Down Another Road to Serendip

Somehow I seem to be drawn down roads that lead me to things I hadn't intended when I started out. Yesterday, someone made mention in a Facebook posting about our role in international policing, so I was immediately reminded of the Phil Ochs' song "Cops of the World." I found it on Youtube and linked it in my response. The person whose page I had posted the comment on thanked me and said he'd never heard the song before. 
Cops of the World - Phil Ochs

This put me back onto Youtube and a short nostalgic trip through several of Phil's songs. Then I discovered the 1983 film, done for British TV's Channel 4 entitled "Chords of Fame." It's a documentary in four parts about Ochs, his music, career and death by his own hand in 1976.
Chords of Fame - Phil Ochs

It is mostly a documentary, with pictures and film clips, interviews with people who knew Ochs and a performance of some of his music by a young actor/singer named Bill Burnett. Several critics at the time said that the use of an actor to portray Ochs diminished the film. Perhaps. It is, for me, a powerful evocation of a time when I was involved in both the fringes of the folk movement, radical politics and, less fringe-y, the US Army.

I can frequently forget those days for long periods of time, but then, something will dredge up a memory and it all comes cascading back, often accompanied by tears for all that we've lost and the people no longer with us.

So many of the poeple interviewed in the film are gone, now. We lost Dave Van Ronk in 2002; Odetta left us in 2008; and Mike Porco, the Sicilian grandfather Bob Dylan never had, the creator of Gerde's Folk City, died just short of 95 in 2010. The times have changed. Even back in 1983 much had gone the way of so many things. 

The Gaslight, once a basket house, then a paying gig for folk singers who had risen a bit above the crowd, closed in 1971 and in '83, according to one of those interviewed in the film, had become "an Arab restaurant."

A brief side note - I met Odetta for the first time with Tex Konig in the Dug Out, a one-step down bar on Bleecker Street, just up the street from "The Tin Angel" made famous in the song of the same name by Joni Mitchell. The three of us sat and drak whatever we were having. Tex wasn't a drinker, but he nursed something along. Tex was a large man, over 6'5" and weighing over 300 pounds. Odetta was also a big woman, imposing, regal and one hell of a singer. And she was coming on to my friend and it was whizing right over his head. When I told him, after Odetta excused herself to move along to a gig, that she was coming on to him, hard, his response was "Odetta? Why would she bother with me? I'm just another folk singer, she's, well, she's Odetta!"  I didn't have an answer for that, not then, not now and with both of them gone, not ever.

When I came back from my time in the military in '69, I moved back to New York and with a new girlfriend took over a sub-let apartment at 112 MacDougal Street, upstairs above the Gaslight and the Kettle of Fish, a bar frequented by musicians, artists and the whole gamut of people in the Village in those days. When we wanted a drink, the Kettle was the usual place until some people we knew opened "Nobody's" on Bleecker. Nobody's became one of the rock and roll bars in the city, but it was still folkies and actors and a smattering of rockers when it was more or less home base for a bunch of us.

The Kettle of Fish has moved twice from its MacDougal Street location and is now a Wisconsin-themed sports bar on Christopher Street. I can't imagine it; I really don't want to imagine it, not even a little. When I was living above it and managing the Cafe Feenjon across the street starting at the dinner hour through to breakfast the next morning, I could often be found in the Kettle with friends drinking beer or, when I was flush, Jack Daniels, neat with a cool water back. In 2009, the old location of the Kettle at 114 MacDougal was the Cafe Esperanto.

Last time I remember, the Old Cafe Rienzi, next door to the Feenjon, was a clothing store, featuring retro couture with a hippie flavor. (I learned recently that it was now a pub called the Grisly Pear, which sounds like a place I might want to hang out, if I did that sort of thing any more.) Rienzi's used to be the place to hang out, the back room especially. It drew all kinds of folks, musicians, writers, artists, actors, models and whoever showed up and seemed interesting. 

I remember hearing Brian Jones jamming with a young chick guitar player named Carol Hunter early in the Stones rise to greatness. Brian stopped for a bit to marvel at this girl's playing and then joined back in. Great place to be at the time.

The old Feenjon at 109 MacDougal has been known by many names, the first I remember being "The Commons" and then "The Fat Black Pussycat" where I used to do my homework and hang out, sitting in the windows that fronted on Minetta Street, the front entrance back in the day. When it became the Feenjon - which means "coffee pot" I was told by the man who owned the place when I worked there, Bob Englehart - Bob cut through the back entrance to give it a presence on MacDougal Street, which was the main drag as the Village became a tourist mecca. The place is now a Mexican restaurant called "Panchito's" and, for reasons known only to the new owners, they painted out the sign that was above the place for as long as I knew it proclaiming "The Fat Black Pussycat Theater." History obliterated by a broad paintbrush and red paint.

At some point in my time as night manager and espresso machine operator at the Feenjon, we decided to re-open the large back room, the part that had been the main theater in the Fat Black Pussycat days. We had live music there two or three nights a week, mostly lesser-known folks, including my friend Tex before he pretty much took off permanently for Canada. But one night, for some reason, several well-known names in folk music and other forms were in town and they ended up in the back room of the Feenjon. I remember Odetta, Jack Elliot and a couple of others and David Amram, a French horn player whose musical interests crossed all borders. It was a magical night, without egos, without the music business getting in the way of the music.

The Feenjon became a Middle Eastern nightclub under Manny Dworman - whom we used to call "Manny Halfman" for reasons lost in memory - and is now a rock music club run by his son, Noam. Manny Dworman bought the place from Englehart when Bob needed to sell and take over his father's short-haul bus business in New Jersey. Under Dworman, the place became a Middle Eastern coffee house with ethnic music, often including Dworman, who was a pretty good oud player in his own right. He later moved the Feenjon to the former Cafe Wha? which he bought from Manny Roth, David Lee Roth's uncle. 

So, I hope you can pardon this unabashedly nostalgic ramble. I was a bit player, the friend to some of the featured players. The only thing I have going for me is that, unlike so many of them, including my best friend from those days, Tex Konig - folksinger, storyteller, actor, fine Chinese cook, pistolsmith and martial artist - I am still here to remember it and write some of it down.

I don't usually dedicate my blogs, but for a lot of reasons, this one is dedicated to Tex Konig, who left this world just shy of 60 in July of '99. I probably wouldn't have been in all those places or known all those people if I hadn't known Tex.

November 22nd, 1963 Remembered 

Yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President, in Dallas, Texas. Pretty much everyone in the US knows where they were on that day and what they were doing.

I had not been a huge supporter of Kennedy, but in my family even my slight praise met with some resistance from my father, who aways referred to JFK as "That good-for-nothing Irish son-of-the-rich." My dad's side of the family had little use for the Kennedys, mostly stemming from Joe, Senior, having gotten some plum Washington job that, it was felt, should have gone to my grandfather.

I guess, like most of the people my age - I had turned 19 the month before - I was somewhat taken with the whole "Ask not what your country can do for you . . ." ethos and the fact that Kennedy was a lot cooler than other national politicians. I expected great things from him and his administration.

So, on that day, I was in the upstairs bedroom of a duplex apartment, part of a mansion built as a summer house for members of the Astor family in Astoria, Queens. It was not quite as grand as it had been in its heyday, but it boasted a good-sized living room, a dining room and kitchen on the main floor, actually the 2nd floor, and two bedrooms on the top floor. It was affordable for a young single mom and her 2-year-old daughter.

I had met the woman who lived there the week before in Greenwich Village, at a small storefront coffee house called, rather grandiosely, "The Cafe World." I had been quickly introduced by a mutual friend. The woman and I sat and chatted between sets by several folksingers we both knew. Eventually, she asked if I'd like to see her haunted mansion. What young boy could resist a come-on like that from a dark, rather exotic looking woman, dressed in a style several years out of date, but not stylishly retro?

By the time that eventful Friday had rolled around, I'd spent a week with her, being taught, with patient tenderness and a good deal of skill, the art of pleasing a woman and being pleased. We had not actually consummated our relationship at that point. 

It was early afternoon, sometime around 1:30 P.M. when the phone rang. My lady friend answered, spoke for a moment and put the phone down. "Turn on the TV," she said, "DG said that Kennedy has been shot."

Sure enough, anywhere you looked on the dial, the news people were talking of nothing else. It came in fragments, nothing like the way we get our news today. There was no live or even taped coverage of the entire motorcade, there were no cameramen rushing to the hospital, none of that. Just the news men, Cronkite, Huntley, Rather and others getting unconfirmed reports, tearing off flash bulletins from the AP and UPI teletypes. My lady friend and I sat at the edge of the bed, holding hands and with shocked expressions on our faces.

Then, at around 2 P.M. Eastern time, the news came that President Kennedy, despite heroic efforts of the staff at Parkland Hospital, had succumbed to his wounds. We looked at one another, I got up and turned off the TV, and in some unconscious human need for comfort and a restoration of some normalcy, we consummated our week-long bout of instruction and foreplay.

There was little else on television that weekend. Lots of pictures of Kennedy and his family from earlier days, coverage of LBJ being sworn in on Air Force One, with the widow of the late President standing near. There were even moments of silence and solemn music. The nation was in mourning.

I have been teased by some of my friends who said that it took a natural tragedy to get me to shed my virginity. After that day, nothing was the same, not for me or for any of us. It was, in truth, a loss of innocence in a great many ways. Fifty years ago. It seems like a lifetime and and yet only yesterday. The lady is dead, I am in my 70th year. And the world is a very, very different place than it was on that day in 1963. 

Frightening Read - The Enemies Trilogy - Foreign and Domestic

I've read books of all kinds since I began reading over my mother's shoulder. The school administration at McDonough #9 in New Orleans were annoyed with my mother for having taught me to read before I entered kindergarten, but it wasn't really Mom's fault. I basically taught myself.

Recently a friend sent me a list of free books at Amazon for the Kindle. Among them I found a novel by Matthew Bracken called Castigo Cay, a slightly futuristic speculative adventure story mostly set aboard a sailing vessel in the waters off the South Florida coast ( A worthwhile read with similar themes) there was a list of the author's previous work at the end, including a trilogy that began with Foreign and Domestic, whose title comes from the oath taken by so many of us to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. 

The book is the first in what is called The Enemies Trilogy. F&D is set in the present, in the area around Washington, D.C., an area I used to know somewhat from having been stationed there twice in my service with the Army. Bracken gives you a strong sense of place, with great descriptions you feel would allow you to find all of the locations. He tells a story about a small group of ordinary people who get caught up in a plan by a small group within the BATF&E to gain favor with the administration and enhance their standing within the Federal Law Enforcement community. They do that by perverting their mission and breaking their oaths to the Constitution.

The frightening thing about this book is how plausible the conspiracy at the center of the plot is, given current events. I've had to read it in small increments because the believability of the plot tends to get my blood pressure up to dangerous levels. I can see it all happening just as Bracken has written it.

The splinter group of rogue federal cops uses the technique of "plausible culpability" to further the agenda so many in the real-world current administration have put forward, that gun owners and "constitutional nut jobs" pose a threat. They use "false-flag" operations, which lead to draconian anti-gun laws and it gets worse from there. Anyone who reads the news will see parallels and possibilities aplenty here.

Bracken creates believable, human characters, heroes and villains alike, and, unlike many male-oriented novels, writes strong female characters, equal to their male counterparts.

If you are interested in how the present increase in federal power, the strong anti-Constitution agenda of the administration, the ever-greater militarization of law enforcement, especially at the federal level might play out at worst-case-scenario levels, thus book and the two that follow, which I am eager to read, will be to your liking.

To say much more would get us into spoiler country. If you've read Foreign and Domestic and want to discuss it or comment on this blog, I am on Facebook as well as here.

Life at the Cellular Level

     No, this isn't some esoteric treatise on biology. It's about my experience with cellular telephones. The first time I had access to a mobile cellular phone was as a field supervisor for a security company. Because we had a contract with an alarm company to provide armed response, and no central dispatch, the field supervisors got to lug around this hefty piece of technology that was almost the size of a military man-pack radio like the AN/PRC-77 we used in Vietnam. 

AN/PRC-77 radio                   

       

Nokia Senator 21 lbs.

     In the military, there was usually someone to tote the 13+ pound PRC-77 around for you. I got to carry my own phone. We weren't supposed to use it for anything but alarm response calls, but since it was our only link to the office, it got used, with explanations and justifications, for other things as well. When I went to another security firm, that anchor was a part of my past.

     I by-passed the classic brick phone for a Motorola MicroTac, which looked like the communicator in Star Trek. (Not an accident, I later learned. A Motorola engineer I met doing tours told me that they used the familiar form factor to make adoption easier.)

Classic '80's brick phone  

     We started using the Motorolas in the Institutional Police and officers were able to get them for their own use at the same price and with the same deal as the City, so I ended up with two of them, one for department use -- all of us on "special details" got one -- and one for personal use. When I left the IP, I quit using mine and it sits in a box somewhere with a couple of spare batteries and the charger.

     I managed to live without a cell phone for a few years, but I did buy a Palm III to keep information, calendar and so forth upgrading to a slimmer Palm (actually a Handspring Visor Edge, a Palm-compatible device. Handspring was acquired by Palm shortly thereafter.) I got a great deal, since they were offering a deep discount if you gave your older Palm device to someone and they filled out the paperwork. I gave mine to my girlfriend Ana (now my wife) but she never used it.

     And then I was forced back into the cell phone world. When I started driving for California Jeep Tours, the boss was surprised to learn I didn't have a cell phone. I told him that I had been encumbered with a radio and two cell phones as well as a couple of pagers when I was a cop and wanted no part of the tethered world, thanks all the same. One day, he handed me a small cell phone the size of a bar of soap. I was back in the cellular world

    At some point, I realized that carrying two electronic devices -- my Visor Edge PDA and the cell phone -- made little sense, and I bought a Palm Centro, their latest smart phone, in 2007. I had expected that I could just port all my Visor Edge information over to the Centro, but that wasn't going to happen since the OS on my old Visor was one generation too old for that.

     I kept the Palm Centro-- and the service -- even after business slowed down and I was seldom needed to drive. I will confess to a rather selfish act. I kept the service with AT&T even after I moved to New Mexico, meaning but never getting around to changing over my service and getting a New Mexico number. And then, a month ago, my service ended. I wasn't all that surprised and can't fault my former boss for terminating my service. I had what I called my "Census burn phone" a Virgin Mobile phone I got when I was taking census back in 2010, so I bought some minutes, reactivated it and began the search for a new service and solution.

     I wanted to keep my Palm Centro. I had a lot of information on it, much of it no longer relevant, but enough that was to want to keep it in use. My old service -- and Ana's -- was with AT&T, so we looked to them first. Now, the serious drawback to the Centro is that it has a terrible browser, so I never used it to search the web. But because it is a smartphone, AT&T made a data plan at $20 a month mandatory. There was, apparently, no way around it. They also wanted a chunk of change to move Ana's service from California to New Mexico with a delay of a week or more. Needless to say, we were both . . . miffed, perhaps? Only more than that.

     One of the providers would sell me a SIM card to unlock my Centro, but, again, since it was a smartphone and technically capable of going on-line, they all wanted to make me take a data plan, even if I never used it. If I was going to have to pay for a data plan, I wanted to be able to use it, and that meant a phone with a significantly better browser. I was looking at Android phones, but they were pricey. And then I saw the LED signage at the "cricKet" store near us advertising "Free Android Phones." Well, free under certain circumstances. And it looked as if it would apply to us, although it wasn't going to be free for the phone I wanted. But at the discounted price, if I ported my phone number from Virgin, it was a good deal.

     Well, for some reason, which no one can explain, my number wasn't portable. But, I was told, the discount will hold. We'll see. It seems that one of the salespeople and the manager are of different opinions on the matter. And when Ana decided to upgrade to an Android phone, we got a run-around and she decided against it. 

     So, I find the Samsung Vitality smartphone I chose is pretty amazing, compared to what I was used to. When I came out from California with my stepson, Chris, he with an iPhone, I suffered a bit from phone -- and app -- envy. The Samsung does most of what his iPhone does, enough for me, at any rate. It is so far in advance of my old Palm Centro that I don't care that it lags behind the curve and isn't cutting edge. It does what I want, cost -- it would seem -- a reasonable amount and has enough "coolness" factor to keep me happy for some time.

Six years ago I wrote a piece for the Lew Rockwell site. Recently, I got a request from a gentleman in Romania, asking to be allowed to translate the piece into Romanian. I gave my permission. Below is the original piece. Here is a link to the translation: http://webhostinggeeks.com/science/lewrockwell-comorig-ro

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Listening for a Sound That Won't Be There by Jamie Fraser-Paige by Jamie Fraser-Paige Once upon a time we fought a war in Southeast Asia, a war we pretty much lost, no matter what Nixon said. Let's not get into the whole set of lies and half-truths that got us into that war. Nor the lies that kept us there or the lives thrown away and the patriotism squandered. All on an unwinnable war far from our shores whose end result was a peace that we could have had thirty years before. I mention the war only to provide context for a small glimpse into how we fought that war in the intelligence arena and why so much of today looks so very, very familiar to me. I was drafted in September of 1965, one of the 50 thousand that Johnson requested to escalate the war in Vietnam. I didn't have any strong feelings one way or another about the war. I wanted to believe that we were doing something good and noble over there. Call me naïve, I probably was. I grew up reading about World War Two and watched Korea unfold on the screens of the local movie houses in the newsreels – I'm of the last generation so privileged. I felt it was my duty to serve my country when asked. I admired the writing of Robert Heinlein and found the premise of granting suffrage only to veterans that he put forth in Starship Troopers to make some degree of sense. When I went down for my induction, I opted to enlist, choosing the Army Security Agency as my branch. I made this choice because my cousin had been in the ASA and several of my other friends had served either in that branch or in the Air Force equivalent. I had a facility for language and was fascinated with the world of intelligence. Blame Ian Fleming and Graham Greene for that. I tested well, too well in fact to be trained in any of the languages I really wanted like German (which I'd studied along with Spanish in High School) Russian, Czech, Hungarian and so forth. I scored in the top one percent on the Army Language Aptitude Test, the ALAT. I was doomed to be sent to learn an Asian language. Even that might have been alright. Chinese, Korean, Japanese – Japanese, especially since I liked the culture and had some family history in the area. But no. The Army had other ideas. I was selected to be trained as a Lao linguist and area analyst. I spent thirty-nine weeks in the Foreign Service Institute – or rather in a contract class taught in some anonymous high-rise in Alexandria, VA – on civilian status learning the language of Laos, a language spoken by only about six million people. I did reasonably well, spending six hours in class each day and an additional two to four in the language lab working with tapes. My classmates and I spoke Lao among ourselves, sitting in bars and clubs in the District and being enigmatic. I went up to Ft. Meade, assigned to the ASA unit located just outside the grounds of the NSA headquarters known as the Puzzle Palace, America's codebreakers. America's eavesdroppers, phone tappers, cable interceptors. It's called Signal Intelligence – SigInt – and it was considered a very important part of our defense against the great enemy against whom we were struggling, World Communism. I learned my trade there under a very informal Navy Chief Petty Officer who insisted we all call him "Bob." It was anything but glamorous, but you knew that, right? Intelligence is mostly a lot of drudgery unless you're a field agent and even then there's more paperwork than anything else. For that matter, that's true of a lot of jobs that people who don't do them consider exciting and glamorous. Like being a cop. I've done that, too, for that matter. While I was at NSA, assigned to the Southeast Asia desk, clipping newspaper articles that mentioned my unit's target, the Lao Neutralist Army of Kong Le, there was a major flap in the Royal Lao Air Force. I was at my desk, going through the day's papers when I came across a front-page story about an attempted coup in Laos. At dawn of 22 October 1966, under the command of General Thao Ma, commander of the Tactical Air Force, eight RLAF T-28s set out to strike different targets in Vientiane. I was about to call my boss when some of the upstairs brass strode into the area demanding to know why they had to learn about something like this in the morning's paper. Since it was my desk they seemed to be gathering at, I attempted to answer. I said that, in all probability the coup attempt – Ma's second in a little over a year – had been a closely held operation with radio silence maintained. Since we had no real assets on the ground and no penetration of the Lao military, there was no way for us to know until it was fait accompli. They wanted to know how a Reuter’s correspondent had gotten the story so quickly and I told him that he was probably standing around the air field when the planes took off from Luang Prabang where he and his most loyal pilots had essentially been exiled. He'd seen the direction of flight – toward Vientiane, not Vietnam – and followed up. "How did he get this information and how could he follow up so quickly?" they asked. "Well," I replied, "they probably pay him a pretty good bonus for scoops like this." They were not amused. People were not all that amused with General Ma, either. His sortie attacked two ammunition depots and the main command of the armed forces along with the homes of several Generals. Thirty-six people died on the ground and dozens more were wounded. Then the American and British Ambassadors interfered and forced the general to give up. He and 12 of his pilots then fled to Thailand, where – after several months in prison – all were granted political asylum. The T-28s were repainted with the Royal Thai Air Force markings and flew missions in support of various secret wars in the area. Now, the relevance of this to the present situation is this: We have come to rely heavily on technology. We can eavesdrop on just about anyone, anywhere at any time. We have super computers and thousands of specialists in a variety of fields who can take any piece of Electronic Intelligence and process it, mine it for every bit of information and then make pretty good guesses as to what it means. But the best way to foil us is to use low tech. Meet face to face. Plan the operation before you start, meeting in small cells with little chance of penetration and then carrying out the mission with no further discussion outside that cell. No phone calls, no radio transmission, no email, nothing that requires technology or lends itself easily to technological interception. The concern currently over the illegal use of no-warrant intercepts of domestic conversations is certainly valid, but it's not the first time we've done something like this. In theory, NSA must have a warrant. Of course, the CIA isn't supposed to operate domestically either, but they do. The practical ex-spook, ex-cop some days yearns for the freedom to use any means necessary to do the job. There's been an internal struggle for years with the two sides of my personality and the civil libertarian always wins, damn his eyes. In my opinion, no amount of wiretaps, radio intercepts, fancy programs to sift among the millions of transmissions of all kinds, analog, digital or any combination legal or illegal will prevent or even warn us of the next terrorist attack if they are following good practice. That's the really sad part. And it makes you wonder – it certainly makes me wonder – if the Bush administration knows that. I think they do and that means that all of this is a ploy to be able to control the American people. And that's not how it is supposed to be. Well, I told you I was naïve. February 14, 2006 Jamie Fraser-Paige [send him mail] is a former member of the Army Security Agency, shorn of his Top Secret Crypto clearance for his political unreliability. He nonetheless served in the US Army honorably from 1965 to 1969 as a non-com. He is also a former police officer and security consultant who lives with his lady, a chef and their cat in the San Francisco Bay area. Since 1984 he has voted Libertarian and done volunteer work for the party. In 1985 he wrote the California party flyer on the Second Amendment and ran for a seat on the Berkeley City Council. Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com

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When you declare war, what you get are soldiers, not cops

Many years ago, one of our Presidents, it might have been Johnson (actually, Jamie, it was Nixon, in 1971; sorry) declared a "War on Drugs." The dynamic of law enforcement was set on a new path -- or back on an old one reminiscent of the days of prohibition and anti-labor activities. In some places, it began even earlier. Not long after I was discharged from the Army, I was living in Greenwich Village, on MacDougal Street, sort of the Main Street of the Beat/Hippie/Folkie world at the time. I was managing a coffeehouse across the street that was, at that time, known as "The Cafe Feenjon" but had existed since the late '50s as "The Commons, "The Fat Black Pussycat" and perhaps other names now forgotten, at least by me.

Now all of this is to set the stage for a bit of history. In the late '60s -- I left the Army in September of '69 and moved to New York in early '70 to place it all in a chronological context -- the civil rights movement was taking a decidedly un-civil shift. There were the Black Panthers, The Black Liberation Army, The Symbionese Liberation Army and other, lesser-known Black radical groups and a lot of fringe folk with no real ties to any group, just a serious case of the mads with white people. In NYC, cops were being killed in larger numbers than anyone could remember. The Mafia pretty much had a rule that cops were off the table as targets because a cop-killing brought a lot of heat down in an area and often right into the middle of a healthy business operation. This was not a Good Thing. But the Black Militants had no such scruples. In one instance, in 1972, an undercover police officer was fatally shot at the #7 Mosque of the Black Muslims in Harlem. Two cops, one black and one white, were gunned down on the outskirts of the Polo Grounds Projects, a public Housing development on the site of the old NY Giant's baseball stadium -- and one-time polo field. The NYPD, fearing a continuation of what had been dubbed "The Long Hot Summer" re-energized the Tactical Patrol Force, originally created in 1959 to deal with a rise in crime rates.

By the time the unit was brought up to strength, staffed by young men, six feet tall and athletic in build, the City had cooled down and the incidents of the previous year seemed to be part of history. Once re-activated, however,  TPF had to be used and it was, including in several incidents where a situation was created by officers in the target precinct triggering the call-out of TPF. They were also used for "crowd control" including keeping weekend foot traffic in Greenwich Village moving. They were not popular with many of the locals. I had a friend who served, for a time, with TPF until their use in incidents provoked to justify the use of TPF finally got to him.

Not long after, even small towns began to get "tougher on crime" and the feds were right there with Vietnam War surplus equipment. Many were offered helicopters and those that could field a pilot and a place to tie the 'copter down took the government up on their offer. As I said, war had been declared on drugs and the federal government, long unable to really make much of a dent in the drug trade, enlisted local law enforcement in numerous task forces and gave them military-surplus equipment with which to fight that war.

LAPD created SWAT in 1967 in response to the rise in racial tension during the Watts riots in 1965. (http://www.policemag.com/Videos/Channel/SWAT/2010/04/LAPD-s-Chief-Gates-on-Creation-of-SWAT.aspx is a brief comment on the formation of SWAT by Retired Chief Daryl Gates.) SWAT is, in a very limited fashion, a useful tool when dealing with barricaded subjects, violent, armed offenders and the like. But, as was true of TPF, once you have the tool, the tendency of bureaucrats is to use the tool in order to justify the expense.

Much is made in the press and the blogosphere of police departments getting what they always seem to call "tanks" but are usually armored personnel carriers of some type. Armored vehicles can serve a very useful, even critical, function in law enforcement. When dealing with the situations described just above, having a mobile armored base from which to operate or with which to move on a subject who is armed can be critical. It can save lives, allowing the officers to shield emergency responders while they remove an injured person. However, using an armored vehicle to serve every warrant? Along with the full SWAT team? Nah, I don't think so. But, they do.

There were a couple of Facebook postings recently from a friend -- who I would say is a trifle to the left of me on many subjects -- about the recent bestowing of military equipment as freebies to local cops. One is this, http://www.businessinsider.com/program-1033-military-equipment-police-2011-12#ixzz1fhfo82jd. The other was http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/12/05/120511-news-militarized-police-1-6/

In the second story, one of the recipients of the federal largess, Chief of Police Bill Partridge, who heads a 50-officer department in Oxford, Ala., said “If you’re quick on the trigger on the Internet, usually you can get what you want,” Partridge said, noting his department visited the program’s website “weekly or daily” to check for gear. “My philosophy is that I’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it.”

The problem here being that recent history has shown us that "having it" is almost a guarantee of "using it" sooner or later and not always in the most appropriate manner.

I like "big boy" toys. I have been a shooter most of my life, from about eight, when I went to the shooting galleries in Times Square and Coney Island to pop targets in the arcades with .22 Shorts fired from old rifles. I like things that go whir and clank and bang as much as the next guy, and when I got to shoot fully-automatic weapons on some one else's dime at a conference in Seattle, I was a happy camper. All that said, I find the militarization of our police, to the extent to which it has progressed since the late '50s, is just plain wrong and it is also counter-productive.  Cops have, as the articles mention, become pretty much an occupying army, distanced from the community they are supposed to serve. 

I wore the nearly ubiquitous black battle-dress uniform and high-top boots, carried a high-capacity semi-auto pistol in a large caliber -- .45 ACP -- and was trained on other weapons, as well. There was a riot helmet in my locker and a 36-inch riot baton as well. I always wore my vest, even when I worked plain-clothes. But I was available to talk to the people who worked on my beat at the county hospital or the mental health clinics or, prior to that in the housing projects and the county welfare offices. I didn't let down my guard, but I tried, consistent with that, to be open and available to the people with whom I dealt. I had learned the concept of "Community Oriented Policing" long before it became a buzzword for a federally-funded program from a beat cop who worked in the 6th Precinct and patrolled the streets of Greenwich Village in the late '60s. Jimmy was approachable, pleasant to deal with and alert to what was going on. He was in stark contrast to the TPF cops who lorded it over the citizens, bohemian and tourist alike, on those crowded summer streets.

There is a major fundamental difference between the police and soldiers, although both are armed and may use similar equipment. The police, ideally, keep the peace and arrest wrong-doers. Soldiers maintain peace by killing the enemy and occupying territory. There is a huge difference. So, while I can see the need for some of the military-grade tools that local cops are getting and using today, I think a lot more discretion needs to be exercised in their use and a lot less use made of some if it.

When you declare war, what you get are soldiers, not cops

Many years ago, one of our Presidents, it might have been Johnson (actually, Jamie, it was Nixon, in 1971; sorry) declared a "War on Drugs." The dynamic of law enforcement was set on a new path -- or back on an old one reminiscent of the days of prohibition and anti-labor activities. In some places, it began even earlier. Not long after I was discharged from the Army, I was living in Greenwich Village, on MacDougal Street, sort of the Main Street of the Beat/Hippie/Folkie world at the time. I was managing a coffeehouse across the street that was, at that time, known as "The Cafe Feenjon" but had existed since the late '50s as "The Commons, "The Fat Black Pussycat" and perhaps other names now forgotten, at least by me.

Now all of this is to set the stage for a bit of history. In the late '60s -- I left the Army in September of '69 and moved to New York in early '70 to place it all in a chronological context -- the civil rights movement was taking a decidedly un-civil shift. There were the Black Panthers, The Black Liberation Army, The Symbionese Liberation Army and other, lesser-known Black radical groups and a lot of fringe folk with no real ties to any group, just a serious case of the mads with white people. In NYC, cops were being killed in larger numbers than anyone could remember. The Mafia pretty much had a rule that cops were off the table as targets because a cop-killing brought a lot of heat down in an area and often right into the middle of a healthy business operation. This was not a Good Thing. But the Black Militants had no such scruples. In one instance, in 1972, an undercover police officer was fatally shot at the #7 Mosque of the Black Muslims in Harlem. Two cops, one black and one white, were gunned down on the outskirts of the Polo Grounds Projects, a public Housing development on the site of the old NY Giant's baseball stadium -- and one-time polo field. The NYPD, fearing a continuation of what had been dubbed "The Long Hot Summer" re-energized the Tactical Patrol Force, originally created in 1959 to deal with a rise in crime rates.

By the time the unit was brought up to strength, staffed by young men, six feet tall and athletic in build, the City had cooled down and the incidents of the previous year seemed to be part of history. Once re-activated, however,  TPF had to be used and it was, including in several incidents where a situation was created by officers in the target precinct triggering the call-out of TPF. They were also used for "crowd control" including keeping weekend foot traffic in Greenwich Village moving. They were not popular with many of the locals. I had a friend who served, for a time, with TPF until their use in incidents provoked to justify the use of TPF finally got to him.

Not long after, even small towns began to get "tougher on crime" and the feds were right there with Vietnam War surplus equipment. Many were offered helicopters and those that could field a pilot and a place to tie the 'copter down took the government up on their offer. As I said, war had been declared on drugs and the federal government, long unable to really make much of a dent in the drug trade, enlisted local law enforcement in numerous task forces and gave them military-surplus equipment with which to fight that war.

LAPD created SWAT in 1967 in response to the rise in racial tension during the Watts riots in 1965. (http://www.policemag.com/Videos/Channel/SWAT/2010/04/LAPD-s-Chief-Gates-on-Creation-of-SWAT.aspx is a brief comment on the formation of SWAT by Retired Chief Daryl Gates.) SWAT is, in a very limited fashion, a useful tool when dealing with barricaded subjects, violent, armed offenders and the like. But, as was true of TPF, once you have the tool, the tendency of bureaucrats is to use the tool in order to justify the expense.

Much is made in the press and the blogosphere of police departments getting what they always seem to call "tanks" but are usually armored personnel carriers of some type. Armored vehicles can serve a very useful, even critical, function in law enforcement. When dealing with the situations described just above, having a mobile armored base from which to operate or with which to move on a subject who is armed can be critical. It can save lives, allowing the officers to shield emergency responders while they remove an injured person. However, using an armored vehicle to serve every warrant? Along with the full SWAT team? Nah, I don't think so. But, they do.

There were a couple of Facebook postings recently from a friend -- who I would say is a trifle to the left of me on many subjects -- about the recent bestowing of military equipment as freebies to local cops. One is this, http://www.businessinsider.com/program-1033-military-equipment-police-2011-12#ixzz1fhfo82jd. The other was http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/12/05/120511-news-militarized-police-1-6/

In the second story, one of the recipients of the federal largess, Chief of Police Bill Partridge, who heads a 50-officer department in Oxford, Ala., said “If you’re quick on the trigger on the Internet, usually you can get what you want,” Partridge said, noting his department visited the program’s website “weekly or daily” to check for gear. “My philosophy is that I’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it.”

The problem here being that recent history has shown us that "having it" is almost a guarantee of "using it" sooner or later and not always in the most appropriate manner.

I like "big boy" toys. I have been a shooter most of my life, from about eight, when I went to the shooting galleries in Times Square and Coney Island to pop targets in the arcades with .22 Shorts fired from old rifles. I like things that go whir and clank and bang as much as the next guy, and when I got to shoot fully-automatic weapons on some one else's dime at a conference in Seattle, I was a happy camper. All that said, I find the militarization of our police, to the extent to which it has progressed since the late '50s, is just plain wrong and it is also counter-productive.  Cops have, as the articles mention, become pretty much an occupying army, distanced from the community they are supposed to serve. 

I wore the nearly ubiquitous black battle-dress uniform and high-top boots, carried a high-capacity semi-auto pistol in a large caliber -- .45 ACP -- and was trained on other weapons, as well. There was a riot helmet in my locker and a 36-inch riot baton as well. I always wore my vest, even when I worked plain-clothes. But I was available to talk to the people who worked on my beat at the county hospital or the mental health clinics or, prior to that in the housing projects and the county welfare offices. I didn't let down my guard, but I tried, consistent with that, to be open and available to the people with whom I dealt. I had learned the concept of "Community Oriented Policing" long before it became a buzzword for a federally-funded program from a beat cop who worked in the 6th Precinct and patrolled the streets of Greenwich Village in the late '60s. Jimmy was approachable, pleasant to deal with and alert to what was going on. He was in stark contrast to the TPF cops who lorded it over the citizens, bohemian and tourist alike, on those crowded summer streets.

There is a major fundamental difference between the police and soldiers, although both are armed and may use similar equipment. The police, ideally, keep the peace and arrest wrong-doers. Soldiers maintain peace by killing the enemy and occupying territory. There is a huge difference. So, while I can see the need for some of the military-grade tools that local cops are getting and using today, I think a lot more discretion needs to be exercised in their use and a lot less use made of some if it.