Alan Sandomir married my cousin Donna a little more than fifteen years ago. He is a cultivated and charming man, an excellent family man and an attentive husband. He is also a convinced conservative, which has earned us a few heated conversations. He lives with his family in a peaceful neighborhood of Long Island. When I met him for the first time, Alan was still a police officer. He is today one of the most important detectives — read inspectors — of the NYPD (New York Police Department). He heads the “Special Victims Squad,” a police unit that investigates rapes, with or without murder, and sexual abuse committed against children. I always loved listening to him tell me about his investigations, his investigative techniques, his interrogations of serial killers whom he chases from one end of the United States to the other. The stay I spent at their home in the summer of 2002 allowed me to glimpse his daily life more closely. Each evening I waited for him to come home, his revolver and a pair of handcuffs attached to his belt, and to tell me about his day. Sometimes he did not come home, his investigation being liable to continue the whole night through. He was still then under the shock of the September 11 attack. Requisitioned the very day to secure the perimeter of Ground Zero, he had helped to clear and identify the victims’ bodies, notified families of the death of their loved ones, protected, weapons in hand, the large containers set up near the site of the attack and serving as an open-air morgue. The imprint of blood on his shoes, the pestilential odor of the bodies still haunted his memories. During my last stay in 2008, Alan entrusted me with the cassette of a film about the NYPD made by the NBC television network. He was interviewed in it and filmed crisscrossing the streets of New York in his car, his walkie-talkie in hand. One saw him leap out of the vehicle to catch a fugitive and handcuff him, conduct searches. I knew, moreover, that under a pseudonym scarcely concealing his name, he had become a character in a detective novel. The day he entrusted me with this film, toward the end of December, we were all having lunch together in the Long Island house where the Hanukkah decorations still remained. How could this man who was my cousin be this detective-film character? How did he manage to combine his life as a detective and his life as a family man — a Jew, what’s more? I knew that his two daughters were in a Jewish school. How could one be both a Jew and a cop? I knew Harry Kemelman’s rabbi mysteries, but Alan was the first Jewish police officer I had ever met. He never ceased to intrigue me. This Plurielles dossier on Jews and America allowed me to ask him the questions I had always wanted to ask him.
Plurielles: Can you tell me in a few words the story of your family?
Alan Sandomir: My father was born in 1920 in Warsaw. His father was a fervent Zionist and he left with his whole family for Palestine in 1925 or 1926. They settle in Tel Aviv. My father goes to school but he interrupts his studies at fourteen to learn the trade of barber. He works in a Tel Aviv shop and also cuts the hair of the soldiers of the British Army. Later, he joins the Haganah. He takes part, notably, in the tragedy of the Altalena, when a ship, loaded with weapons and fighters, led by Menachem Begin, is torpedoed on June 23, 1948, on the orders of Ben Gurion. After the war, he opens his own barber shop in Jerusalem. And then, in 1952, he decides to emigrate to the United States. He remained, all his life, very attached to Israel, but he hoped to start a family and to be able to offer his children a better life than the miserable life he led in Israel. In New York, he meets my mother, who was born in Brooklyn. She had been raised as an American but spoke Yiddish perfectly. In fact my parents spoke to each other only in Yiddish. They settle in Brooklyn where my father opens a barber shop. He had not gone to school but he thinks, like my mother, that it is very important that I read. That I read everything. My parents never refused me a book. At the age of thirteen, they therefore subscribe me to the magazine U.S. News and World Report, as well as to another magazine that contained reports on the various countries and regions of the world. That’s perhaps why I later studied anthropology! My family respected the traditions. We went to the synagogue for Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah, my mother lit the candles for Shabbat, I had my Bar Mitzvah. But the house was not kosher. Between the ages of nine and thirteen, I attended the Talmud Torah classes at the synagogue, several times a week after school. And then one day, I must have been about eighteen, I gave up all observance and religion went out of my life.
Plurielles: So you studied anthropology — is that what led you to become a police officer?
Alan Sandomir: I did a double major in anthropology and also in Political Science. But you can’t say that’s what led me toward the police. After my studies, I spent four years in the American army in Germany. When I came back, I had it in mind to join the American Secret Service but I quickly understood that this job would not offer me what I was looking for. I became a police officer in order to then become a “detective” (inspector of the criminal investigation police). What I wanted was to be that man in suit and tie who slips into the chaos to bring order back to it. The one who solves crimes, helps those who say no to criminals. I wanted to put an end to violence. I knew that this job was not an ordinary job, that it was full of challenges. Many people would not want to or could not do this work, but I knew that I could, and it was even very exciting. My political opinions, no more than the fact of being Jewish, entered into the reckoning in this choice. I was in America and I could choose any career provided I was qualified for it.
I wanted a career where I would not be confined behind a desk, a career where I could be promoted on account of my successes. And finally a job that would give me a right to a pension and a medical allowance in case I took risks. I knew the salary would be low. But if I worked hard, succeeded, and was promoted, my standard of living would be that of the middle class. So I worked hard, succeeded, and was promoted. Today I am at the highest rung of the police inspectors, I cannot go any higher. I keep working because I love what I do, but I am going to have to retire soon. At fifty-six, I work on average sixty hours a week. This job, that’s for sure, is rather a young man’s job. There are no specific studies to become a “detective,” but once you’ve joined the police, you have to take the courses of the Police Academy and pass the exams. The program, in my day, lasted six months. It included learning the great principles of law and of police procedures, basic sociology, physical conditioning, and training in self-defense and the handling of weapons.
I started out as a uniformed officer. I walked the streets of the Lower East Side, in Manhattan, on foot. The neighborhood’s population was then composed essentially of very poor Blacks and Hispanics and the crime rate there was very high. For a time, it was the heroin-trafficking capital of the entire East Coast of the United States. I patrolled sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs. The degree of violence that existed there, both against the cops and among the gangs, surprised me a great deal at first. But you learn to deal with it. My job was to intervene in case of crime, fire, to raise the alarm in case of medical emergency. I intervened in the course of my rounds, sometimes because I was alerted by the police radio. Soon, I began to crisscross the neighborhood by car, which allowed me to cover a wider perimeter.
Fairly quickly, I was promoted and I joined a unit of plainclothes officers that was charged with cracking down on armed offenses, shootings or stabbings, thefts, burglaries. The difference is that we had, notably, the right to carry out home searches. It’s an exercise you learn, I took courses for it: how to knock on doors, how to use your weapon in that situation.
The bulk of the acts of violence had a connection to drugs. So I worked in collaboration with a unit specialized in drug suppression. Nine months later, I was transferred to northern Manhattan to join a unit (still plainclothes) charged with tracing the channels of drug trafficking, identifying the networks and dismantling them. This time, I had to learn the handling of tactical weapons other than the traditional ones, and of course to train myself in investigation in drug circles.
My work as a detective began in 1992 in the Bronx. The crime there was terrible. We investigated two to four new murders a month. Not counting assaults of every kind, thefts, rapes. I did that for three years and I dreaded having to keep doing it until the end of my career. It held no appeal for me. After three years investigating murders in the drug world, I had come not to give a damn whether the dealers got murdered or not. They were criminals who were responsible for their own fate. I wanted to defend those who had not deserved to be victims. The “Bronx Special Victims” squad had contacted me to recruit me. The idea of investigating rapes and abuse committed against children tempted me. Those people, the children in particular, had in no way deserved to be victims. But I no longer wanted to do this work in the Bronx. The Bronx was a cesspool and it still is today. I wanted to return to Manhattan. I finally joined the Manhattan Special Victims squad and I’m still there. Within this unit, I have investigated very many cases and chased criminals from one end of the country to the other to bring them back to New York. I was trained in the investigation of rapes and in the analysis of rape scenes. For some years now, it is I who dispense this training to the new recruits of the service.
Plurielles: Are there many Jews in the New York police?
Alan Sandomir: No, I don’t think there are many, but there must nonetheless be a few. But not resembling other Jews, either professionally or politically, does not bother me in the least. The great majority of police officers are right-wing or center. The tradition of the left is to denigrate the police — well, until the moment when you need it… Unlike most Jews, I am a conservative, as my father was before me. My father never asked anyone for anything, nothing was ever handed to him. He worked hard and earned everything by the sweat of his brow. He was very grateful to America, which allowed him to attain a comfortable standard of living and to give his children a better life than his own. Capitalism, which encourages the free market, personal initiative, innovation, is for me the best of systems. Even if I acknowledge that my government has failed for the past fifteen years or so, through the fault of an unbridled greed and the dishonesty of a good number of elected officials on both sides. The fact remains that capitalism encourages success, whereas socialism and the ideologies of the left institute mediocrity as the norm. The humanism that underlies socialist ideology is, in my view, a utopia. A utopia very beautiful, to be sure, and certainly very moral in its foundations, but not very realistic. I have more than doubts as to its effectiveness as a system. But I am not a thinker. I draw on no intellectual authority, I am only a cop. That’s simply what I think. As for why American Jews are historically left-wing, I have no explanation for that, except an extreme historical short-sightedness. No doubt it’s also tied to the fact that the Jewish emigrants who arrived in the United States at the end of the nineteenth, the beginning of the twentieth century were very poor. They identified with the exploited and persecuted classes. At that time, the idea of socialism was developing everywhere in Europe, especially after the Russian Revolution. In America, the unions were pointing an accusing finger at the excesses of American capitalism, which was making profits on the backs of the workers. Now those workers were in large part Jewish, Irish, Italian. And then, as we know, the Jews have always embraced the intellectual avant-garde of their time, and at that time, it was the left that was at the forefront of political thought. And this political sensibility was then transmitted from generation to generation, in the family and at the university where the children of these immigrants went. It seems to me, nonetheless, that for some time things have been changing. More and more Jews are going to discover the benefits of American conservatism, on the personal as well as the community or national plane.
Plurielles: Have you ever arrested Jewish criminals or Jewish rapists?
Alan Sandomir: I have arrested very few Jews in the course of my career and even fewer Jewish rapists. The reason, in my opinion, is that Jews are not predisposed to this type of behavior. It must also be said that the Hasidic or ultra-Orthodox communities do not call on the police for this kind of crime. They very rarely call on the police in general, in fact. People settle their conflicts among themselves according to their own laws.
Plurielles: When you carry your revolver, do you sometimes happen to think that your ancestors in Poland were forbidden to bear arms?
Alan Sandomir: No, I had never thought about it. My weapon is nothing more to me than a work tool. It has for me nothing glamorous or heroic about it, nor, of course, anything diabolical. It is at once a luxury and a burden. I have carried a revolver for twenty-seven years… I hardly even think about it anymore. But I acknowledge that your question, from a historical point of view, is interesting. Yes, interesting…