But why lavish praise on cops for doing the job they are supposed to do? Precisely because so many otherwise routine traffic stops take a turn for the deadly, especially when the encounters involve black or Hispanic drivers. Watch video
By now you've seen the clip of an arrogant self-entitled former commissioner with the powerful Port Authority mouthing off to two Tenafly police officers.
At the very least, you've heard her name.
But if Caren Z. Turner is the star of this particularly appalling road show, the story's real heroes are the self-possessed cops who kept a potentially explosive situation from going completely off the rails.
You definitely should know the names of Matthew Savitsky and Tom Casper, the cops who are rightly being hailed by colleagues from as far away as Hawaii, Texas and Canada.
A 68-minute dash-cam video of the incident introduced the world to Turner. It shows her challenging the two officers after they pulled over the Toyota her adult daughter was riding in for a routine motor vehicle stop on a busy highway in the Bergen County community.
Tenafly chief on cops: They handled it 'perfectly'
Increasingly belligerent and confrontational, Turner capped her performance by throwing the F-bomb when the officers refused to genuflect before her demands for information - this after insulting their ability to put together a rational sentence.
This is intolerable behavior for an average citizen, of course. For the chairwoman of the Port Authority's Ethics Committee, it's off the charts.
Make that former chairwoman - Turner resigned from the agency last week in the heat of public outcry.
She also issued a bland, sorry-not-sorry interpretation of the encounter, touting her active role in the community and urging the Tenafly Police Department to review best practices "so that incidents like this do not recur."
If Turner is the poster child for appointed officials behaving badly, Savitsky and Casper are models for staying calm in the face of pressure, of applying the lessons in de-escalation and sensitivity training that their brother and sister officers spend hours learning.
"The officers handled themselves perfectly and professionally," says Tenafly Police Chief Robert Chamberlain, who personally viewed every minute of the all-too-graphic video. "I stand behind how they handled the incident. Mrs. Turner was excited, and they kept their composure."
But why lavish praise on cops for doing the job they are supposed to do? Precisely because so many otherwise routine traffic stops take a turn for the deadly, especially when the encounters involve black or Hispanic drivers.
The phenomenon is so common that the state's Attorney General's Office recently enlisted top sports figures for a series of public service announcements appealing to drivers to use common sense to avert conflict during potentially fraught police-civilian interactions.
Note to Ms. Turner: Bragging about your closeness with the mayor and correcting the officers when they respectfully refer to you as "miss" - "No, don't call me miss," she demanded. "I'm the commissioner" - doesn't cut it.
To their credit, Port Authority officials have forcefully rebuked its former commissioner, while apologizing to the Tenafly cops for her "outrageous and abhorrent conduct."
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