The Super Cops

One of the byproducts of this China virus lockdown, foisted on us by government at every level and resulting in 'public service' message bombardment by the Hollywood elite (in their minds, not mine), is that I've watched more television and surfed more interwebs than normal.

That's how I happened across a movie I hadn't seen in decades: 'The Super Cops'.

It's the (mostly) true story of a couple of rookie coppers from back in the early '70s, Dave Greenberg and Bobby Hantz, played by Ron Leibman and David Selby, respectively; the film was based on the book by the same name...which I read my sophomore year in high school. I saw the flick when it was first released in theaters.

Greenberg and Hantz were, to say the least, unconventional in their methods, often disguising themselves as street bums or public utility workers in order to make drug collars, even working cases on their days off...without approval of police brass. As they piled up arrests and convictions they also became thorns in the sides of supervisors and drug detectives but, once a drug lord contracted three hit men from Detroit to kill them because of how badly they'd impacted their precinct's dope business (the duo were tipped off by several informants and they actually arrested the hired killers), did the administrative types back off.

There were allegations of 'Batman and Robin', so named by the precinct's citizenry, being dirty cops; NYPD's Internal Affairs division tried, unsuccessfully, to draw them into a payoff. scheme.

All in all, by today's standards, it was a pretty lame-and-tame movie. The book was better.

Greenberg retired from the police department in 1975, then served as an assemblyman (city councilman) in 1978; however, he was twice convicted of mail and wire fraud and ended up in prison. Hantz was arrested on a drug charge in the Bahamas while on vacation and agreed to resign his commission.

Not-so-super cops, after all.

The film got me to thinking about the term 'super cops', and some of the men and women I worked with over the five decades I wore a badge (1979 to 2013). The truth is, the general public is largely ignorant as to what a 'super cop' really is; by my humble definition, an extraordinary policeman is someone you could learn from, who did things by the book and led by example, never asking those under his command to do things he or she would not. The very first name I thought of was a man I worked for even before I became a certified police officer.

Lieutenant J.D. 'Jack' Moore of the Ohio State Highway Patrol.

Sometime in the mid-70s, while I was visiting my then-girlfriend at her parents' home on Mansfield's northeast edge, we heard numerous sirens approaching the neighborhood from what seemed like all points of the compass, shutting down a couple of streets over from where we were. The cop gene, seedling that it was in my head, led me to seek out the commotion; it was a deranged young man armed with a .30 caliber rifle, standing shirtless in his front yard.

Law enforcement had blocked off the street, of course, but I had binoculars in my white 1974 AMC Gremlin and made use of them; I was probably 75 yards away. Someone with a badge was trying to talk to the disturbed man through a bull horn from behind the cover of a cruiser and I could hear the guy yelling back at the top of his lungs, though I couldn't make out his words.

A few minutes later I see a state patrol cruiser pull up on the opposite end of the street from where I was; the state patrolman (they weren't 'troopers' back then) spoke to a couple other uniforms, took off his campaign hat and walked towards the armed man, stopping in the street beside a parked car. The man with the rifle, I'd later learn, only wanted to speak to this particular OSP officer, and he shuffled to the other side of the same car, .30 cal carbine planted on his hip, pointing skyward.

Things seemed to calm down at that point as they talked, but suddenly this guy whips the rifle down, trying to get a bead on the state patrolman, the officer ducking and shuffling around the car, trying to keep it between him and the man. Coppers started screaming at the guy to put his gun down (I'll forego the accompanying profanity) and he finally did. The man was taken into custody without further incident.

That state patrol officer had been Mansfield post commander Moore. I will never, for the rest of my life, forget watching him face down an armed man without even drawing his sidearm.

As fate would have it, I worked for Lt. Moore at the Mansfield post several months later as a cadet dispatcher; that's someone who works the radio at post-level and eventually goes to the OSHP academy in Columbus to become a full-fledged trooper. How that turned out is another story in itself.

I found Jack Moore to be a fair, honest man, one who treated me more as an equal than the lowest subordinate. Three times a week, when working day shift, Jack would snatch me from dispatch and take me to run with him at the now-gone Naval Reserve center on Ashland Rd, to be followed by a couple of hot dogs at Weiner King on Lexington Avenue. The man loved that place and he would always pay for my lunch no matter how much I objected.

J.D. Moore, who died on duty of a heart attack in 1981, was a super cop in my book. We need more like him in today's world.