NEWTON'S LAW: ADDING INSULT TO INJURY FOR NATION'S GOOD POLICE OFFICERS

How's this for adding insult to injury? Thieves in Mount Lebanon, Pa., not only had displayed no respect for Officer Gregory of that city's police department, they kidnapped him from his patrol car last month.

Never mind that Officer Gregory was a dummy. That's not meant as a slap at the hostage ... Officer Gregory is a mannequin.

Eleven pounds, uniformed and legless, he sat in a patrol car and blindly watched traffic go by, his meager goal to discourage people speeding away from nearby Pittsburgh.

No clues yet on the captors. The Shiites have no comment.

Officer Gregory was manufactured by Gregory, Inc., in Provo, Utah. According to the company, more than 1,000 law enforcement agencies in America use similar mannequins for various reasons.

It is not a very personal approach to keeping the peace, but then Officer Gregory wasn't brought on board to garner an appearance on "Top Cops." He had a job to do and went down in the line of duty.

If you recall the movie "48 Hours," Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte debated the merits of being an effective policeman. Murphy's character insisted that a gun was essential to the task; Nolte's character claimed that experience and ... uh, balderdash get you through.

Given some current law enforcement techniques, Nolte's argument might be partially correct. Appearances count for a lot.

The long arm of the law is reaching out to officers who have immovable arms. With their fixed expressions, these lawmen are so unblinking it would make Wyatt Earp uneasy.

Not even Joseph Wambaugh could make their line of work interesting.

In fact, some of this new breed of law enforcers are born in the St. Louis suburb of Webster Groves. The company is called Store Security Systems Inc., and it makes a product called Cut-Out Cops.

The Cut-Out Cop is a life-sized photograph of a police officer printed on cardboard. It is meant to make potential shoplifters think twice about stealing a store's merchandise.

Assertive thieves won't be put off by these standup guys, the manufacturers say, but it will be disconcerting to casual shoplifters.

We've strayed quite a distance from the cop walking the beat, but these ideas are pretty sound. If you can discourage crime with plastic and cardboard, why pay salary and benefits for the real item.

And a squad room of these guys could have saved Daryl Gates a ton of trouble.

Police officials were meeting in New York this week to discuss brutality cases. A number of ideas were being tossed around, including the establishment of a formal police code of ethics. The gathering got considerable media attention because of the Los Angeles beating incident, and that might be unfair.

Newspaper people have a natural allegiance to police officers; like cops, most journalists get into their line of work not to wield power or get rich but to serve a useful role in society. Most maintain that attitude.

No one is more appalled by the Los Angeles beating incident than the good cop, just as no one is more daunted by celebrated newspaper hoaxes than the good journalist.

Still, the majority of the police officers who do good will be tainted by those few who do bad. And legislation, in the form of a largely useless code of ethics, will be passed to resist the work of those few, satisfying the public outcry while frustrating the good guys.

Officer Gregory, wherever he is, would weep at the injustice.