The collision of these two Manhattan events encapsulates the profoundly polarized national debate over policing. Springsteen's song -- with the words "41 shots" intoned over and over -- takes on the NYPD for overreacting: "Is it a gun? Is it a knife? Is it a wallet? This is your life."

But the victims of the Central Park "wolf pack" attack -- a sort of super frat party, in the wake of the Puerto Rican Day parade, which escalated from super-squirter fights to stripping women's clothing and near-rape -- say the cops didn't react enough, and the emerging details leave little room for doubt: "I went over with my camera and started shooting but the cops just stayed there," said witness David Grandison. "I saw girls getting groped, getting pushed down. The cops knew what was going on."

So which is it? Is the NYPD too harsh or too soft?

Here is what needs to be understood about the NYPD's latest scandal: Goldbricking cops in Central Park and trigger-happy cops in the Bronx are the same problem. The cops who did not want to disrupt their easy Sunday overtime to listen to fitness instructor Anne Payton Bryant describe a horrifying attack are a symptom of the same problem as the undercover officers who fired those 41 shots memorialized in Springsteen's song.

It's the same problem that New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Police Commissioner Howard Safir did not want to face after the shootings of unarmed Diallo and Patrick Dorismond; and the problem they were still evading this week. Giuliani went into the same change-the-subject mode as when he revealed Dorismond's juvenile arrest record, pointing Monday to all the beer cans confiscated at the parade: "This was not a police department which was asleep that day."

As the horrifying details of Sunday's assaults emerge -- 24 women, including a 14-year-old, have told police they were groped or raped; the mob in the park ran wild for at least a half-hour after the first victims ran to police officers on the park's edge; Peyton Bryant shuffled from one officer to another until she was finally humiliated at a precinct house -- one fundamental question remains: How did it happen? How did so many police officers work so hard to look the other way?

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