Lindsay's Finest Headache

...The New York Civil Liberties Union opposes the League on this question, arguing that to forbid a policeman to belong to the Society is to infringe upon his rights...

...This was not an earthshaking idea, but since he took office in January, it has had broad political repercussions...

...Interestingly, the Negro policeman's organization, the Guardians, supports the civilian review board idea...

...But many laymen find the sensitivity of white policemen on this point difficult to understand...

...The man who now uses T.R.'s desk is the city's new Police Commissioner, Howard R. Leary...

...The three issues are: a civilian review board, membership in the John Birch Society, and recruiting of non-white policemen...

...The question of whether it is proper for a policeman to belong to the Society became an issue soon after Leary took office...

...The problem of promoting nonwhite policemen to important posts on the force is likely to prove far more difficult to resolve than the Birch Society issue...

...There is no quick, easy solution to this question, or to the questions of the civilian review board and the John Birch Society...

...The review board question was the first to receive Lindsay's attention...

...The new board, they say, would duplicate existing disciplinary machinery, and thereby constitute double jeopardy for policemen...

...And whatever he does to resolve them, it is unlikely that Police Headquarters will long remain a living symbol of a past for which so few, nowadays, are nostalgic...

...Navy, finds itself the prisoner of past personnel practices...

...Leary has resorted to tokenism as an interim measure...

...CORE and the NAACP feel that expanding the board is only a gesture, however commendable, and that the board should have facilities to make its own investigations...

...Lindsay has said only that he wants to make the choice himself from a list of names submitted "by a committee made up of men and women of unquestionable stature...

...By the same token, police chiefs around the country are looking to the stand that the New York Police Department takes on the John Birch Society...

...Those who make the charges maintain that not only the New York police but many other law enforcement departments around the country need to be brought up to date...

...The department will remain vulnerable to charges that it is ultraconservative until it takes a stand, and until Commissioner Leary comes up with some kind of estimate of the number of Birch Society members on the force...

...But the Police Department, like the U.S...

...But its members are deputies to the Police Commissioner, and complaints of police misbehavior are investigated by career policemen...

...And now as Mayor he is, fittingly enough, bedevilled by police controversies...

...On the other hand, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association (PBA), representing more than 90 per cent of the city's policemen, says it will attack the board in the courts, PBA officials point out that roughly similar boards in Philadelphia and Rochester have been challenged on legal grounds...

...Organizations like the AntiDefamation League have argued that a Birchite policeman cannot be objective about minority groups, since his Society claims that the civil rights movement is Communist dominated...

...So far, there has been no indication of who may be chosen for the four positions...

...In addition, the Board members' professional backgrounds have been, from the white policeman's point of view, acceptable...

...It has resulted in the Mayor's replacing former Police Commissioner Vincent L. Broderick with Leary, and most recently in his being booed by picketers during the St...

...The talk and the furnishings at Headquarters also recall the past...

...Some of the issues raised, like the question of improper interference by City Hall in police affairs, have waned for lack of specific evidence, though they will doubtless crop up again...

...A practical man, Leary did not take the desk by choice, particularly, but because he inherited it from his predecessor, along with a collection of controversial issues which, one way or another, all involve charges that the New York Police Department lags behind the times...

...But the overwhelming majority of policemen oppose it as an unwarranted intrusion from the outside, and they are backed by a considerable segment of public opinion which is generally opposed to diminution of police power...

...But three of the issues have proven particularly prickly, and the manner in which Lindsay and Leary attempt to resolve them will have repercussions on police forces throughout the country...

...In one of his earliest campaign statements, he proposed setting up a seven-man independent board to review complaints of police misbehavior...

...But if and when he does so, his troubles will have only just begun...

...This revised board is to make its disciplinary recommendations directly to him...

...With increasing vehemence, civil rights groups have been demanding more non-white police officers, and charging that police recruiting has been, wittingly or not, biased against minority groups...

...This is a question that any modern police force should resolve...

...The Society, he says, feels no hostility toward minority groups as such, and any policeman who belongs to the Society would be the kind of man who would perform his duty equitably under any circumstances...

...Nonetheless, if Lindsay's review board proves successful, it will spur demands from civil rights groups that similar boards be established in other cities...

...The majestic old Belvedere fountain in Central Park is another...

...So far, he has merely said that he considered the Society's estimated figure of 500 too high...

...Patrick's day parade...

...NATIONAL REPORTS Lindsay's Finest Headache By Eric Pace New York Louis Auchincloss to the contrary notwithstanding, there are places in New York where the nostalgic visitor can find flavors of the city's past...

...Shortly after taking office, he promoted one promising Negro Inspector to the relatively lofty post of Assistant Chief Inspector...

...Its turn-of-the-century Baroque dome towers venerably over the rooftops of neighboring pistol stores and luncheonettes...

...And, for better or for worse, so is the Police Headquarters building at 240 Centre Street, in the heart of Little Italy...

...Leary is expected to implement Lindsay's campaign proposal soon by expanding the board to include a controlling majority of four civilians from outside the department...

...As adviser on community relations, however, he does not exercise direct command of police units...

...The police remain potentially the touchiest problem the Mayor faces...

...The third member, Franklin Thomas, is an able Negro lawyer who was formerly an Assistant U.S...

...But the Lindsay administration must take some sort of action to forestall widening criticism-and the possibility of further trouble with the city's minority groups...

...L??chow's restaurant is one of them...

...Others, like the question of how best and most economically to modernize the department's equipment, are simply matters of administrative priorities...

...Why, if the Police Department has nothing to hide, should policemen resent having outsiders review their behavior...

...How he handles them will have a considerable bearing on his national political standing...

...He said first that he saw no impropriety in membership if it did not impair a policeman's "efficiency...

...Proponents of the civilian-dominated review board contend that more concrete lessons can be drawn from the experiences of Rochester and Philadelphia...

...Attorney...

...Inside, there is an equally archaic preponderance of Irish and Italian faces, with very few Negroes and Puerto Ricans, for the ethnic blend of the Police Department reflects the composition of the city's population half a century ago-largely minus the Jews, who never took fondly to uniforms...

...Joseph G. Martin was a reporter on leave from the New York Daily News...

...Civil rights leaders argue that a civilian review board is necessary to modernize police department disciplinary procedures and to provide some sort of outside check which would keep members of the predominantly white police force from mistreating Negroes and Puerto Ricans...

...Martin, however, was fired by Leary after he had said of the new Commissioner, "This man doesn't allow anyone to communicate with him...

...The chairman, Edward J. McCabe, is a retired FBI agent...

...These boards, they observe, have found relatively few cases warranting harsh disciplinary action against a policemanand having a review board does not of itself keep Negro ghetto residents from rioting...

...Capitalizing on the publicity the issue has received, the Society has twice flown its California-based public relations director, John Rousselot, to New York to present its side of the story...

...Eric Pace now covers the police beat for the New York Times...

...To be sure, the Police Department has had a three-man Civilian Complaint Review Board for years...

...One underlying reason is that-as former Deputy Police Commissioner Walter Arm has written-the average policeman is terribly concerned about his own job security...

...High officers use rich mid-Victorian phrases like "the perpetrators left the scene," and the department still treasures the desk that Teddy Roosevelt used as President of the city's Police Board from 1895 to 1897...

...This is simply a matter of updating the police force so that its ranks will reflect the ethnic composition of the city in the 1960's...

...To leave it unresolved simply postpones controversy until an incident arises involving a Birch member...

...Later, he deferred final judgment...

...There are relatively few Negro officers in the promotion pipeline, and even if the most enlightened hiring policy were implemented now, it would have little effect on the upper command levels for years...

...Among the loudest of the critics was John Lindsay when he was running for office...

...He is therefore alarmed at the prospect of outsiders having a voice in disciplinary matters...