Battle of Police Endorsements : Bush Again Raids Boston but Dukakis Outguns Him

Not since the Battle of Bunker Hill has Beantown seen anything like it.

There was Republican presidential nominee George Bush in a daring raid on enemy territory Thursday morning, taunting his opponent in an East Boston eatery and accepting the endorsement of a 1,500-member union in the Boston Police Department.

And there was Democratic presidential nominee Michael S. Dukakis, his pride clearly wounded, firing back from the Statehouse steps with one of his biggest political guns and the endorsements of more than a dozen state and national police groups.

In the end, the Massachusetts governor outflanked and outgunned the invader. But the surprise battle between the candidates and their crimebusters turned into one of the long campaign’s most lively days of political theater.

It began when Bush quickly rearranged his schedule to fly to Boston after the police union leadership voted 51 to 0 Wednesday to endorse him. With several dozen uniformed policemen standing behind him Thursday, the grinning vice president asked: “Who was it who said the police aren’t there when you need ‘em? They’re wrong, I’ll tell you.”

Robert T. Guiney, the union’s president, declared: “As police offi cers in the capital city of Massachusetts, we know Gov. Dukakis well, and we can state publicly that he is no friend of police.”

Anticipating the kind of damage such statements can do in a campaign already weighted toward crime and the Pledge of Allegiance, the Dukakis forces first sought to persuade the police union not to make the endorsement. When that failed, it mounted one of its fastest counterattacks yet.

The Dukakis camp hastily flew in law enforcement officials from Texas and Florida, announced endorsements from police groups representing nearly 100,000 members and used New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo to taunt Bush back.

Compares Support

Bush got “a few drops of benediction” from local cops, while Dukakis had “a tidal wave” of support from the nation’s police forces, Cuomo claimed at a Statehouse rally.

“We’re here to investigate a felony,” Dukakis said, flanked by 10 rows of burly cops bedecked in badges, medals and ribbons. “Assault and battery on the truth. Because what George Bush is doing to the truth in this campaign is a crime.

“For the last eight years, Mr. Bush has been running with a crowd that wouldn’t know the rule of law if it hit them in the face,” Dukakis said.

Robert Kliesmet, president of the 22,000-member International Union of Police Assns., assailed Bush for “deep cuts in state and local police programs, deep cuts in Customs and Coast Guard interdicting funding (and) deep cuts in drug rehabilitation and education.”

Still, Bush scored a hit. His guerrilla strike three days before the two candidates debate in Winston-Salem, N. C., clearly rattled the Democratic campaign and raised uncomfortable memories of his earlier visit to Boston, when he assailed Dukakis for failing to clean up Boston’s polluted harbor.

The police union endorsement was not a total surprise. The Boston union voted to endorse President Reagan in 1984 and endorsed Dukakis’ gubernatorial opponent, Edward J. King, in 1978, and again in 1982, when Dukakis won back the office. The union has also fought with Dukakis over jurisdiction and union issues.

The Dukakis campaign dispatched a crowd of supporters to the streets outside the restaurant to greet Bush. Inside, one protester who loudly interrupted Bush several times during the vice president’s remarks was hauled out, his jacket yanked off his shoulders, by Bush supporters.

Bush told the policemen:

“I’m the one in this race who wants to strengthen law enforcement. Our first priority must be to keep criminals away from the good and decent people who want to raise their families in peace and safety.”

While stating that conditions in the nation’s inner cities and weakening of family values contributed to crime, Bush told the cheering crowd: “You and I know that, when the apple rots, you cull it out . . . . Some people need to be taken off the streets and kept off . . . .”

He repeated his endorsement of the death penalty, which Dukakis opposes, and also criticized a Massachusetts program that allows some convicts to obtain weekend furloughs from prison:

“I will not turn loose first-degree murderers sentenced to life without parole on weekend passes. Life without parole should be exactly that. When it comes to these questions, my opponent is simply out of the American mainstream.”

In fact, the program has been modified to exclude persons who are facing life imprisonment without possibility of parole.

As Bush left the city for Houston for a Republican Party fund-raising dinner with President Reagan, Dukakis made his riposte.

Aides dropped debate preparations to summon hundreds of Statehouse workers and supporters and quickly pulled out the stops to prepare a raucous rally in reply.

Dozens of uniformed police officers lined the sun-swept Statehouse steps, representing police groups from across the country. Ron DeLord, head of the 8,000-member Combined Law Enforcement Assns. of Texas, one of Bush’s adopted states, set the tone.

“While George Bush talks about how tough he is on crime, we got a Panamanian dictator thumbing his nose at the United States,” DeLord said. “Hell, take a Houston SWAT team, go down there and kick that dictator’s ass, and let’s settle this!”

Then came David Murrill, representing 24,000 members of the Southern States Police Benevolent Assn., who blasted “the total fiasco” of the South Florida Drug Task Force, which Bush headed.

“While George Bush was supposedly winning the war on drugs . . . the price of cocaine fell 80% and the supply more than tripled,” Murrill said.

Lt. Edward Merrick of the 15,000-member Massachusetts Police Assn. said Dukakis’ efforts had helped police put five times as many drug offenders in jail last year as in 1983.

Dukakis has won the endorsement of the Massachusetts Police Assn., the Massachusetts Police Chiefs Assn., the state’s district attorneys and the 14 county sheriffs, two of whom are Republicans.

Dukakis responded to Bush’s attack on the state’s furlough program by saying that the federal government furloughed nearly 16,000 inmates last year for up to 45 days at a time, among them “hundreds and hundreds of drug pushers and drug traffickers.”

And he said the suspect in the murder of a Boston police officer was a repeat violent offender who had been paroled from federal prison after serving less than half of a prison term for bank robbery.

“That’s what’s going on in the federal system these days, my friends,” Dukakis said.

While Dukakis spoke, more than a dozen of his top aides watched warily in the crowd to check their handiwork. Loudspeakers drowned out the dozen or so protesters out front who banged drums and carried mock coffins to demand not an end to abortion but better housing for the homeless.

“Only in Boston do we get hit from the left,” one aide said with a sigh.