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Since that incident there has been no cool between Police Commissioner Kennedy and the New York City Youth Board. Says one board official bitterly: "All Kennedy wants is to swing the big stick, arrest more kids, get more cops, bust up gangs. Where's his respect for the human being?" Contends another critic, Columbia University's New York School of Social Work Professor Alfred J. Kahn: "The conduct he encourages in his officers in effect challenges the objectives of our statutes and substitutes his personal philosophy for that of the law."
Individual Responsibility. Kennedy argues that such critics misunderstand the policeman's role. And he is angrily suspicious that sometimes they do not even understand their own. Says he: "They say some young punk is 'the product of his environment.' Well, who isn't? They say 'He suffered a traumatic experience in his youth.' Well, most of us have. They say 'He's the victim of a broken home.' Well, there are lots of kids from broken homes who didn't become vengeful and take it out on someone else. We've got away from the sense of individual responsibility and free will."
Street-roaming delinquents might not have been listening this week, but the kids saw and heard the physical translation. The gentle police approach was gone; "headbeaters" (cops) were on watch everywhere. And behind the men and women in the deep blue uniforms stood the toughest cop of all, keenly aware that the responsibility for keeping the peace was his, positive that his approach to juvenile delinquency was the proper one for a policeman—especially since the other approaches had not solved the problem. For New York's fisty finest, Commissioner Stephen Patrick Kennedy had a last basic police order: "To the extent that we perform our proper function, to that extent will the city be a better place to live in."
* Last week Kennedy's confidential police solved the department's most embarrassing burglary in recent years , the theft of $26,000 from police department sales. They grabbbed a 35-year-old patrolman previously cited for good police work, who confessed that he had already spent half of it, shamefacedly coughed up an unspent $13,433.