Member-only story
I met John Burnside through my wife. His fiancee and my girlfriend (now my wife) were co-workers at MSKCC. He was just the greatest guy, always smiling, always listening — ever considerate of other people and their feelings and needs.
When I met John, he was a fireman. He’d started his career as a NYC policeman. But he transitioned to being a fireman when he realized how he was expected to treat people as a cop. He never went into any detail about that — there’s a code, where you don’t talk after school about that sort of thing, I guess.
But think about that…you can’t be a nice person, you can’t treat people with kindness, consideration, and decency and still be a cop. At least in NYC, circa 2000, you couldn’t. Probably in many more places and times than that.
The picture above is from a story in which a cop commits felony assault on a woman half his size. Her crime, apparently, was that she was walking in the street when she was supposed to be on the sidewalk. You can judge for yourself whether this policing action was commensurate with the crime. I know what I think.
I thought of John when I saw the video. I know that he never would have done something like this. I know that he could not countenance this kind of violent behavior. And I know that he concluded that there was no place on the police…