Criminals belong in jail.

• Author: Bethell, Tom
• Position: Crime

If our fellow librals found it hard to say anything bad about good guys like the unions, they were equally disinclined to say anything good about the bad guys. And for most liberals in 1969, the police, who were using clubs to break up antiwar demonstrations, were vet?, definitely bad guys. It was as hard to get constructive criticism of law enforcement as it was of the military, which was of course considered to be composed entirely of war criminals. But we believed that such real crimes as murder and robbery did require effective police and tough law enforcement. Liberals of that time, however, seemed to have little concern for the victim and almost limitless faith in the criminal's potential for rehabilitation. This was accompanied by an automatic assumption that it was heresy to question the Warren Court's interpretation of constitutional provisions protecting rights of the accused. While we were to make clear that we shared few of these conventional liberal positions, we did understand that law enforcement had to be criticized when it was done brutally or to harrass and intimidate the innocent, as it was aginst blacks in the South.

This piece appeared in 1976.

I read a remarkable story in The Post about a girl named Sally Ann Morris who had been shot in Georgetown:

"She and her boyfriend, Henry Miller, were walking down 33rd Street, heading for an M Street restaurant. . .when two men approached. As they passed the couple, one of the men pulled out a gun, cocked it, and stuck it in Sally Morris's back.

"Instinctively, Miller grabbed her and they started to run. After a few steps, she said, she heard gunfire and felt a slap at her back. 'It felt like a burning needle that went through me real quick. It sort of numbed me '''. .The bullet ripped through her intestinal tract and lodged in her lower abdomen . . . .Doctors had to perform a colostomy, rerouting the undamaged intestinal tract to a substitute opening in her lower abdomen. This type of operation allows body waste to be passed into a disposable plastic bag attached to the new opening.'"

And this unbelievable para"Compounding all this is the fear that the ordeal is not yet over and that her assailants may return to kill her. Four suspects arrested in the case, who were released on personal recognizance pending trial, promptly disappeared and are at large today."

What was going on here?

"I don't know the details of the case," said Lee Cross, an assistant U.S. attorney, when I...