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Here we go again. They’re doing it again. Handcuffing people, I mean. My newspaper flaunts a front page picture of seven volunteer firemen and a woman secretary of the fire department arriving at court, the men in handcuffs. All the men were hefty individuals who looked as if they might be of interest to the World Wrestling Federation, but obviously they lacked the temperament to match their appearance. They had apparently submitted like pussycats to the district attorney’s scheme to humiliate them and aggrandize himself by marching them into court in chain-gang fashion. They fell for his bluff, in other words, not realizing how fast he would have backed off if they had challenged him. I thought people only gave in in this way to the IRS. I once had a tax client who… well, I’ll save that story for another day.
To make the cheese more binding, a few days later it was the turn of some cops to march in the perpetrators’ parade. They were a group from Fire Island accused of felonious assault on a prisoner. The department has only thirty members, so the chief is the equivalent of a sergeant in a normal-size department and he led the parade into the courthouse -- in handcuffs. The chief! Five cops! What’s the matter with these guys, what’s the matter with Long Island? Never mind what’s the matter with the district attorney, that’s obviously beyond cure, but cops under arrest don’t let themselves be cuffed. The law may be reducing them to the status of the rabble they once fenced off from normal society, but to chain them up like them is too much for any man. It was in New York at least, where another five cops were arrested for killing a felon in a gunfight (questions were, ah, raised), but in the picture I saw none were wearing handcuffs.
As for the firemen, what were the atrocious crimes for which they had to be manacled like Hannibal Lecter after peacefully surrendering themselves under arrangements made by their attorneys? It doesn’t appear that anyone committed rape or robbery or even drunk driving, but instead “used district funds for excessive travel spending, including extravagant meals for family members, amusement park admission tickets and alcohol." A good part of these expenses were run up in places like Orlando, Florida, and Las Vegas, Nevada, where the firemen, five of whom were commissioners, sought surcease from their labors at Disneyworld and Caesar’s Palace. The amount ranged from $23,000 to $4,500 over a period of at least five years, indicating a fairly low level of abuse.
One good murder or rape-robbery would have been enough to put this story on Page Nine instead of Page One if it had happened on the day of arraignment. The story that would have stayed on Page One was the one I’ve only touched on above, when I mentioned that a fire department woman was arrested with the men. They were small time, she wasn’t. She was big time She was the treasurer of the Montauk Fire District for fourteen years and a thief for seven of them. Her take came to a total of half a million dollars The District slept soundly through it all. They didn’t place any obstacles in her way such as requiring co-signers on the checks she issued. This encouraged her to keep the ball rolling with lots of checks written to herself. She didn’t even have to go to the trouble of setting up dummy corporations with dummy bank accounts as repositories for her skim. It was seven years before anyone woke up to what was happening and called in the auditors. By that time the lady had enjoyed several trips abroad, educated at least one of her children in an expensive private school in Vermont, and tasted lots of other perquisites of wealth. It’s often said that embezzlers can’t take vacations from work, but I suspect this lady, Mrs. Gaines did, because she was working for a very trusting employer. Oh yeah, she was not outfitted with handcuffs by the wardrobe department. Common sense prevailed in her case as it didn’t in the case of the men.
The police department of the 1950’s, which I adorned, recognized common sense also, which told it that though women were capable of throwing tantrums and hissy-fits when in custody, none had yet been known to injure a judge or a court officer or anyone else when uncuffed in court. So they were left that way and if they weren’t then the judge wanted to know why. Reverse male chauvinism, expressing itself in unwanted solicitude for a perfectly equal human being who wanted no treatment other than what men got? Well no, judges didn’t like to see women humiliated like animals in a cage when everyone knew no woman wanted to be seen in public like that. Backward, weren’t they?
Enough for the deeper meanings of such things. The deeper meaning of my objections to innovations in the treatment of the sexes -- and everything else -- is that I learned to act some other way when I was young and now I am so hidebound that I can’t shake off my early training. All of it, that is, not just what I got in the police but what I got before that and since then too. To wit:
There’s one misdemeanor you can arrest for without seeing it happen -- leaving the scene of an accident. When an heiress out here plowed into a group of people one night and then fled to her nearby home, I would have gone in and gotten her and all the lawyers on Long Island wouldn’t have stopped me.
The Mail has to go through. If a mail truck’s in an accident, you’ve gotta call the Post Office to come and get its load -- or something like that. Anyway the Mail must go through.
There is one crime where a citizen must report what he knows to the police. That is
kidnapping.
At the scene of a homicide the investigating detective is in charge and can give orders to anyone else there.
All the rules weren’t learned on the job. There were other sources which came before:
Tell the truth and shame the devil. Children should be seen and not heard. Sarcasm sits ill on the youthful. Laziness, did I ever offend thee? (Things I heard from my mother. Often). Church and school supplied other admonitions, which I’m saving for a later date. | |