Courtesy, Professionalism, Respect: A Year of Debating the Meaning of 'Public Safety'

Police have a hard job, and they largely do it sensitively, but they only make headlines when something goes very wrong.

Police are given too much power to maintain the social order, and they wield it heavily, often oppressing the people they're sworn to protect, sometimes with fatal consequences.

Those are the poles of perception in New York City and around the country, in the wake of the deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray and others. And while there are nuanced positions in the middle, the past year has often been tense, leading to strident voices on both sides.

"When an officer does his job, when he walks the beat or makes an arrest, like he's supposed to, and puts someone behind bars, like he's supposed to, you don't hear about it," said Pat Short, 69, in Bay Ridge. "In New York, there are great numbers of policemen, so of course you're going to have someone stray. Same thing in the military. But I believe for the majority, they're good guys."

She said politicians, activists and the news media sit ready to pounce when something goes wrong, to sensationalize. 

Short was responding to Danielle Lamassa, who a minute earlier shared her much less upbeat impressions of police sensitivity.

"They let their titles go to their heads," said Lamassa, 27, who works in Bay Ridge but is from Staten Island, where Garner lived and died. "Cops are supposed to defend us, but the first thing you do when you see cop lights is you get anxiety. Whether you're doing right or doing wrong, they're just going to find something to bust you for."

Lamassa said things seemed to be getting worse, but she admitted that could be because more incidents were being videotaped on increasingly ubiquitous smartphones.

"I think if people didn’t have cellphones and they weren’t recording, then we would never know about a lot of this," she said. "So good for us civilians sitting here and picking up our cellphones and recording what brutality actually is."