The Job: True Tales from the Life of a New York City Cop

by Steve Osborne

  6.

  Home

  It took a while, and I was starting to get a little frustrated, but it finally happened. I found a place to call home.

  A year earlier I was promoted to sergeant and was sent to Midtown North for my first six months. Most people think working in Midtown is a primo spot, but it isn’t. It sucked, and I hated it. It was insanely busy, which is what I like, but it was all nonsense. I spent most of the night stuck in traffic and supervising more cops than I could count, or possibly keep track of. And every stupid little thing is a big deal when it happens in Midtown. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

  Then they sent me to the Fifth Precinct, Chinatown. Hated it. It was dead, nothing happened. There was a million people coming and going in all directions, but no real crime. I had to get out of there also.

  Finally I couldn’t take it anymore. I was miserable, so I put in for a transfer to the Ninth Precinct. The Fifth and the Ninth were on the same radio frequency, and all night long I would hear gun runs, shots fired, and robberies in progress over in the Ninth, while in the Fifth, nothing was going on. I was bored out of my mind.

  When I asked the lieutenant if there might be a problem getting me over there, he just laughed. For as long as anybody could remember, the Ninth had been a shit hole, and if you got sent there, it was either bad luck, or you were being punished. Especially when it came to supervisors—nobody with half a brain in their head wanted to be a boss there. The cops there were a salty bunch, and if you didn’t have your act together and know what you were doing, they would eat you alive. But they were a tight bunch, and everybody watched each other’s backs.

  Right away they put me on midnights, 12:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. Most people hate midnight tours, it’s the busiest for real crime and has the least number of cops working, but I liked it. It suited me. Most of the normal world was home in bed, so it was just us and them: the bad guys and the creatures of the night, all of us roaming the streets, looking for trouble.

  My first night there I got stuck on the desk. I really wanted to be out on patrol, but the way it works is, we “whack it up.” Tomorrow night the other sergeant would be inside, and I could go out in the street. Besides, I was just happy to be here and out of the Fifth, and Midtown was quickly fading into a distant memory.

  It didn’t take long for the fun to begin—I was only about an hour into my first tour. I was admiring the cracks in the walls and the peeling paint on the ceiling, when all of a sudden, I hear a commotion outside. Then without warning—BOOM!—the front door flies open and a guy comes running in, screaming, “Help me, help me!”

  His head is split wide open, and there’s blood flying all over the place. And running right behind him is another guy chasing him with a three-foot piece of steel pipe, screaming, “Motherfuck-errrrrrr!”

  Right away me and some young cop I hadn’t really met yet leap over the desk and tackle the guy with the pipe. Two seconds ago I was sipping my coffee, reading the paper, and admiring the dingy decor, now I’m rolling all over the dirty floor with some nut job.

  I had this maniac’s one arm, trying to wrestle the pipe out of his hand, while the young cop is trying to slap cuffs on the other, and the guy wouldn’t stop fighting. It was amazing, he could give a rat’s ass he was in a police station. He was pissed, and really wanted to kill the other guy. And all the while we were fighting, the victim is hovering over us screaming at the top of his lungs, “Fuck him up! Fuck him up good!” And every time he screamed there was spit and blood flying all over the place.

  What made it worse was that both of these guys stunk really bad. They were two homeless drunks that liked to hang out on the park bench across the street, and they reeked of booze, body odor, and some other delightful aromas I didn’t want to really think about.

  At the same time my PAA (police administrative aide), a civilian woman in her fifties whose job is to take reports from victims on minor stuff, tried to help. She pulls a nightstick out of her desk drawer—the stick she’s not authorized to have—and comes running over yelling, “Hit him with this, Sarge!”

  Just then two cops come charging through the front door and jump in. They saw the commotion from down the block and figured I might need some help. Finally, after a lot of kicking, punching, and screaming, I get the pipe out of the guy’s hand, and we get him cuffed. Then we wrestle him over to the holding cell and throw him inside, headfirst.

  I sit the victim down and try to get a story out of him, but it isn’t easy. He was bombed, his blood alcohol level would have humbled a college frat party. Plus there was blood rolling down his face, into his mouth, ears, and watery eyes. And every slurred syllable out of his mouth was accompanied by blood, spit, and booze breath. Real police work is not as glamorous as you might think.

  Turns out these two best friends were fighting over who took the biggest sip from the forty-ounce beer they both chipped in for. And believe it or not, after hearing the story, it all made perfect sense. Out on the street what’s fair is fair. Guys get killed over less.

  I grabbed a radio and notified the dispatcher that we had “one under,” inside the station house. I’m sure that got a laugh from everybody that was listening. Around here you didn’t even have to leave the station house to make a collar! I also requested an ambulance for the victim, while the cops started banging out an arrest report for the perp. Just another night in the Ninth Precinct—loser goes to the hospital, and the winner goes to jail.

  I grabbed some alcohol wipes and scrubbed my hands raw, then I went back to the locker room to change into a clean uniform shirt. The shirt I had on was now a biohazard. I thought about throwing it in the garbage, but if I did that every time something like this happened, I’d go broke buying new shirts.

  When I got back to the desk, it was amazing, it was like nothing had happened. The young cop on the telephone switchboard went back to doing his crossword puzzle, and my PAA went back to filing her nails. It seemed like nobody felt this was anything unusual. In most precincts it would be something out of the ordinary—but not here.

  As I took my place behind the desk again, I couldn’t help but stare up at this big piece of peeling paint on the ceiling. It was huge. I was wondering how long it had been like that, and how long it would be before it fell on somebody’s unsuspecting head. I wondered when the last time was that anybody had painted or even really cleaned this place. The building was a hundred years old and looked every minute of it.

  What I liked about being a New York City cop was the history, and the tradition. We’re the oldest police department in the country, and I felt like I belonged to something special. On the wall behind me were several plaques with the names and faces of police officers killed in the line of duty. This place had a lot of history.

  A short time later, I was trying to decide whether I was going to order out for eggs or a cheeseburger, when, believe it or not, it happened again. BOOM! Suddenly the front door flies open. I jumped out of my chair, ducked, and put my hand on my gun, thinking “What the fuck now?” And that’s when a guy comes marching into the station house—playing the bagpipes. It three o’clock in the morning, and this guy kicks open the front door of a police station and comes marching in playing the bagpipes like he’s something out of Braveheart.

  He doesn’t acknowledge me, or any of the cops standing around. He just starts marching back and forth in front of the desk playing this ear-splitting music. And the funny part is, when I looked around, nobody really acknowledged him either. I glanced over to the cop on the switchboard, and he was still doing his crossword puzzle. I looked over at my PAA, and she barely stopped filing her fingernails. Just like the fight, only an hour before, nobody seemed to think that this was unusual.

  Turns out he was just another one of the neighborhood nut jobs. Almost every precinct in the city had their regular psychos that liked to hang around the station house, and the cops usually let them, as long as they didn’t become too much of a pain in the ass. Usually they’re ha
rmless, and they kind of become the precinct mascot. I would soon find out that the Ninth had more crazies than most.

  After doing a couple of laps in front of the desk and playing that earsplitting music, he marched back through the front door and out into the night where he came from. As I listened to the music fade away in the distance, the young cop on the switchboard smiled and said, “Welcome to the Ninth.” Then he told me he was ordering coffee and asked me if I wanted one. All I could think was, I don’t need coffee to stay awake in this place.

  Not long after that I was back on patrol, but this time I was assigned to Tompkins Square Park. About a year and a half earlier, the city had kicked out all the squatters that lived there. Over the years the park had become sort of a shantytown. It was filled with junkies, crackheads, homeless, runaways, anarchists, and any other kind of miscreant you could think of, all looking for like-minded companionship. Twenty-four hours a day there were subhuman-looking creatures huddled around barrel fires smoking crack, shooting dope, and drinking forty-ounce bottles of beer. It was something out of this world. You might as well have been on Mars surrounded by aliens.

  The grass refused to grow anymore, and if the trees could have picked up and moved, they would have. They were tired of being peed on.

  Some well-intentioned do-gooders had given the homeless tents and sleeping bags to help make them more comfortable, so the park had become crowded with cardboard shacks, campfires, and brightly colored domes. Some of the bigger tents were for community use. They had one tent just for “shooting up.” Junkies like a little privacy when they’re cooking their shit and sticking a needle in their arm. Then there was the sex tent. If a crackhead couple needed some alone time to make a crack baby, there was a quiet, romantic place for that.

  If the police had to go in there, you would never go alone—you were just asking for trouble. We were always outnumbered, so we would always go in there in groups of two, three, or preferably more. It seemed like almost everybody hated us, especially the anarchists.

  Surprisingly, though, not everybody wanted to throw a brick off some roof and hit us in the head. There was one guy who every time he saw me came over to say hello. He was a pleasant, soft-spoken fellow who looked like Jesus, with long sandy-colored hair and a scruffy beard. For short periods of time I actually found him amusing. Sometimes he would make me laugh, and he could carry on a normal conversation, unlike many of the other park inhabitants. He would talk my ear off until I got tired of him and told him to take a hike. Sometimes I would see him walking around the neighborhood with a live chicken. One day I asked what the bird was for, and he gave me this creepy smile and said, “Dinner.”

  A year or so later, his girlfriend, a ballet dancer, would end up missing. Through some good police work, the detectives quickly figured out that he killed her, then chopped her up, boiled her in a big pot, and made soup out of her. As if that wasn’t freaky enough, he said that he fed the soup to his homeless friends. He probably told them it was chicken. I heard they found her skull in a five-gallon bucket up at the Port Authority bus terminal in Midtown.

  Even for a place like the Ninth Precinct, this was definitely unusual, so the story, and his picture, made the front page of the paper. You can guess what happened next: somebody asked him to autograph it, and they it hung it up on the wall in the Detective Squad. He signed it, “To the boys in the Ninth, I’d love to have you for dinner.”

  The park, and everybody in it, was a three-ring fucking circus.

  After the city kicked everybody out and started the infamous Tompkins Square Park Riot, they surrounded it with a ten-foot-high fence and vowed never to let them back in. After the riot, the city had no intention of giving back one square inch of this valuable Manhattan real estate. So every day, twenty-four hours a day, whether we had the manpower or not, at least two cops and sometimes a sergeant were assigned there in order to keep the former tenants from moving back in. Tonight, I was the “Park Sergeant.”

  Some of the people that got kicked out stayed around. They hung out across the street, just staring at us, and that ten-foot fence that was put up by the Man. You could see that crazed look on their faces as they tried to figure out how to get back in, or at least how to hang a banner on the fence proclaiming SQUATTERS’ RIGHTS.

  It was like a Mexican standoff. I felt like I was at the Alamo.

  A few hours later I felt like I was in a slow-motion Daytona 500—and I was starting to get dizzy. I had a car with two cops locked inside the park covering the interior, and my job was to drive in circles, covering the perimeter, and we were not supposed to leave under any circumstances. If one of these morons managed to get back in and damage some park property, or at least hang a banner saying something like FUCK THE MAYOR, I would get my nuts cut off. So I was stuck riding in circles.

  On one of my laps around the block a homeless woman leaped from between two parked cars and landed in the middle of the street, right in front of me. I had to jam on the brakes to keep from hitting her. When my tires stopped screeching, my front bumper was only inches from her. And in the bright glow of my headlights, she turned, smiled, then pulled down her pants and pissed right in front of a marked NYPD police car.

  She had this kooky grin on her face, as she squatted dangerously close to my front bumper. Half her teeth were missing, and those she had left were black and crooked, but the smile made me believe she was really enjoying herself. I don’t know if she did this to other passing motorists, or just to police cars, but she was nearly pissing on my front bumper, and having a great time doing it.

  I was a little startled because I almost ran her over, but the pissing thing was a little surprising too. When she was done, she pulled up her pants and took off running up Avenue A, laughing like crazy.

  For the briefest moment I thought about chasing her—but why? What the fuck for? I didn’t want to catch her. I didn’t even want to touch her. I was running out of clean uniform shirts. And if I did catch her, then what? Tie up a sector car for a couple of hours while they sat on her at the Bellevue psych ward? We only had three sectors working that night, and crime never stops in the Ninth. It would be a total waste of manpower.

  I looked over and saw a few of the park zombies laughing their asses off. They seemed to enjoy it as much as she did. What to do? But after thinking about it for a second, I started laughing with them. Finally something we could all agree on. Then I went back to riding in circles.

  A little while later, a “gun run” at East Third Street and Avenue B came over the air. The dispatcher stated there was a male white and a female Hispanic inside a blue auto, and the male was armed with a gun.

  I heard Nine Adam pick up the job, but nobody was answering to back them up. We only had three sector cars, the other two were probably busy handling their own jobs, and the Park Car was locked inside the ten-foot-high fence. The dispatcher called out again, “Any available Nine unit to back Adam on a report of a man with a gun?” No answer. I decided the hell with it, I’m going.

  The southeast corner of the park is at Seventh Street and Avenue B, so I could practically see Third Street. I figured I could shoot right down there, back up the sector car, and get back before any of the park zombies knew I was gone.

  I only drove about a block, when a blue car with a male white and a female Hispanic flew past me going the other way. I figured, this has got to be them, so I pulled a U-turn and started to follow. The car was moving a little fast, and by the time I made the turn they were about two blocks ahead of me, so I hit the gas and tried to catch up. I snatched the radio off my belt and told the dispatcher, “I’m following a possible from the gun run at Three and B.”

  They made the left on Seventh Street, and I was having a little bit of a tough time catching up because he was hitting green lights all the way. I couldn’t use my red lights and siren, because if he saw me coming, the chase would be on. The best way to do this is to get in behind him and try to grab him when he’s stuck in traffic. We always try
to avoid a car chase whenever possible, but it was four in the morning and there wasn’t much traffic, so I was a little screwed.

  He made the right on First Avenue and stopped at the red light on St. Mark’s Place. This was it, I couldn’t wait for another car to back me up because when the light turned green, he would be off and running again, and I’d be following him to the Bronx before he hit another red light.

  So when the traffic light turned green, I flipped on my flashing red lights and bleeped the siren, and much to my surprise he pulled right over. That was easy enough, I thought. I pulled in behind him and waited a moment. I figured I could stall for a few seconds and give one of the sectors a chance to swing by, but when I grabbed the radio to tell the dispatcher that I had the vehicle stopped, the driver’s door on the blue car had swung open. The next thing I knew, a big white guy with a goofy grin on his face stepped out and started walking toward me.

  It was dark out, but it was easy to see, and I had no doubt about it. In the glow of my high beams and flashing red lights, I could see the butt of a gun sticking out of his waistband. When he got out of the car his shirt lifted a little, and there it was right in front of me—and getting closer.

  This is it—this is a cop’s life. Every minute, of every day, this is what you wait for. This is what you think about, and this is what you prepare for: The Man with the Gun.