Anyone who has ever made the trip to One Police Plaza to get press credentials knows the absurdity of the process well: leave multiple messages to make an appointment, wait for weeks or months for that appointment to come, force a smile for the dinky point-and-shoot camera mounted on a stick and then hope that the printer is working that day so that the pass actually emerges.

This is life at the hands of DCPI, the police department press office—timeconsuming and full of inanities. Take the process by which reporters are able to get the level of credential that allows them to cross police lines: only those who have three clips showing they have crossed police lines in the past can get a pass to cross police lines in the future. Trace it back, and eventually, every reporter with one of these credentials will be revealed to have crossed police lines without the pass. In effect, DCPI is encouraging reporters, at least at the outset of their careers, to break the law.

And yet, they all march in for renewals, forms and portfolios in hand. Dutifully compiled as these may be, the packets are rarely examined by the people in charge past simple verification. If things look good enough, the application is approved. Out comes the piece of plastic, presuming, of course, that the printer is working.

Even then, with all the hoops jumped through, reporters can still count on the occasional trouble from the police, as with an incident at the first mayoral debate involving a staff member of this publication.

Arriving several minutes past the announced cut-off time, he was threatened with arrest by an officer on the street corner who effectively dared him to push his luck and try to walk to the door. Over the course of the rest of the evening, two other officers demanded to see his identification without having any probable cause or reasonable suspicion that a crime had been committed. One of those two, Lt. Gene White of DCPI, temporarily confiscated the credentials, claiming he believed they were fake. When a call to headquarters proved the pass to be valid, White went on to accuse the staff member of being drunk, falsely claiming to smell liquor on his breath.

The news of this incident prompted a variety of responses from people in the political community, ranging from disbelief to nervous laughter to outrage.

What it did not prompt was a response from the Police Department or the Bloomberg administration, both of which were approached for comment by other media outlets.

That alone should be reason for concern. And at a time when the NYPD and the administration are already reviewing the press credential process, this incident should serve as a rallying call to prompt others in government to start taking action to change this process.

First, the process of applying for and obtaining credentials should be removed from the purview of the NYPD bureaucracy. Even in these times of low crime, there is more than enough for officers to do. A semi-independent office, with oversight by the police and the city government, would be both a better allocation of resources and a better way of preventing potential abuses of power.

This new office should review procedures in the interests of efficiency and effectiveness. There is no reason, for example, that all press credentials should expire on the same day in January, causing the same inevitable bottleneck of renewal applications at the beginning of each year. Fixing simple things like this would make an immense difference.

Of course, addressing basics like this is the easiest part. The more complicated task will be restructuring the entire application process to have an open discussion of how distinctions are made between who is a journalist and who is not, as well as what qualifies journalists to be able to do things like cross police lines or obtain entrance to events.

There are complicated questions involved, certainly.

But they need to be discussed by the leaders of this city on both sides of City Hall. Self-serving as it may be for a publication to editorialize about the value of journalists, many of the reporters working in New York provide an essential service to this city. They keep the government on watch and keep the public informed.

With their ranks increasingly slim, efforts should be made to help the ones who are left, not hinder them. Elected officials interested in good government should be working to make this happen.

And endearing yourself to the people who cover you by taking up their cause probably is not a bad political move either.