Only in Milwaukee. In other communities, local television stations follow cops until they find the one or two who are buying and eating doughnuts on duty. In a few communities, they follow cops until they find cops who drink on duty or stay in bars after hours. But only in Milwaukee do local television stations find cops bowling on duty.

Yes, although we try to forget, we are the city that gave birth to the myth of Laverne and Shirley. We like our beer, we like our brats, we like our cheese, we like our Packer, and we like our bowling. We like it less and less but this town is still a bowling town.

And our cops truly bowled Milwaukee-style. Milwaukee-style bowling is league bowling. It requires a whole group of guys and an old-fashioned alley. Midnight bowling is okay but none of that glow-in-the-dark stuff. No bumpers for sure and, in this case, no automatic pin-set up. No, it�s best when using some key to get into a bowling alley after-hours to bring rookies with you to set up the pins.

I suppose they could argue that they were keeping the city safe from bowling pins. If you don�t knock those pins down every time they are up, goodness knows what they might decide to do. But that argument goes right down the gutter because of those rookies setting up the pins. Those pins were being framed! They were being tortured!

Now, don�t get the wrong idea---not every cop in Milwaukee goes bowling. Most of our cops on duty are on duty. (Well, except for the guys from the same precinct who went sledding in a cemetery on the night shift last January. But no media caught them. They got caught when one of them hit a headstone and was injured. I guess the dead guys won that one.)

Even if I could forgive these cops for abandoning their posts and the community, all would not be well. The city fathers (and mothers, I suppose) have been working for years to shed our blue collar image. They worked to get the Calatrava addition to the Art Museum. They worked to keep the artwork called �The Blue Shirt� off the parking garage at Billy Mitchell Airport. They even once tried to place banners on many tall, downtown buildings and call this city �The City of Banners� but that effort went nowhere because the banners were too small to be noticeable.

We can be a laughingstock all on our own. We don�t need the bowling cops to help us.

|