Law and Disorder

Color the scene A Clockwork Orange. On the night of the Muhammad Ali-Ken Norton heavyweight fight last week, the action outside Yankee Stadium was worthy of Stanley Kubrick's chiller: gangs of youths rampaged, snatching tickets from fans, breaking into parked cars, seizing a city bus, attempting unsuccessfully to get into the stadium. An attractive woman was shoved face-first into a concrete wall outside the ballpark, and while she bleated in terror, three patrolmen watched unmoving. Pickpockets bumped profitably through the crowd lifting wallets, and young thugs from the wasteland of the South Bronx grabbed women's bottoms and tore open bodies. Some 500 uniformed New York police supposedly guarding the stadium had made no more than an occasional arrest by the night's stormy end.

Certainly no arrests were made by the 1,000 other policemen who were also on the scene. These were off-duty cops, who were blowing whistles, chanting slogans and tying up fight-bound traffic, actions that had the on-duty cops cheering.

The chaos at the stadium was just one in a series of protests last week by militant members of the New York Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, the city's cop union. Their aim was to draw public attention to the P.B.A.'s disapproval of a work schedule and wage package offered to the union by the financially pressed city. The P.B.A. was angered by a change of hours that would raise a patrolman's work time from 243 days a year to 253 and shorten his weekends. It also insisted upon a pay raise of 6%, retroactive to July 1975, a demand for which it had won court backing, though the case is now being appealed. Other city unions had forgone raises until last month because of the city's fiscal crisis.

Two nights before the stadium mob scene, 1,000 police had protested next to Gracie Mansion, Mayor Abe Beame's residence. They set off firecrackers, clanged garbage-can lids, blocked traffic, and shouted "Wake up, wake up!" through the streets of one of Manhattan's most fashionable neighborhoods.

In one action, 2,500 off-duty cops gathered near the Americana Hotel, where the labor negotiations were going on, shouting chants, jostling pedestrians and tying up midtown traffic for three hours. Another group besieged Police Commissioner Michael Codd's home in Queens, honking horns and yelling epithets; one enthusiastic demonstrator tore the star off the shoulder of a deputy chief inspector and threw his hat and walkie-talkie underneath a car.

False Noses. But it was the failure of the uniformed police to discipline either their off-duty brethren or the mobs at Yankee Stadium that exhausted the city's patience. In an angry statement. Commissioner Codd told his 26,000-man force that any policeman unwilling to accept the responsibility of his job should "retire or get out." Codd promised to bring departmental charges against the offenders and the precinct captains who had allowed the disorders to occur.

Late in the week P.B.A. and city negotiators agreed on a settlement giving the police a 6% wage boost retroactive to Sept. 1 this year. That would bring the base pay of patrolmen to $17,458 (plus a cost-of-living hike). In exchange the P.B.A. would agree to drop its court suit. But the P.B.A. delegates rejected the pact, and later several thousand off-duty police, some hiding behind false noses, marched on city hall. That left the city facing not only the threat of more demonstrations and rowdyism, but that gravest of concerns: some form of police strike.

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