Freedman’s previous work had an activist bent. Her first book documented her weeks living in the shambles of Resurrection City, the Poor People’s Campaign encampment on the National Mall, in 1968. She was inclined to see the police as antagonists, upholders of a failed system of law and order. But, following a long stint with New York City firefighters (her book “Firehouse” was published in 1977), Freedman found herself less skeptical. Day by day, the police officers she followed won her over. After four years in their company, she came to like these guys and regard them with a wary respect. A show of photographs from “Street Cops,” currently at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, in Chelsea, opens with a grid of fifty-six small framed portraits of men (and a few women) in uniform, most smiling, none intimidating, nearly all of them white.
This makes Freedman’s series uneasy viewing for the modern spectator who considers the subject of American policing inextricable from the problem of its institutional excesses and abuse. Freedman was anxious to find a balance in her work. She wanted us to understand that her sympathy for the police was clear-eyed, not romantic. Still, one can’t help but sense that Freedman’s affection for the individual officers whom she trailed made it hard for her to see the systemic mechanisms that define what cops do. On one page of her book, cops are helping little old ladies and joking around with kids in the street. On another, a Black man is seated on the sidewalk, surrounded and menaced by officers, being “talked to.” (“It’s the only thing they understand,” a cop complains in the accompanying text.) What is disconcerting is that Freedman seems to give both sides of police work equal weight. She wasn’t a muckraker, and would never have considered herself an apologist, but her restraint here feels dishonest.
