Maybe Vick Should Become a Cop.

Beats dogfighting any day: Three of Sean Bell’s five killers

This past December, former Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick was sentenced to 23 months in Federal prison for dogfighting.

Of what significance is the fact that, for that cruel sport, he will serve far more time than New York Police Department detectives Michael Oliver, Gescard Isnora, and Marc Cooper, above, will do for killing Queens resident Sean Bell, in a hail of 50 bullets, the morning of his wedding day?

I wish I’d made a note of which blog I saw offer Black men this advice: If you ever find yourself under heavy police fire, hold up a puppy.

Besides, charter MEDIA ASSASSIN readers may recall a February post, mentioning that the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria spent $367 million in 2005 fighting those diseases in Uganda, the same amount Americans spent this year on Valentines for their pets.

Clearly, for we Black men, calling one another “dawg” has more than semantic heft. Maybe that’s why I was thinking about this while reading ESPN.com columnist Gene Wojciechowski’s piece, “Vick’s future isn’t in Atlanta; is it anywhere in NFL?”:

You can only imagine what was going through Michael Vick’s mind as NFL commissioner Roger Goodell emerged from the left side of the Radio City Music Hall stage, walked to the podium, leaned toward the microphone and said, “With the third pick in the 2008 NFL Draft, the Atlanta Falcons select [dramatic pause] Matt Ryan, quarterback.”

In the time it took to say those two words — Matt Ryan — Vick’s Falcons career, or what remained of it, came to a final resting place on the NFL sea bottom.

Concluding,

The message is clear: The Vick Era, so to speak, is finished in Atlanta. A manhole cover has been all but welded shut over whatever hopes Vick has of returning to his first and only pro team, and to the doting owner who adored him, Arthur Blank.

So, without job prospects in Atlanta pro football, should Vick, say, apply to the local police force when he gets out of Leavenworth in July 2009?

Probably not: Most municipalities have provisions against their departments hiring criminals as cops.

But, apparently, there’s no such rule in New York City. Would he move?