Two Policemen on the Beat

In the shock wave of attacks on policemen, Philadelphia has been an epicenter. TIME Correspondent Karsten Prager made the rounds one night last week with two members of the city's elite, all-volunteer "highway patrol," a highly mobile force distinctly unpopular in the high crime areas where it is deployed. The patrolmen were David Messaros, 29, white, with two years on the force; and Lawrence Boston, 26, black, a four-year veteran. Prager reports their feelings about the perils of their job:

TWO of the Philadelphia policemen shot the weekend before were members of the highway patrol. Messaros and Boston were the second team to answer the victims' call for help; when they arrived, they confronted an angry, shouting crowd of 150. Only by using threats could the two men get through to their wounded colleagues. "I really didn't feel very much then," Messaros says. "I let out a couple of screams to let off the pressure. Yesterday, three more cops got hit. I read the first account of it this morning and all of a sudden I started to cry like a baby."

To Messaros and Boston, the enemies are "bugs"--"riffraff," as Boston translates it, white and black alike. "It's not really a war," Messaros explains. "It's trying to make a place that's got good people and bad people living in it safe for the nice people. That's why I'm a cop. I like the job, but I also don't want my kids going through all this." Boston adds: "Bugs don't care who you are. When push comes to shove, they don't care whether you're green or black or gray or what. They just go for the uniform." Both men have had close brushes with serious injury or worse. Messaros was stabbed in the hand last year by a young car thief. The year before, a man fired his .38 at the pair, but he missed.

Neither man takes chances. Boston never leaves home without his gun, "even to go to church"; Messaros says he straps his holster on before he brushes his teeth. "Fear is something in your mind that has to be overcome," Messaros says. Boston is equally stoic: "Hell, I could die tomorrow at the movies." Still, both feel that their equipment--pistol, blackjack, nightstick, helmet--could be improved upon by putting a sawed-off shotgun in their car. No need to point it at anyone, they say--"just that you come out of the car, and it comes with you."

When Messaros started as a cop, he says, "I almost got killed for treating people the way they taught us at the academy, like being friendly and all that. I'm not a nice guy any more. When we get out of the car, we don't know who the guy is that we're gonna look at or what he's got or what he's gonna do." At one point on this night, they stop a young black about to go into a bar in a known narcotics area. They search him for drugs. "This just ain't right," he complains over and over. His protests get louder, so Boston warns him: "Don't you grandstand on me." The youth is clean; they release him and he disappears, muttering. Either he has just managed a masterful counterfeit of innocence--or the police have made a new enemy.

If Messaros and Boston are worried about making things worse, they do not show it. "Careful as usual, business as usual," says Boston, peering down an empty alley. But neither man believes that the most recent attacks on the police will be the last. "A cop can sense it," Boston says. "The hostility in the street is going up. You can feel it right there, and it will get worse."

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