Durk's Gospel

IN the past eight months, hundreds of students at Ivy League colleges have listened raptly to the unlikeliest of campus recruiters: a cop. New York City Police Sergeant David Durk, 35, comes on in a button-down shirt, loafers and blunt idealism. "If the thought of seeing a problem on the street and doing something about it appeals to you," he told Harvard undergraduates recently, "become a cop." Surprisingly large numbers of students seem eager to try changing the world in blue uniforms. Most of Durk's recruits are headed for Washington, but scores of others have signed up to take exams in Los Angeles and New York.

"Cops aren't inherently pigs," Durk tells the students. "But insofar as some pigs become cops, it is because you won't do the job yourself." As he talks, Durk studies his audience in search of the toughest-minded do-gooders, "the kids who can break down the machismo factor in police departments and show that it's not unmanly to care and have compassion." He also points out that police salaries, though still low, are rising in some major cities. For example, Los Angeles rookies get $9,000, which is more than four times as much as the average Peace Corps volunteer earns.

A New York doctor's son, a graduate of Amherst and a doctoral candidate in sociology and public administration at New York University, Durk once thought the practice of law might be his calling. He studied a year at Columbia Law School but disliked his classmates' chatter about money. In 1963, he became a cop for the same reasons he uses to persuade potential recruits. "The social potential of the policeman is incredible--self interest merges with public interest. If you dare to think about it," Durk says, "it's your last chance to be a knight errant."

With his quick mind (he quotes easily from Dostoevsky, Oscar Lewis and The American Scholar, as well as from the police manual), Durk rated first in his detective squad and rose uncommonly fast in the department. Last month he added another accolade to his police record when he received the Judge Jerome Frank Award for policemen who demonstrate "particularly commendable respect for the civil rights of individual citizens."

His success as a recruiter, made possible by a grant from the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, has caused Durk equal pride and frustration. Though he has persuaded many students to want to join the New York City police, for example, not one will be in uniform next fall because the force has a waiting list of applicants who have already qualified under the traditional physical and written requirements. The key factor, Durk maintains, is never tested: motivation.

Durk is convinced that a new breed of committed cops could radically change the quality of U.S. law enforcement. Too many officers, he suggests, are insensitive to the needs of the ghetto. "We need policemen who worry about the kid getting raped on the tenement roof, not those who look out of the window of their patrol car and say 'See the animals.' We need more cops who care to identify with the people they are supposed to protect." In a nation where more than 55% of high school graduates now go on to some kind of college, a police department without higher-educated rookies is surely hurting itself. Perhaps more police chiefs as well as collegians should heed Durk's pitch.

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