Word: durkes
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...lacks the usual police reluctance to use brainy officers: this fall he expects to have 50 recent graduates of Ivy League colleges on the streets, including the Harvard-educated son of Writer Ring Lardner. Most of them were recruited by one of the nation's first such cops, David Durk (see box, page...
...past eight months, hundreds of students at Ivy League colleges have listened raptly to the unlikeliest of campus recruiters: a cop. New York City Police Sergeant David Durk, 35, comes on in a button-down shirt, loafers and blunt idealism. "If the thought of seeing a problem on the street and doing something about it appeals to you," he told Harvard undergraduates recently, "become a cop." Surprisingly large numbers of students seem eager to try changing the world in blue uniforms. Most of Durk's recruits are headed for Washington, but scores of others have signed up to take...
...Cops aren't inherently pigs," Durk tells the students. "But insofar as some pigs become cops, it is because you won't do the job yourself." As he talks, Durk studies his audience in search of the toughest-minded do-gooders, "the kids who can break down the machismo factor in police departments and show that it's not unmanly to care and have compassion." He also points out that police salaries, though still low, are rising in some major cities. For example, Los Angeles rookies get $9,000, which is more than four times as much...
...York doctor's son, a graduate of Amherst and a doctoral candidate in sociology and public administration at New York University, Durk once thought the practice of law might be his calling. He studied a year at Columbia Law School but disliked his classmates' chatter about money. In 1963, he became a cop for the same reasons he uses to persuade potential recruits. "The social potential of the policeman is incredible-self interest merges with public interest. If you dare to think about it," Durk says, "it's your last chance to be a knight errant...
With his quick mind (he quotes easily from Dostoevsky, Oscar Lewis and The American Scholar, as well as from the police manual), Durk rated first in his detective squad and rose uncommonly fast in the department. Last month he added another accolade to his police record when he received the Judge Jerome Frank Award for policemen who demonstrate "particularly commendable respect for the civil rights of individual citizens...