Johns Hopkins Magazine -- June 1997
Johns Hopkins Magazine
Home

JUNE 1997
CONTENTS

RETURN TO TOP COPS HIT THE BOOKS

AUTHOR'S NOTEBOOK

RELATED SITES

P U B L I C    P O L I C Y    A N D    I N T E R N A T I O N A L    A F F A I R S

Author's Notebook
Top Cops Hit the Books
By Dale Keiger


I have long been fascinated by police work, much to the consternation of my wife. She knows that whenever I'm afforded the chance to jump into a squad car, I take it. I've ridden midnight shifts, spent time in jail (as a reporter, not an inmate), and hung out with a big-city vice squad commander who weighed about 250 pounds and kept a revolver stuck in the waistband of his jeans. Once when I pointed to a mug shot of a hooker and said that she was unusually attractive compared to most of the women the vice squad arrested, this commander grinned broadly and informed me that I'd just paid a compliment to a guy in drag.

The cops in the Hopkins executive leadership program surprised me a little. They are by no means the first smart cops I've ever encountered, but they were intellectuals in a way that I hadn't anticipated. That is, they were deeply interested in ideas, and the relevance of ideas to daily life and questions of how one should conduct oneself. When some of them joked about being lost by all this lofty intellectualizing, I could tell they were lying. They weren't lost at all, they were just bemused to find themselves in such a heavy discussion.

It was funny to observe them during breaks, because they still walked like cops, men and women alike. I'm not sure I can describe this, but it's got a little swagger to it, a sort of ya-see-me-well-I'm-now-in-control walk, and it's usually got a little of that working-class shoulder roll to it, as well. It was not hard to picture them in uniform, though I mostly saw them in jeans and polo shirts.


RETURN TO JUNE 1997 TABLE OF CONTENTS.