N.Y. Police Activity Returning to Normal

The cab driver was preparing to buy a sandwich and coffee in the mid-Manhattan delicatessen, when suddenly, wallet open, he sprinted to the street and began arguing with the policeman who had just written him a ticket for parking in a no-parking zone.

After grudgingly accepting the summons, he drove his cab forward, stopped in front of a fire hydrant and prepared to return for his lunch. The policeman sounded the siren of his patrol car, signaling that a second ticket soon could be coming. Enraged and without his meal, the hungry cabbie drove away.

The brief vignette Friday was a clear sign that things were returning to normal in New York City. A six-day work slowdown by police officers protesting a plan to rotate precinct assignments had ended with an uneasy truce between police and their commissioner.

More Trouble Feared

During the rule book slowdown, thousands of police officers refused to issue thousands of summonses. Sporadic attempts were made to disrupt police radio frequencies by playing music or holding microphones open in patrol cars. There were fears of more serious insurrections ahead.

But after Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward and the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Assn. reached agreement Thursday evening to hold talks before the transfers began, police began writing summonses again and enforcing other regulations they had neglected.

“Things appear normal,” a Police Department spokesman said.

A spokesman for the PBA agreed that the job action was over.

March Called Off

As part of the compromise, the police union called off its plans for a massive march Friday across the Brooklyn Bridge and a demonstration outside police headquarters. Commissioner Ward agreed to postpone past Monday his plan to transfer 20% of the patrol force to new precincts each year as a corruption-fighting measure.

But the commissioner declined to abandon the plan, put forth after 13 police officers in the same Brooklyn precinct were indicted on charges of stealing drugs and other crimes.

A series of meetings between negotiators for the Police Department and the PBA is now expected to work out a compromise designed to make the proposal more sensitive to the needs of police officers.

“We don’t have a plan,” said union President Phil Caruso. “We’re starting from scratch and we’re going to attempt to work out a plan that both sides can live with.”

Losing Seniority

He said one major issue was the question of senior officers losing seniority in shift assignments and preferred beats.

Attempting to address that issue, Mayor Edward I. Koch, who acted as a behind-the-scenes mediator, said police officers working day shifts want to know that they will not draw night duty and lose second jobs when they are transferred to new precincts.

“That’s a reasonable matter to be considered,” Koch said. “Lots of cops have big mortgages and they’ve got to pay the mortgages. When you affect their second job, that’s not cosmetic. That’s up front.”

But, because Ward stressed that he intends to start the transfers “in a few days,” it remained unclear whether Friday’s return to normal represented a settlement of the problem or merely a truce.

Opponents of transfering 20% of the patrol force among station houses each year say morale will be badly hurt because many policemen think they are being punished for the alleged wrongdoing of a few officers. They further argue that breaking up teams of policemen endangers not only the community but policemen as well.