The New York Police Department’s all-time favorite Ernest Hemingway line is, apparently, “There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter,” which is frightening. Members of the department’s Warrant Squad, the division that targets fugitives, were seen recently wearing the slogan on T-shirts outside of a Queens court, perhaps in violation of dress code, but the aggressive sentiment has been floating around NYPD halls for some time.
Village Voice’s Graham Rayman notes that the line also adorned shirts worn by the plainclothes Street Crime Unit, which killed Amadou Diallo and no longer exists. The quote “I am a hunter of men” has been attributed to former police commissioner and convicted felon Bernie Kerik. And early-nineties commissioner Howard Safir, a former U.S. Marshal, once quoted the same “hunter of men” sentence on an episode of 60 Minutes.
You’d think, after all these years, someone would’ve made it past the first line to find some new material.
