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Subject: Op-Ed piece from today's WSJ
New York
On a gray and chilly afternoon, when the stinging, windblown rain seemed to come in sideways, I saw a police boat on patrol in the Hudson River.
As it passed I could see there was a name painted on it: Robert Parker.
I wondered who he was and why a boat would be named for him. So later that day, I checked.
In 2004, Detective Robert Parker and his partner, Detective Patrick Rafferty, were attempting to arrest a suspect in a domestic-violence case. On East 49th Street between Snyder and Tilden Avenues in Brooklyn, the suspect shot and killed both officers.
As he lay dying, Detective Parker called a 911 operator and identified the gunman. He also was able to tell the dispatcher that responding officers could find a mug shot of the killer on the dashboard of his police car. Because of that, the murderer was apprehended within two hours; after trial he was sent to prison for life, with no possibility of parole.
What do you do for the officers who died trying to arrest him? There are no televised award shows to honor cops, no red carpets to celebrate their valor. Their faces don?t make the glossy covers of celebrity magazines.
What the New York Police Department did was name two workaday patrol boats for Detectives Parker and Rafferty. At the christening of the boats, the police commissioner at the time, Raymond W. Kelly, said of the detectives: ?We will always consider them a part of our one, inseparable police family.?
One recent morning an NYPD detective told me that word?family?is the key. These days, he said, police officers around the country know that, if their names appear in the newspaper, it likely will be for something they have been accused of doing wrong. But when a fallen officer is honored the way Parker and Rafferty have been, ?no one else may know who they are, but their families, especially their children, can take comfort in knowing their names will live on. The families just want to know they are remembered.?
NYPD Deputy Chief Thomas Burns told me: ?Police officers leave the house for their shifts and have a front-row seat on the world, both the good and the bad. The families have it harder than we do. They?re the ones who wait and worry until the officers come home.? It?s like that for police officers? families in every town in the U.S., as we have been all too achingly reminded in Pittsburgh and in Thousand Oaks, Calif.
The Hudson was choppy and unwelcoming on the afternoon I came upon the boat named for Detective Parker. The cold rain was pelting its hull. Still, the officers assigned to patrol the river were on the water, on the lookout for trouble, because that is their job?whether anyone is aware they are out there, or will ever know their names.
Mr. Greene?s books include ?Chevrolet Summers, Dairy Queen Nights.?
New York
On a gray and chilly afternoon, when the stinging, windblown rain seemed to come in sideways, I saw a police boat on patrol in the Hudson River.
As it passed I could see there was a name painted on it: Robert Parker.
I wondered who he was and why a boat would be named for him. So later that day, I checked.
In 2004, Detective Robert Parker and his partner, Detective Patrick Rafferty, were attempting to arrest a suspect in a domestic-violence case. On East 49th Street between Snyder and Tilden Avenues in Brooklyn, the suspect shot and killed both officers.
As he lay dying, Detective Parker called a 911 operator and identified the gunman. He also was able to tell the dispatcher that responding officers could find a mug shot of the killer on the dashboard of his police car. Because of that, the murderer was apprehended within two hours; after trial he was sent to prison for life, with no possibility of parole.
What do you do for the officers who died trying to arrest him? There are no televised award shows to honor cops, no red carpets to celebrate their valor. Their faces don?t make the glossy covers of celebrity magazines.
What the New York Police Department did was name two workaday patrol boats for Detectives Parker and Rafferty. At the christening of the boats, the police commissioner at the time, Raymond W. Kelly, said of the detectives: ?We will always consider them a part of our one, inseparable police family.?
One recent morning an NYPD detective told me that word?family?is the key. These days, he said, police officers around the country know that, if their names appear in the newspaper, it likely will be for something they have been accused of doing wrong. But when a fallen officer is honored the way Parker and Rafferty have been, ?no one else may know who they are, but their families, especially their children, can take comfort in knowing their names will live on. The families just want to know they are remembered.?
NYPD Deputy Chief Thomas Burns told me: ?Police officers leave the house for their shifts and have a front-row seat on the world, both the good and the bad. The families have it harder than we do. They?re the ones who wait and worry until the officers come home.? It?s like that for police officers? families in every town in the U.S., as we have been all too achingly reminded in Pittsburgh and in Thousand Oaks, Calif.
The Hudson was choppy and unwelcoming on the afternoon I came upon the boat named for Detective Parker. The cold rain was pelting its hull. Still, the officers assigned to patrol the river were on the water, on the lookout for trouble, because that is their job?whether anyone is aware they are out there, or will ever know their names.
Mr. Greene?s books include ?Chevrolet Summers, Dairy Queen Nights.?