…named Ed Conlon joined us one night back in 2004. Of the many beat cops who have written about “the life,”  he is the only one we have met who is also a graduate of Harvard. What he has to say about his adventures, misadventures and the eternal problem of crime-control is strikingly relevant to the current national “crisis” about violence in front of and behind the badge. One inevitably remembers the Gilbert and Sullivan lines: “a policeman’s life is not an ‘appy one.”