As I See It ~ A Reporter's View

As I See It

A Reporter's View

By William B. Treml

Judge Roy Bean would have had a fit.

Pat Garrett and Wyatt Earp would hoot in derision.

And what would cause such consternation in these lawmen from the Old West? Why, what else but “public relations” policemen!

Not that the two Michigan State University graduates who tomorrow go on duty on the University of Michigan campus as "police liaison officers” couldn’t handle the gunslingers with which the Beans, the Smiths and the Garretts had to contend. But the duties assigned to Ann Arbor Patrolmen Glenn R. Seifert Jr. and Philip M. LaVigne are considerably different than those charged to those famous lawmen of yesteryear.

For handcuffs, guns and night sticks will be almost foreign objects to Seifert, 29, and LaVigne, 30, when they begin prowling the campus tomorrow. They will be working under a $25,000 federal grant and their major purpose will be to, as the sociologists call it, “relate” to the student body.

Police Chief Walter E. Krasny launched a similar program as a pilot project on the campus several years ago and the Seifert-LaVigne assignment is the final product of that plan.

“Things have changed," Krasny, who began his police career pounding a beat as a patrolman 33 years ago, points out. “We try to change with the times. This is one of the changes.”

Seifert and LaVigne will be working under University Unit Capt. Kenneth B. Klinge and one of their purposes will be to improve the "town-gown" relationship. They will meet with rustlers and thieves who flocked to southwest Texas as the Southern Pacific Railroad pushed on.

Judge Bean never worried about his judicial reputation and set precedents almost daily. Once he fined a corpse $40 when a gun was found on the body.

Today most police agencies are so conscious of public pressures and reactions that monumental reports are made and major internal investigations are launched if an officer so much as draws his service revolver on duty. ’Twas not always so.

Pat Garrett ended his long search for Billy The Kid by killing the outlaw without warning in a darkened bedroom of a New Mexico ranch in 1881. In 1935 John Dillinger heard an FBI agent say “Hold it right there, John,” seconds before the public enemy was drilled through. Billy The Kid was afforded no such luxury by Marshal Garrett. The desperado who had bragged he had killed a man for each year of his 21 died with the words: “Who’s there?”, spoken in Spanish, on his lips. The only answer which came was a .44 slug.

Twenty-seven years later Garrett himself would die by gunfire suddenly and without warning on a road near his home.

Famed as marshal at Abilene, Kans., was Wild Bill Hickok whose claim was that he had never killed a man except in self defense. His shoulder-length brown hair and his droopy mustache made the lanky, shambling marshal a conspicuous figure along Abilene streets.

When a gambler resisted an arrest attempt one Saturday night, Hickok shot him dead. His reputation as a man fast with a gun had preceded him to Abilene. People still talked about the incident in Rock Creek, Nebraska, when Wild Bill became engaged in a quarrel with a group of settlers in the area and killed three of them in seconds.

But living by the sword (or the gun) many times turns out to be a fatal life style. Wild Bill Hickok shortly before his 40th nirthday met a faster gun in a saloon in Deadwood in the Dakota territory. There in 1876 he fell dead in a gun battle.

For years police departments everywhere have been accused of giving traffic officers “quotas” of violation tickets to write. Wyatt Earp, he of the “OK Corral” fame, had one.

While marshall of Dodge City, the most famous of the Earps received $2.50 for every arrest he made in addition to his monthly salary of $250.

Which brings us via a circuitous route back to Patrolmen Seifert and LaVigne who will face none of the problems of the Old West when they walk the University campus for the first time tomorrow.

In the days of Judge Bean that wide expanse of lawn and walk called the University Diagonal would have been an ideal place for a shoot-out. But the chances are the most the new “liaison” officers will encounter there will be a spirited discussion on the inequity of the government welfare program.

Judge Roy Bean with his barroom justice is long dead.

And Pat Garrett’s smoking gun aimed at the dying Billy The Kid is scarcely a memory.

That era of peculiar, individual violence is gone.

In its place we have a new period which gives us on the one hand gang wars, street riots, kidnapings and murders.

And on the other, public relations in the Police Department.

GLENN SEIFERT

PHILIP LAVIGNE