9/98 Dispatch

January 2001

On behalf of the Board and our families we wish you and your families a safe, healthy and Happy New Year.

We are sorry we had to cancel our Christmas Party, but the response was not what we had expected and did not want to run a half way party. We will begin to advertise the 2001 Party earlier and get firm responses and be better established. We will also be doing a children's Party too. I want to thank the Board for all their hard work in getting things established, but unfortunately, I had to make the decision to cancel the Party and take the responsibility for it. The Board worked hard with short notice to get things done and they did a Herculean task to get it going, but we did not get enough advertising out to get the responses we needed to make it a success. I apologize to any one who was inconvienced by this.

This month we will be having several things going on at the meeting. Since a lot of our members are getting ready to retire shortly or in the next few years, we have arranged to have a PD retirement specialist come to speak to our members on Jan 8,2001 and he will help us to plan for our future, Pat O'Shea is a retired NYPD Detective who specializes in retirements, so bring plenty of questions for him. We are also trying to get some members from the State Board to come up either this meeting or the next to answer questions and to explain our benefits and to have our Members meet the new State Board Members.

We also plan to honor Congressman Ben Gilman for his part in bringing the remaining killer of NYPD PO Mike Buzcek to justice last month. As of this writing, the Congressman is trying to juggle his schedule to attend. PO Buczek's killers escaped shortly after the killing from Washington Heights to the Dominican Republic, where one of the killers( a Dominican cop at one time) took an unscheduled flying lesson and met his death. The second one was captured just a few short weeks ago with a large assistance from Lodge Member Ben Gilman.

Congratulations to Steve Giove on his recent election to the President of the Orange County Shields and to Tommy Carroll on the success of the Shields annual blood drive(Tommy, I still have a pint of blood for you in the next week or two.)

On a personal note, thank you to the members who have called, e-mailed or stopped by or just offered prayers to my father, a Lodge Member, and to the Lodge as a whole for the fruit basket sent to his house. He has been very sick lately and we have been by his bedside for the last three weeks so I have been very slow in getting back to everything and everyone. I would like to thank Member Jerry Gibbs for going out of his way daily to make sure that myself and my family are taken care of at Columbia Presbyterian from making sure we have parking available to just words of encouragement. Thanks.

Lastly,stay safe, and remember wear your vest.
Tom

Congratulations to Leslie and Brian McInerney on the birth of their daughter Emma Ann, on Jan 4, she was welcomed by her big brother Billy, all are doing well.

Important Chat Room warning

To All MOS, at roll call training yesterday, we were informed that numerous complaints were received by the NYPD re: off-duty cops in chat rooms, using vulgar language or "being discourteous" (while off-duty & on-line). BEWARE.........If you have anything in your user profile that identifies you as an NYC PO, and someone makes a complaint, it will be forwarded to IAB, where there is a Sgt. & two Detectives assigned to investigate "Computer Discourtesy". PLEASE PASS THIS ON TO ALL MOS AND REMOVE ANY REFERENCE OF NYPD FROM YOUR USER PROFILE. Watch what you say & who you "chat" with.

When the Lord was creating peace officers, he was into his sixth
day of overtime when an angel appeared and said, "You're doing a lot of
fiddling around on this one." And the Lord said, "Have you read the specs on this order?

A peace officer has to be able to run five miles through alleys
in the dark, scale walls, enter homes the health inspector wouldn't touch, and
not wrinkle his uniform.

"He has to be able to sit in an undercover car all day on a
stakeout, cover a homicide scene that night, canvass the neighborhood for
witnesses, and testify in court the next day.

"He has to be in top physical condition at all times, running on
black coffee and half-eaten meals. And he has to have six pairs of hands."

"It's not the hands that are causing me problems," said the Lord,
"it's the three pairs of eyes an officer has to have."

The Lord nodded. One pair that sees through a bulge in a pocket
before he asks, "May I see what's in there, sir?" (When he already knows and
wishes he'd taken that accounting job.) "Another pair here in the side of his
head for his partners' safety. And another pair of eyes here in front that
can look reassuringly at a bleeding victim and say, 'You'll be all right
ma'am, when he knows it isn't so."

"I can't," said the Lord, "I already have a model that can talk a
250 pound drunk into a patrol car without incident and feed a family of
five on a civil service paycheck."

The angel circled the model of the peace officer very slowly,
"Can it think?" she asked.

"You bet," said the Lord. "It can tell you the elements of a
hundred crimes; recite Miranda warnings in its sleep; detain,
investigate,search, and arrest a gang member on the street in less time than it takes five
learned judges to debate the legality of the stop... and still it keeps
its sense of humor.

This officer also has phenomenal personal control. He can deal
with crime scenes painted in hell, coax a confession from a child
abuser,comfort a murder victim's family, and then read in the daily paper how law
enforcement isn't sensitive to the rights of criminal suspects."

Finally, the angel bent over and ran her finger across the cheek
of the peace officer. "There's a leak,"she pronounced. "I told you that you
were trying to put too much into this model."

"It's for bottled-up emotions, for fallen comrades, for
commitment to that funny piece of cloth called the American flag, for justice."

Again, this is your newsletter, whatever you would like to see printed please submit it. we will print anything from the members, pro or con. We will not practice censorship, just correct for spelling. We want to make this a newsletter that the readers, our members, look forward to.