STORY
BEHIND THE POEM BIRDS OF A FEATHER
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This poem was born, a bit
out of resentment that had been building up for a period of time.
It came about when a couple of us were sitting in a coffee shop and chatting.
Several members of the beat team walked in and were invited to join us.
They looked at us like we were dirt, and one stated quite plainly, “We
don’t sit with patrol pukes”.
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I was totally amazed, well,
not really because I had seen similar attitudes before. Patrolmen
were referred to as “hats”, or “pens”. It had gotten to the point
in our department where we were working in a series of fractured camps
with nobody knowing what the other was doing. Traffic men were an
elite group unto themselves, or so they believed and patrol people were
considered not worthy to speak to. Patrolmen worked side by side,
but north patrol did not talk to south patrol (part of that was due to
the fact that we worked out of different buildings, miles apart).
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Information would only flow
one way, up. Patrol would pass things onto the Detectives and never
hear anything back about the results. Or if the Detectives were working
a case, they would never tell Patrolmen about it, even though we knew the
streets and the players in our area better than they did. The only
time Patrolmen would be called in by the Detectives, was if they were too
lazy to write a report, so they had the “pen” do it.
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Resentment continued building,
so I wrote the poem, hoping that people would snap back to reality.
It didn’t work. Happily though, after many years, the barriers are
mostly gone and we work mostly together with one common goal. There
are still a few pockets of resistance, mostly in a few of the “elite” special
units, but mostly it is a thing of the past. Thankfully.
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