With the way our cops are being so disparaged right now, I thought a story from my early childhood might be appropriate. In the early 1950s, when I was four years old, my family lived in North Park, San Diego, just across the street from Morley Field. My mother was in the hospital, having suffered a devastating miscarriage. I vividly remember hearing her moaning in agony through the bathroom door a few days before. A while later I watched men in white uniforms come, put her on a gurney, and take her to the hospital. She almost died. 

One day while she was in the hospital, my father was at home. I was following him around the house and he wanted some peace. “Go to the zoo,” he finally said to me in exasperation.

Children are literal. I went. The San Diego Zoo was nearly two miles away. I got all the way to the front parking lot before a cop car pulled up beside me. The two officers in the car started to question me. Then one of them said “Get in the car.”

I tried to run away, but they caught me and put me in the back seat. I remember crying hysterically. I thought they were either going to shoot me or take me to jail. But they were real nice. “Hey, we’re not going to hurt you, little boy,” one of them kept saying to me. I knew my address on Upas Street and they took me home.

What might have happened to me had not two San Diego police officers been alert? But they were alert. That’s one of the things cops do. We need them.