon,” I thought to myself. “She’s got to be kidding, right? What kind of person names their kid Matt Dylan?”
I’m not sure what I’d expected the new chief to look like. The last one was overweight, smoked, a lot, and wasn’t exactly known for his sense of fashion. I suppose I just thought this was going to be more of the same. I was a bit taken aback when I first saw him step out. It was immediately apparent that this was not going to be more of anything this city had already seen.
Chief Dylan—I still couldn’t believe his parents actually named him that—began by expressing his appreciation for being asked to speak. His voice was soft and deep, and it resonated with power and authority. “One of the more significant concerns of the American public today is the level and violent nature of crime across the country,” he said. The podium had been strategically positioned but was going to be nothing more than mere stage accoutrement for this guy. He rolled into motion, moving with a deliberate, stately gait, using his hands for emphasis as he spoke.
“Since the 1940s, incidents of crime in the United States have risen by more than 10,000 percent. Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration, but it makes the point. We’ve seen some encouraging decreases in the overall crime rate lately, particularly violent crime. However,” he continued, “these decreases will likely be short-lived and appear as nothing more than an insignificant blip on the histogram of escalating criminal activity. That is, unless we make some long overdue changes to current police practices and develop new and improved methodologies and processes for engaging in the activity we call policing.” He moved across the stage, drawing the attention of everyone in the auditorium with each step. He punctuated critical passages with dynamic voice inflections, tonal modulations, and animated hand and arm gestures.
“We’re witnessing an epidemic of juvenile violence of unparalleled proportions. Fear is becoming a debilitating anathema that is slowly and insidiously sucking the life out of a once-vibrant society. Many of us sit and watch these various manifestations of decay in disbelief, wondering when the police will get things under control. It seems as if we’re waiting for Glinda to wave a magic wand and create a solution that’ll eradicate all social disorder and criminality, or perhaps for a Messiah to lead us into a promising new era of peace, harmony and justice. But neither of these things is likely to happen… evvver!
“If you’re waiting for the police to take back the streets, here’s a little rain for your parade. The police can’t take back the streets. There’s not a single documented case in the history of policing of any police taking back any street, anywhere in America. There simply aren’t enough police anywhere in the world to do that.”
I was stunned, because the police are always talking about “taking back the streets.” It seems we’ve been fighting a war on crime for years and now he’s telling us we’re not going to get our streets back from the bad guys. This didn’t strike me as a good thing.
Dylan continued, “In 1981, President Reagan was shot while he was literally surrounded by people who had no other purpose in life but to protect him. Now, if the president of the United States can be shot while surrounded by people who are dedicated to protecting him, what makes any of you think that 900,000 police officers can protect a nation with a population of 308 million people from every incident of crime or disorder?”
Okay, that’s a good point, I thought.
“It’ll only be through cooperation and collaboration of the police as facilitators, and the public as interested, active participants, that our streets will be taken back. Police don’t take back the streets! People do! Only when you have had enough and combine your efforts with those of the police can any real progress be made in reclaiming our streets. Reclamation takes hard work. It requires dedication and commitment by all of us to improve the processes that will ultimately alter our social condition.”
The room hushed. It seemed as though everyone was a little shell-shocked. It wasn’t just me. I don’t believe anyone had an inkling of what to expect at this point.
“I used to believe, like many of you,” Chief Dylan continued, “that we were only responsible for ourselves. Remember the sixties? ‘Do your own thing.’ ‘If it feels good do it.’ I see some of you out there are nodding your heads. They weren’t just a bunch of feel-good slogans—they were the forces of a movement, and an entire generation became self-absorbed. Well, the sixties have come and gone, and I see things a little differently than I did back then. My rose-colored glasses have turned a smoky shade of gray and I realize there’s nothing I can do that won’t impact someone else. At the same time, there’s not a single action we, as a community, take collectively, regarding any one of us, that won’t also have an impact on the rest of us.
“We need to cultivate new levels of trust between the police and the public. As practitioners, we must admit to our shortcomings and commit to a higher set of ideals. As citizens, we must accept our responsibility as active participants in the effort to police our communities. Ultimately,
