Hugs for the Blues

Whenever my grandson Jeffrey feels low and put-upon, he holds up his arms to anyone in the vicinity and says, “Huggers!”

This means he wants to be picked up and assured that everything is all right. I guess there is no age at which one doesn’t need some kind of comforting due to unpleasant occurrences. For Jeffrey, it could be that he’s been knocked over by the dog. For others, it could be that they’ve been knocked over by a lawyer.

Which brings me, however circuitously, to the situation that has been unfolding recently in the courtroom of Judge Lance Ito during the O.J. Simpson trial, namely abuse to cops.

Nothing that occurs in that trial would surprise me. I received a call the other day, for instance, from a woman who swore she saw an angel perched on Marcia Clark’s shoulder. She said it looked exactly like Michael Landon.

I don’t doubt for a moment that she actually saw it, but angels come and go in the City of Angels, and if others noticed it, no one commented.

What they have been commenting on, however, is the treatment detectives have been getting at the hands of Simpson’s defense lawyers. Both Mark Fuhrman and Tom Lange, especially, took some pretty hard knocks. They bore them with considerable aplomb, but then what else could they do?

Crying is unprofessional, and leaping from the witness stand to pistol-whip a lawyer during cross-examination is definitely out.

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The attacks on the detectives have unleashed a flood (you’ll forgive the term) of sympathy in L.A. for our Boys in Blue, and I don’t mean the Dodgers.

My mail slot and my telephone answering machine have been clogged with messages of support not only for Fuhrman and Lange but for all of the others sworn to protect and serve within reasonable cultural limits.

Our city leaders, ever on the alert for instances of abuse or cynicism, went so far as to lead a pep rally honoring the guys and gals out there saving us from ourselves.

They’d have burned a lawyer in effigy, but the rates for lawyer effigies begin at $500 an hour, and no one was willing to spend the money.

Among those present at the rally was Councilwoman Laura Chick, one of L.A.’s biggest boosters. You might recall that after our Boys in Blue beat Rodney G. King into a bloody mess a few years back, it was Chick who said if the media would only stop concentrating on the negative, things would be nice.

Now it’s the turn of the lawyers to be blamed for making things not nice in a town that has been not nice for some time now due to a series of events, both natural and unnatural, that have made us a synonym for hell.

In fact, a few weeks ago, when I was in San Diego, I heard a priest tell a child that if he sinned, he would go to Los Angeles when he died.

I am willing to admit that a constant battering can lead to low morale (except in newspaper offices, where we feed on grief and hatred), and the police in L.A. are feeling lousy because of the way Fuhrman and Lange have been treated.

When you see cops driving around in their patrol cars sucking their thumbs, you know something is definitely wrong.

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Personally, I don’t think it’s a bad idea for the police to feel that if they don’t behave, F. Lee Bailey might jump out at them from behind a bush and bite them on the ass.

I’ve covered cops for more years than I care to enumerate and know that when you pamper them, they respond by swaggering around town batoning and choke-holding anyone who isn’t Scandinavian.

We supported our local police all through the 1950s, the way the John Birch Society wanted us to, and all that got us was two decades of a blue feeding frenzy.

However, I realize that if you take away their badges, their guns, their doughnuts and their uniforms, what you’ve got left are human beings who need a little encouragement now and again and maybe even some, well, huggers.

So go on, do it, hug a cop today, just to show ‘em that even if they do lie and plant evidence, you still love the little buggers.

Be certain, however, that you approach in a manner intended to convey you mean no harm. While it isn’t necessary to crawl toward a cop on your belly, do keep your hands in plain sight and, if possible, appear docile.

Then, after huggers, pat the little cop on the bottom and tell him to go about his business without all that crying and fussing.

That always works with Jeffrey. He hasn’t lied, planted evidence or made any kind of racial remarks for days.