Reserve Officer Honors Cops in Beat Poetry

Torn between the need to deal quickly and aggressively with society’s most dangerous elements and criticism from the public, politicians and police brass if they act too harshly, police officers are subject to great stress.

In that stress, Glendale writer Nat B. Read, 59, found the stuff of poetry.

At age 40, Read joined the Los Angeles Police Department as a reserve officer, serving two shifts a month. For five years, Read patrolled some of the city’s toughest neighborhoods in the Northeast, 77th and Southeast Divisions, walked a downtown foot beat and worked vice and gang details.

When he was finished, Read put those experiences on paper, not in typical L.A. fashion by turning them into a screenplay or true-crime thriller, but in a 48-page collection titled “Poet Cop.”

Why poetry?

“I thought the reader would ponder those issues longer if they were in an allegorical form,” Read said. “An emotion can be expressed in greater depth in poetry than in prose, and ultimately I was after the gut feeling of the cop on the beat.”

Read’s poems tell of the wise veteran who counsels the rookie to temper his zeal, of tired officers and their respect for the resilience of their squad car on an eternal shift, and the fears that come from facing down gangbangers.

But behind these everyday tales, Read explores darker, more complex, themes including force versus restraint, the inner life of an authority figure who still tries to remain part of the larger community and the ever-present threat of violent death.

“Tonight I helped turn a young boy’s life around.

“Tonight I used my badge to jail a wife-beating brute.

“Tonight I brought back home a lost retarded child.

“Tonight I made a difference on the edge of darkness.

“While you slept in peace close to the fire.”

“It shows how we delegate the reality of needing to meet violence with violence,” said Read. “There can be no peace without violence. But the power to inflict violence sets up an awkward clash with our society’s values.”

A police officer necessarily employs force and has “the ability to legally kidnap, to subject people to bondage, to assassinate people,” he said. “Those are actions that are counter to a free society, yet necessary if the majority of society is to live in peace.”

Caught in the middle is the police officer, who more often than not turns his or her frustrations inward, feeding an us/them mentality, Read said.

“What begins as ‘we the community’ shrinks to ‘we the cops,’ ” he said.

“The more they are asked to deal with society’s sordid side, the more they are cut off from sources of psychological health, and the more they tend to view their world and citizens in it as perverse.

“It’s a climate of Vietnam for many officers, of being tasked with reducing crimes but having their hands tied by civilian lawmakers.”

From his experiences grew poems like “The Truth of Rodney King”:

“This truth was hammered home that fateful night.

“And in the fateful trial of that sworn band which found him:

“The mark of a society is not how it treats its innocent,

“But how it treats its guilty.”

“The carnivore copper

“Is seldom a poet.

“Yes, heartfelt emotions,

“But no way to show it.”