NEW YORK'S JEWISH FINEST

...On the other hand, the Commissioner is a political, extension of the mayor who appoints him...

...Of the five "super chiefs" in the department, a three-star appointment two rungs below the police commissioner, one is Jewish, as are two of the city's seven borough commanders...

...If there is...

...The case was never solved...

...It's worth recalling here that during his election campaign in 1973, Abraham Beame, New York's first Jewish mayor, repeatedly promised to put more cops on the streets, a low bow in the direction of the law-and-order lobby...

...Sergeant Emanuel Bogen...

...At least this is what policemen, Jewish and non-Jewish, will state for the record...

...It offers fraternity, a commodity sought not only by Jewish policemen but also by Jewish firemen, transit cops, corrections officers, housing cops and employees of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, all of whom have separate organizations under the umbrella of the National Conference of Shomrim Societies...

...The effort to recruit more Puerto Rican cops, for instance, brought with it a separate civil service examination for Hispanics, lending credence to white fears of a double standard...

...The standard question — "What's a nice Jewish boy (or girl) doing at a job like that...

...No way...

...For some uncanny reason," he says, "there's an identity problem for Jewish cops working in Chassidic areas, perhaps like a black working in Harlem...

...Maybe if circumstances had been different, they would've sent the Irishmen to special classes to learn to speak Yiddish...

...I think, though, that in a neighborhood where there is a broader cross-section of Jews, the Jew tends to feel more comfortable...

...It felt great...

...Of the 300 arrests that he made during this period — all of them for possession or sale of pills, cocaine or heroin, but never, he hastens to point out, simply for possession of marijuana — 250 of the "collars" were Jews...

...Before last summer's layoffs, the Shomrim Society's figures showed 1,100 men and 23 women among the 30,000 men and 726 women members of the police force...

...During a six-month period...

...On the other hand, the police department has a tremendous capacity to homogenize...

...In fact, Les enjoyed being mugged...

...Les Morgenstein was reassigned to a precinct on the upper east side of Manhattan...

...appeared in the July/August issue Of moment uniform...

...subscribes to the theory that Jews living in New York have received good police service over the years because there have been Jews in the department, but that is not the same thing as saying that they received better police service directly from Jewish cops...

...The Randall's Island corps was, says Officer Morgenstein, "the elite of the finest...

...Because New York's sanitation union has a more clever contract than do the police, the garbage workers greeted the new fiscal year with a wildcat strike...

...Paul's Society for Greeks and Russians, and the Hispanic Society for Puerto Ricans...

...It was a pleasure to have these phony Chassidim patrolling the perimeter where ghetto meets ghetto...

...In 1972, Rabbi Kass accompanied 130 policemen and their families on a trip to Israel, and each year a group of Shomrim members joins the New York Solidarity March for Soviet Jews...

...Is there nothing, then, in the cultural background of the Jewish cop that distinguishes his behavior on the job...

...When the word went out that a list of Spanish-speaking people was needed to take the test, a lot of us had to ask, 'Why just Spanish-speaking?'," says Assistant Chief Jules Sachson, borough commander of the Brooklyn South area and one of the highest-ranking Jews in the department...

...I love police work," he says...

...He is foremost a cop...

...claims not to keep exact count of the number of Jews within the department...

...The Jewish cop realizes early on that professional solidarity must supersede religious allegiance...

...The policeman's professional identity shapes the outside world's attitude toward him, and inevitably it comes to dominate his own thinking...

...These were the so-called "Depression babies," men who hadn't actually been born during the Depression but who had endured it during adolescence and were overdue to enter the work force when the civil service began to relieve the unemployment rolls...

...When the dollar crunch came last summer, the elite of the finest shed their plainclothes and returned to Mark Singer is on the staff of the new yorker His article, "God and Mentsch at Yale...

...Kushner is frequently in contact with representatives of the Israeli government, preparing for the effect in New York City of various events in the Mideast...

...announced a recruitment drive to attract minorities — an affirmative action-inspired scheme aimed specifically at blacks and Puerto Ricans...

...Many people didn't think so, particularly the Irish, who enjoyed hegemony within the department...

...Obviously, Rosen has kept careful score...

...T^ie Shomrim Society was founded 51 years ago by perhaps a minyan's worth of Jews who felt less than completely at home in New York's Irish-dominated police department...

...Meanwhile, the proportion of Jews in the department is nearing an all-time low...

...Les is a member of the New York Police Department and a Jew, one of approximately 850 Jews among the 27,000 members of the police force...

...This is especially true whenever the department becomes threatened from the outside, as it has been, of course, by New York's "crisis budget...

...If Officer Morgenstein wants to wear his bar mitzvah tallit on the job, well, that's nice but, really, what difference does it make...

...A minor incident, perhaps, but a telling one...

...It's more important than ethnicity...

...The fact is, though, that the Jews within the department did amount to something...

...occasionally "justice" is rendered at the scene of the crime...

...A man or woman who has had a successful career prefers to feel that his or her success is the result of personal merit...

...In several areas of the city today, there are Jewish police officers assigned to investigate synagogue burglaries or vandalism in Jewish cemeteries...

...From 1972 to early 1975, Rosen worked as an undercover narcotics detective on high school and college campuses in Brooklyn and Queens...

...Immediately the woodwork empties...

...Three years ago, as a result of a special effort to attract more Jews to the department, 1,500 Jews took the civil service test necessary to qualify for the Police Academy...

...As far as Puerto Ricans were concerned we were simply the man, Mister Rabbi," says Morgenstein...

...Should a nice Jewish boy become a cop...

...Forty Orthodox Jews signed up and we arranged for them to take the test on Friday, rather than the normal Saturday date...

...Abraham Kushner, a veteran of 29 years on the force, acts as a liaison with several Jewish groups...

...Despite the penchant for vigilan-tism that has burgeoned among some Orthodox Jews, most locals welcomed the decoy cops and their back-up teams...

...Assistant Chief Jules Sachson...

...A fair number had, in addition to bachelor's degrees, law degrees — but they had never practiced law...

...A Brooklyn synagogue supplied the other accoutrements necessary to outfit credible ersatz Chassidim — wide-brimmed fur hats, black frock coats, dark suits and black shoes — the attire generally deemed fashionable by the residents of Crown Heights and Williamsburg, New York's two main Chassidic neighborhoods...

...Cohen believes that, in general, the Jew makes a more compassionate policeman than his gentile colleagues...

...Borough Commander of the Brooklyn South area, hosts a meeting of rabbis in his office...

...Morgenstein took pride in wearing his own bar mitzvah tallit on the job...

...Perhaps part of Officer Rosen's cynicism can be explained by the fact that the day that I spoke to him — during a Shomrim Society social gathering at a resort in the Catskill Mountains — he had just received word of his transfer from a plainclothes detective squad in Brooklyn to a uniform patrol assignment in Chinatown...

...Despite the clamor for more Jews on the police force, the range of problems, from affirmative action to budget crisis, suggests that very few Jewish cops will one day urge their own sons to join the force...

...At different times the police force has attracted different types of Jews...

...In police argot, a "rabbi" is a friendly superior, a sort of bureaucratic big brother...

...Yes, but not my son, thank you...

...But there is something about the Jewish cop, it seems, that is different, if only because of the delicate incongruity inherent in the notion of two he-meri boys in blue greeting each other on the street and saying, "Hello, bubbela...

...The most famous group in modern department history came from the 1940 list, compiled from those people who took the civil service test offered in 1938...

...The point is," says Seedman, "that a parent who spoke Yiddish had little need for police services, but a person who speaks Spanish tends to be a more needy client...

...Pity the poor young dude who finds himself trapped in the daylight when the shout "Gonnif...

...Certainly there must be hordes of policemen who derive perverse pleasure from tooling around the "jungle" in a squad car all day long, so that when they return home at night to Nassau County they can feel vindicated...

...Years ago why wasn't there a special test for Yiddish-speaking cops, or for Italians...

...Strange and awful things can happen during a garbage strike...

...My parents couldn't speak English when they got here but they got along fine in this country...

...Well, he was...

...This one is tricky...

...of the thirty officers assigned to the recruitment program, two were Jewish...

...The goyim are far more understanding in dealing with the Chassidim...

...Rabbi Kass suggests the simple platitude: "Well, everyone's set of values creeps into his attitude toward his life and work...

...These were pushers, man — Jewish scum...

...The reception was magnificent...

...No doubt, statistics on whether Jewish cops make more or fewer arrests than non-Jews would prove something, but no one in the police department admits to keeping a tally...

...A career can easily stagnate at that point unless one has — drum roll, additional irony — the proper "rabbi...

...Let's call him Officer Rosen...

...some say that the first class of rookies from the 1938 exam was fifty percent Jewish...

...In the eyes of the citizenry, the policeman, whether masquerading as a defenseless old Jew or riding in a patrol car, has no significant ethnic attachment...

...One is, above all else, a policeman, and only secondarily a Jew or a black or an Italian...

...Berns and Lichtenstein had heard skeptical Jews within the department predict that they would be lucky to convince a hundred people to take the departmental exam...

...Weiser is speaking not merely of corruptibility, but of the larger problem of anomie, an awesome sense of apartness inherent in the nature of police work...

...I'm twenty-seven years old, I'm in my prime...

...The term is an Irish Catholic confection, a relatively benign but hardly meaningless touch of anti-Semitism...

...Beame's tag line was: "If I'm elected, there will be a real cop named Mike on this street, instead of an actor named Mike...

...The Jew who is "just a human being" would do best to stay away, lest he be doubly set apart, once as cop, once as Jew...

...The question that arose, however, was whether the Jews were "good enough" to become cops...

...If the results of the test had been published and if a list of appointments had been announced, the department would have had to confront what to do for Sabbath observers, but anyway, the subject is moot...

...The salary was also attractive, starting at $11,500 and moving to $18,000 within three or four years...

...As a young patrolman in 1947, Louis Weiser, now retired and serving as the president of the Council of Jewish Organizations in Civil Service, spent several months monitoring a wiretap on the phone of a suspect who conducted all of his conversations in Yiddish...

...Exact figures aren't available because the layoff situation has created frequent fluctuation, but even in times of stability the N.Y.P.D...

...How did he feel about busting fellow Jews...

...Inspector Ralph Cohen, commander of the 90th precinct in Brooklyn, which includes the Orthodox community of Williamsburg, has found that Jewish cops simply don't work well there...

...It had three Jews among its 350 operatives...

...A union organizer in the garment district had been murdered, and a conspiracy of Jewish garment factory owners was suspected...

...This sort of racism breeds an infectious cynicism...

...Les Morgenstein spent his first three days back in uniform guarding the city dump...

...I'm not talking about a redneck, ass-kicking sort of racism, but rather about the mentality that drives upwardly mobile blue — and white — collar middle class people away from the city to the suburbs, where they pause and reflect on how the city has become an "unlivable jungle...

...Virtually every Jew in the New York Police Department belongs to Shomrim, although only about ten percent qualify as active, energetic members...

...For the time being, that was good enough...

...The values of tradition, tolerance, and understanding help to make the Jew a good police officer, but I don't know that they particularly make him different...

...w W W hat is hardly moot is the question of how to deal with the inequities which, according to the popular view, affirmative action programs themselves generate...

...In recent years there have been two Jewish super-chiefs — Simon Eisdorfer, now Chief of Organized Crime Control, and before him, Albert Seedman, who retired in 1972 as Chief of Detectives—and from 1966-69, Sanford Garelik, now head of the Transit Police, served as Chief Inspector, making him the highest-ranking cop in the department, answerable only to the Police Commissioner...

...He was assigned to a federally-funded anti-crime unit with headquarters on Randall's Island, a plot of land in the East River...

...Seated at far left are Detective Michael Waldman and, next to him...

...A police officer can rise through the ranks, and many Jews did — from police officer to detective to sergeant to lieutenant to captain — solely on the basis of merit, performance on written exams...

...A partiaf answer to Sachson's rhetorical question comes from Albert Seedman, the former Chief of Detectives...

...There's nothing I'd rather do...

...In 1972, the N.Y.P.D...

...There is an annual "Shomrim Sabbath" at Rabbi Kass's congregation in Queens — a high-profile event attended by the police department brass — and he has organized sporadic adult Hebrew education classes as well as a single kalian, or religious retreat, in which about 40 policemen participated...

...It was then that his morale slipped below zero...

...Another, far less polite, way of stating this proposition is simply this: Jewish cops are no less racist and no more sophisticated in concealing their racism than other mortals...

...goes up in the streets...

...But the genuine Chassidim could read us like a book...

...Naturally, there were more Jews than there were friendly rabbis, and many ambitious Jews wisely — but one wonders how reluctantly — chose to retire after qualifying for pension benefits under the department's twenty-year retirement option...

...it can't be quantified...

...Before the City of New York edged itself over the precipice of fiscal oblivion and began firing cops, Les spent many of his working days in Chassidic drag, shuffling around the sidewalks of Brooklyn, enticing muggers...

...These were well-educated people, a high proportion of them graduates of City College, upwardly mobile sons of the hard-pressed immigrant working class...

...At police headquarters, working under the Chief of Operations, Lt...

...I want to get the felon off the street...

...When a group of Jewish cops descends upon a Cat-skills resort, as I saw about 35 active and retired cops and their families do one day last summer, they seem no different from, say, a contingent of Masons or Shriners...

...Shomrim has become, in the best political sense, an interest group...

...Aside from a kiddush and motzi — led by Rabbi Alvin Kass, the Shomrim "spiritual director" and Jewish Chaplain of the New York Police Department — the Shabbat dinner that I shared with them had no explicit religious overtones...

...says Lou Weiser...

...A few years ago I noticed that two Jews working in the 90th Precinct were giving out far more summonses than anyone else, and I had to pull them out of there...

...Glad to get rid of 'em...

...says Lichtenstein...

...If you're just a human being, complete with the average foibles and weaknesses of the flesh, this job encourages, shall we say, deviations...

...M lanny Bogen's "Peter Prin-ple" remark, coming as it does from the head of the Shomrim Society, is significant because the officers of Shomrim, as well as those Jewish brass who didn't purge themselves fifteen or twenty years ago, hate to sound rancorous...

...Eventually, they signed up 700 prospects and an additional 800 Jews heard about the recruiting drive and registered on their own initiative...

...There are no precise figures available to show how many of the Jews who took the policemen's civil service test passed, but the number must have been extraordinarily high...

...Above the level of captain, however, the departmental promotion scheme is not an absolute meritocracy...

...Arthur Niederhoffer, a Jew who spent 21 years on the New York police force and has written extensively about police, says, "A person of any persuasion who gets a job on the police force tends to become assimilated into the force, and the demands of the job dominate his behavior...

...Why...

...There are more than a million Jews in Brooklyn...

...Shomrim argued convincingly to the Police Commissioner that Jews, too, have historically been an underrep-resented minority in the department, and so...

...But none of this is to say that any Jews are "making policy" because, technically, all policy decisions emanate directly from the Police Commissioner...

...So, although the Jewish percentage peaked in the late Fifties at slightly more than ten percent, it rapidly receded in the next few years as flocks of Depression babies exited for more profitable and less hazardous enterprises...

...Created "So that Police Officers of the Jewish Faith May Join Together for the Welfare of All," Shomrim does for Jewish cops what the Emerald Society does for the Irish cops, the Columbia Society for Italians, the Steuben Association for Germans, the Guardians for blacks, the Pulaski Association for Poles, the St...

...Even today," says Emanuel Bogen, president of the Shomrim Society, "very few Jews have the chance to fulfill the 'Peter Principle.* They aren't given the opportunity to rise to their level of maximum inefficiency...

...All of these things serve to distinguish Shomrim from the Emerald Society and the Columbia Association and the rest of the ethnic police organizations, but to say that indoctrination in the Jewish faith is the overarching concern of Shomrim is to miss the point of it all...

...It is that apartness which causes cops to cling to one another, to regard their profession as a powerful brotherhood...

...Joining the police force promised job security, a decent pension and other benefits, but above all, it meant a job, period...

...Yet, from time to time a special situation does arise that only a Jewish cop can handle...

...And in addition to the problems of the day, there is another: "Would I suggest to a kid that he become a cop...

...has become irksome because it is a cliche', but it is a question that even the least introspective Jewish police officer must occasionally ask himself...

...o occasionally the Jewish cop assigned to a heavily Jewish area can't function effectively...

...At times, Les Morgenstein's passion for getting the felon off the street — a potentially dangerous passion — required him to decoy as an elderly Chassidic Jew, a fairly popular target for muggers...

...It's no accident, of course, that the actor/cop wasn't named Bernie...

...Before they began recruiting...

...The organization has a greater allure for retired cops, people with time on their hands and nostalgia on their minds...

...And we were selling excitement...

...Ultimately, however, complaints about the abuse of the airwaves came not from the Jewish cops (who must have overheard their anonymous colleagues) but, rather, from private citizens who were monitoring the police broadcasts on shortwave radios...

...T Mhe Shomnm Society of the New York Police Department, a Jewish fraternal organization with 2,500 members, 1,500 of them retired from the force, is the largest Jewish semi-military unit anywhere outside the State of Israel...

...Since the layoffs, the total figure has dropped below 1,000, but the percentage has remained roughly the same — about three-and-a-half percent — this, of course, in a city with a Jewish population of more than 25 percent...

...The questions most often asked were about the danger of the job...

...I love my wife, but when I was with that anti-crime unit, I couldn't wait to get to work each day...

...Anyone accosted that often, you say, must have been asking for it...

...The figure is astonishing...

...Although budget problems are to blame, when a policeman finds himself back "in the bag" after years out of uniform he begins to question whether the police department is such a great place to build a career after all...

...Another way of stating this proposition is to argue that a disproportionately low number of Jews hold policy-making positions...

...After dinner, it was time to head for the nightclub on the premises...

...To a Jew who regards himself as an American, there's something repulsive about these people who insist upon preserving anachronistic ways...

...Today the Irish still run the show, but the internal politics have become sophisticated enough to permit a few Jews inside the ruling hierarchy...

...What truly matters is that he is out there doing his job, guarding the town dump or getting the felon off the street...

...One evening last June, when it was still unclear how many policemen would lose their jobs, the police radio band crackled with the anti-Semitic conversations of several cops making derisive remarks about Abe Beame...

...T Mhe layoffs, which reduced the number of Jews on the force by almost 10 percent, were based strictly upon seniority, but the cutback has been an added blow for the Shomrim Society because it comes in the wake of an earnest effort to draw more Jews to the force...

...Because of the city's depressed fiscal condition, however, no one who took the test has actually been appointed to the Academy, and no one will be as long as the present hiring freeze remains in effect...

...And, as the cynicism grows, it could ultimately drive Jews away from the police force...

...One of Beame's commercials showed him standing on a city sidewalk with a properly Irish-looking fellow in a policeman's uniform...

...Barry Lichtenstein and Lewis Berns, two young, college-educated cops, visited dozens of synagogues, community centers, and college campuses, boosting police work and distributing brochures titled "A Jewish Police Officer: Why Not...

...Seedman, one of the most illustrious Jews in the police department's history — and certainly the best known, thanks to the recent publication of his autobiography, Chief...

...At the same time, there is an argument that goes the other way, that suggests that the Jewish cop will repress his "natural instincts" and insist upon behaving like a tough cop —a "cop's cop...

...They leave that to Shomrim...

...Being a policeman has a very powerful effect upon a person, in every way...

...Our eyes would lock for an instant and they would snicker as if to say, T know you.' " A mildly ironic remark: "I know you...

...But it seems more than a trifle disingenuous to discount the importance of ethnicity within the New York Police Department, an organization rife with internal intrigue, neatly situated in the most ethnically conscious city imaginable...

...Shomrim social events occur frequently, ranging from junkets to Las Vegas to weekend outings in the Borscht Belt...

...Originally, we didn't plan to recruit in Orthodox areas, but one morning we ran into an Orthodox fellow who told us that we should try...

...but we talked about police work as a career, something that builds and requires diligence, just like any other profession...

...Both are adjacent to areas with large numbers of blacks and Puerto Ricans, and community relations could stand improvement...

...Tomorrow he might be decoying as a nurse or an old drunk...

...I'm thinking here of a young police officer I met recently, a slightly jaded veteran at 25...

...No one has mugged him for almost five months now and his morale, he complains, has plunged to "minus zero...

...Inevitably, the self-interests of Jews within the police department have come into conflict with those of blacks and Hispanics...

...This attitude is easy enough to appreciate...