Bed-Stuy Is Burning

by Brian Platzer

  “I know you are not going to let her keep acting like this!” screamed the black woman who’d said Stan would protect her. “I know you are not going to let her treat you with this kind of . . . does anyone speak Spanish here? Does anyone, can anyone translate? Can anyone tell these mamacitas that in this country we do not let our children treat us with this kind of disrespect? We whup their asses if they treat us like this. That’s why she’s growing all fat like that. That’s why they have no self-respect, eating lollipops that have been resting where people put their asses.”

  The black man sitting next to Aaron signaled as though he was about to say something, maybe interrupting, but the woman got louder. “Excuse me—no, it’s my time to talk. Excuse me, but I’ve seen enough. Can anyone tell these people what I’m saying?”

  “I do!” one of the dozen black kids on the way to the riot said. “I speak a little.”

  “Well tell those women that in this country we do not let our little ones treat us with this kind of disrespect.”

  He translated in a rudimentary Spanish that even Aaron could tell was very basic. The kid’s friends were laughing, and the grandmother and the mother were laughing along with the kids.

  “What is she laughing at?” the woman yelled at the translator. “Are they laughing at me?”

  “I don’t know, lady,” the translator said, laughing himself now, along with his friends who were making fun of his Spanish.

  “They’re laughing,” the woman yelled, “but they’re raising this diabetes fat-ass little girl who hit her own grandmother in public, and she’s laughing at me. She better show some fucking respect, coming to this country and laughing at me when I’m trying to help her raise her fucking kids and she’s just sitting there like she—and what are you looking at?” the woman said to Aaron.

  “Me?” Aaron said.

  “Yes, you.”

  “I just think we should let people raise their families however they want to,” Aaron said.

  “Do you?” the woman said.

  “We don’t know anything about them,” Aaron said. “We don’t know if the girl’s dad died this week. We don’t know if he got deported. We don’t know if they’re coming back from a funeral. We shouldn’t be so angry,” Aaron said.

  “Well fuck you, you righteous asshole,” the woman said. “I hope your fucking house burns to the ground.”

  Chapter 38

  Police Commissioner Bill Bratton drove down to the Utica station in his black car. His second and third in command were trying to control the Marcy Projects. But Bratton believed in starting at the beginning and tracing the situation forward. A dozen black cars and patrol cars followed him from Manhattan. Vision Zero meant the mayor wanted zero traffic deaths that year, and a car in which Bratton had been a passenger was caught on camera speeding down Atlantic Avenue twenty miles an hour over the limit, so to end the discussion Bratton said he’d drive himself. He’d been on the streets in Boston for a decade before he had a driver, and now, after spending ten years chauffeured around LA, he was happy to be behind the wheel again.

  When they reached the Utica station and the Boys and Girls High School an hour after the riots had started, and, Bratton guessed, forty minutes after they’d dispersed, he saw crowds to the north. He was carrying a gun again, and he felt for it at his hip. His wife liked it. Sweet Rikki. His fourth wife. She’d love him no matter what. But the people wouldn’t. These riots would be his legacy. The riots and how he handled them. He had a bullhorn in the car. He’d find rioters and police officers, and talk directly to them. He’d be George W. Bush after 9/11.

  But even then he’d have to talk afterward about if broken-window policing led to this. If choke holds led to this. If stop, question, and frisk led to this. For the rest of his life. It was already too late. Dead black men led to this. He knew that. Now this fucking shot kid. And the two kids before him. That was all on him, too. Not the stop-and-frisk, but his promise to deescalate and the escalation that followed.

  Still, if he just got there, wherever “there” was. To the root of the problem. He could solve it. He always had before. He wasn’t going to be mayor. There was nothing left to become, nothing more to achieve. But he had his reputation to protect. And the city’s. Their legacies were intertwined. And he was the only one able to keep the darkness of the 1970s at bay.

  Utica looked like a hurricane had hit it. Police barricades on their sides, a woodchip pile spread all over the paths, and blood, police tape, black soot, plastic bags, desks and chairs, baseball caps, ripped clothing. It looked like Mogadishu. Bratton had visited Mogadishu in the 1990s to see how police were failing to cope with violence there. Now the LA commissioner and commissioners from Boston and Tel Aviv would visit New York to study his failure.

  He panicked at all the time wasting, sped up, felt the engine behind him, realized, with a bitter thrill, that if he drove himself into a lamppost at eighty miles per hour—he was at fifty miles per hour now and could easily accelerate further—he’d be a municipal cowboy hero. His would be the story people discovered the day after the story. Instead of the villain, he’d be a fallen soldier. Jimmy O’Neill was ready to take over. The next chapter in Bratton’s legacy would still be written. A stray bullet would be good, too. An assassination, even better. He’d led a good, full life . . . but he wouldn’t crumble. He was stronger than that. He was the backbone of this city. New Yorkers needed him. That was why they’d brought him back. The city couldn’t survive without him. Jimmy could wait his turn.

  But Bratton didn’t know which direction to head. He saw the edge of a crowd gathering up on Stuyvesant Avenue. He heard bullets firing to the east, away from Marcy, deeper into Bed-Stuy and East New York; and sirens from fire alarms and fire trucks blared to the south in Crown Heights.

  He had his windows open and his two-way radio on. His deputy was in his passenger seat and his personal security sat in back. All this was against protocol, but it was how he liked it. After Vietnam, after Boston, after New York, after LA, after Bratton Technologies and Altegrity and Kroll and NBC and The Bratton Group and Crest and London and Homeland Security Advisory Council and now New York again, Bill Bratton had little interest in protocol. He had little fear of danger.

  I’m Bill Bratton, he thought. He’d made the speech ten thousand times at ten thousand ten-thousand-dollar dinners. I have little time for protocol. I use Comstat. We agreed to be held accountable for what we did. We set a goal for 10 percent crimes solved within ten days. We got 15 percent. Then we set a goal for 15 percent. We got 18 percent. We set a goal, and we asked to be held accountable. Every time there’s a homicide, my BlackBerry goes off. Because I’m in charge. If I’m in the bathroom, if I’m in Israel, I get notice. And then we respond to that data. We put cops on the dots. We react to data. What is the best medicine? Think of it from the medical perspective. We do some tests. Medical tests. We rapidly respond. We stabilize you. Effective tactics. First the trauma specialist arrives. Then the heart specialist. Then pulmonary. Then follow up visits. I’m Bill Bratton. I’m taking a medical approach to dealing with crime. It used to be we’d gather stats twice a year to send them off to the federal government. Now it’s every day. It used to be a million times a year you’d dial 911 and we wouldn’t come, like a doctor giving you placebos instead of real medicine. Now we anticipate the problem.

  The first time he was in New York City, he worked his way up from the chief of the New York City Transit Police in 1990. In 1991, due to his politicking, the Transit Police gained national accreditation, which meant a transition from being the head of a pretend security staff to a real municipal subpolice. This occurred nearly the same month as the Crown Heights riots that killed two people and jailed more, and that eventually lost the mayor the city, contributing to exactly the kind of racial and religious hatred that New York had spent the past twenty years recovering from.

  Bratton’s legacy was a broken-window policy that tried to calm those tensions. He thought about what c
ould happen if the violence spread south on Kingston Avenue and got the Orthodox mixed up with it as well as the blacks. So far it was just the blacks who were angry, and though this was a real problem and Obama was going to get involved, this fit in with what was going on with Ferguson, and after Trayvon Martin, and with Oscar Grant in Oakland, and Manuel Diaz in Anaheim, and Kimani Gray right here in Brooklyn. Kimani Gray. The only publicly identified eyewitness in that killing by two New York City police officers stood by her claim that Gray was empty-handed when he was gunned down, and now she was saying that one of the cops involved threatened her life. Now add Jason Blau to the list.

  No wonder there were riots. Kimani Gray was before Bratton, but what did these rioting kids know? Kimani Gray was news, but the type of news that didn’t get the police commissioner noticed, not like riots that involved confrontations of different races. He had to keep the blacks from the Jews. He had to make sure the Orthodox knew he was watching out for them, that he remembered 1991.

  So he made his decision. He turned his cavalcade south into Crown Heights and with it, the attention of the New York City Police Department. Three quarters were focused on the Marcy Projects. Bratton turned his attention toward Crown Heights. The death count, as reported by 911 calls at least, had to be in the dozens. And most cell towers were down. Half were down to free up the emergency airways. Half that should have been working were jammed with calls. He accelerated and turned south. Crown Heights was still where Jews and blacks lived together, and now gentrifiers were too close for comfort. It was where people were still shot more often than in Bed-Stuy. He wanted to be there, now. A half-hour ago. It felt too late.

  Two boys dead a month before, and then Saturday night in Bed-Stuy. Jason Blau was twelve years old. The officers’ fuckup. Both of them. After thirty million extra in the budget for training to avoid exactly this.

  Bratton had gone to Mogadishu three years after Black Hawk Down. He’d seen that things were still completely fucked. He saw a leg bone on a pool table. How fucked up? The people laughed, told him it was a dog bone and they put it there to scare him. He didn’t get scared so they all drank beer. It wasn’t a dog bone. It was a human bone. Bratton was fucking sure of it. To this day, he knew that the bone on the pool table had been a human leg bone.

  He had told riot police to head to the larger housing projects, fire departments to get to Brooklyn in anticipation; every cop was now on duty and on the way to the danger zones. The housing projects. The major avenues. The big box stores. The schools were let out. He was on his fourth marriage. Not because the job was more important. That was what he told his friends. They all told him to prioritize family. Four wives, and David. And from him, John and Nicolas. John and Nicolas still fought over plastic toy fire trucks. They were eight and six years old, and they’d live their life hearing about their grandfather who couldn’t save New York. Prioritize family! When a city is on fire? A city is always on fire! And Bill Bratton is there to put it out.

  And Bill Bratton is there to—

  “Sir?” someone said.

  There would be stories about missed 911 calls. About cops shot. He’d be blamed. He accelerated harder.

  “Sir?”

  Not New York the first time. Not LA. This would be his legacy. Stop and frisk. Broken windows.

  “Steady, sir.”

  He’d been doing everything right. He would get there quickly, wherever “there” was, and solve this problem himself. He just had to go faster, get there himself, assess the situation, and act.

  “Slow the car, sir.” He would listen to the people. Put himself on the dot. The city needed him!

  “Commissioner Bratton?”

  These people rioted because they wanted more than they had. This was their opportunity to get more for themselves and destroy possessions of others. Well he’d give them everything he had. He just needed to get there.

  “Commissioner Bratton!”

  He skidded to a screech of the tires. The car spun, slid, and stopped. They’d come close to hitting a traffic sign, scraped a few parked cars, fencing, got caught on a hydrant. Bratton exited the car. He felt for his gun. Grabbed the bullhorn. Started running. Felt like he was thirty years old again. With his deputy and security detail, he squeezed into the backseat of the car behind his.

  “Go south!” he shouted. “Go! Go! Go!”

  Chapter 39

  There is no God but God and Muhammad is his messenger. Antoinette asked for a message from Muhammad. She asked for a sign. She said, “There is no God but God and Muhammad is his messenger,” and she thought There is no God but God and Muhammad is his messenger so she was Muslim. That’s what she was told made someone Muslim, and she believed it. She prayed as many times a day as she could, and she gave to charity on the subway. She would fast during the next Ramadan, and once she got enough money together she’d go to Mecca. She was becoming Muslim while she was still Christian, and then when she was fully Muslim, she’d let Christianity go. She was ready to go to the next level.

  Church bells rang at 2 p.m. The back door down to the garden had originally been left open, but she’d bolted that, and then, maybe because she’d been watching so much zombie stuff lately—World War Z, with Brad Pitt, and then the Walking Dead through her ex-employer’s Netflix account (they’d given her the password) through a Nintendo Wii that her mother had sent her for Christmas from Chicago for the fitness game—Antoinette covered all the windows and doors first with shades and shutters, but then she left the baby in the Pack ’n Play with Daniel and put up blankets and cardboard from Amazon and Fresh Direct delivery boxes as well.

  Upstairs tearing boxes apart in Aaron and Amelia’s bedroom, Antoinette caught a glimpse of herself in the fireplace mantel mirror. Seeing herself like that made her laugh. Tearing boxes, wearing a hijab. The first time she’d worn it, she’d thought she looked like a suicide bomber, but not since. Not since Jupiter had complimented her. She choked at the memory, which she already felt joining those in Jamaica and her childhood in New York—those she didn’t permit herself the pleasure and pain of revisiting too often. She had liked the feeling of moving forward. Just hours earlier, Jupiter himself had been part of the forward momentum. She had a deep desire to go to the body—his body was there, right downstairs—but she had work to do, she told herself. She had to block the windows. Antoinette tried not to give into him, the tears, the submission to self-pity. She was still moving forward to Islam. Jupiter had approved of that.

  Antoinette focused on her conversion. She’d chosen her mosque—all the way in Clinton Hill—because it had nothing to do with terrorism. Because it was famous for condemning Boko Haram and Islamic State for being sinners. Under the hijab, the way it framed her face, Antoinette had an even nicer smile. That’s what Jupiter had told her.

  She’d always been a quiet girl with a nice smile who did well at school. She had a better memory than everyone else—for birthdays and things people said and tricks to do in math and places in geography and now verses from the Bible. She had come to the States to live with her aunt in New York. Her mom was in Chicago, and though it was never clear why Chicago wasn’t a place for Antoinette, it didn’t matter much because she’d always been close with her aunt, who complimented her smile, had more money than her mom, bought Antoinette clothing, and made her take school very seriously.

  Antoinette came over in 1990 as a six-year-old, and by 1995 her Jamaican accent was gone. The public school she went to in Flatbush was bad in terms of the education she received, but it wasn’t dangerous, and all her friends were Jamaican or from other Caribbean countries, and when she got a little older they started being from African countries like Nigeria or Kenya. Antoinette always did well in school because school was easy if you went to class and listened to the teacher. She never understood why the other kids made a big fuss about school. The facts were interesting and it was fun to try to learn the tricks that the math teacher taught.

  In 1998, she was fourteen, and her best friend w
as a girl named Afafa who went by Afa, and their best friend was a boy from Haiti named Billy. The three of them did well at school and didn’t get involved in most of the stuff that their friends did, but they also didn’t get jobs. Jobs seemed so awful to the three of them. Antoinette would have been willing, but Afa said that nothing was worse than smelling of fry grease, so Billy quit his job, and the thought of the two of them hanging around all day without her made Antoinette hysterical with envy. The one day she worked at the sneaker store, she had to go to the small bathroom at the pizza place next door to throw up.

  Billy didn’t play sports, and Afa and Antoinette didn’t have boyfriends in spite of Antoinette’s nice smile and Afa’s ass. People joked that they must be doing threesomes, but it wasn’t like that. They told stories and compared what they remembered about the countries they came from, which was mostly just what they saw on trips home over the summer: the food, like which rice was better, and the different ways of drinking Coke, from the bottle or plastic bags. Of course the bottle was better, so they made fun of Afa, which made Antoinette feel good. Afa and Billy lived with their parents and Antoinette lived with her aunt. They didn’t drink alcohol. It was innocent.

  One time they talked about white people.

  “Do you know any white people?” Afa asked.

  “Miss Tevelson,” Antoinette said.

  “Teachers don’t count,” Afa said. She was the smartest of the three of them and had the biggest ass and sometimes talked to the other two like she was their teacher. Afa was the smartest person Antoinette had ever met.