Maybe that sounds harsh, or hypocritical, given that an NYPD cop with an alcohol problem can get Department-sponsored treatment, while a cop with an illegal drug problem can’t. It’s debatable. But what’s not debatable is that every cop has seen what drugs do to a neighborhood, and to a city. And almost every cop has been to a Department funeral for another cop who was killed by a drug dealer or a drug user.
So every year 20 percent of the force, up to and including the chief of department, is selected at random by computer and ordered to report that day to the NYPD Medical Division in Queens to pee in a cup. Cops are also drug tested when they’re promoted, or when they transfer to special units such as Narcotics and IAB. (In IAB and other special units, half of the cops are drug tested every year.) The cop’s “contribution” is divided into three samples, and if Sample 1 tests positive for drugs, Sample 2 is also tested to make sure.
The failure rate is extremely low. Out of more than eleven thousand tests administered by the NYPD in 2014, there were only twenty-two cops whose tests came back positive for drugs or who refused to take the test, which is an automatic failure.
Still, no matter how relatively small the numbers, cops with guns and shields who are using drugs are clearly a danger to the public, and to other cops. It’s also a corruption problem. They’re either stealing those drugs from dealers, or they’re buying them from dealers who they should be arresting, or, if it’s an expensive drug like cocaine, they may be stealing money to buy the drugs. Or they may be getting them from other cops.
So when a cop’s drug test comes back positive, Medical Division doesn’t notify the cop. They notify the Internal Affairs Bureau.
As soon as we get notification of a positive drug test result we’ll go out to the cop’s house to take his gun and shield. At first they’ll almost always deny they’re using drugs—It’s a mistake, the test was wrong!—in which case we tell them they have the right to order a third test from the same urine sample, at their own expense. But they almost never do. They know they’re caught.
And sometimes they’ll try to make a deal with us, like the cop with the Midtown North Street Peddlers Unit.
Pushcart vendors and street peddlers have been part of the New York City landscape since the beginning. There are thousands of them in the city, some licensed, most not. They sell everything from hot dogs and falafel to knock-off designer watches and clothing—“Rodex” watches, “Guci” handbags and scarves—to out-and-out counterfeits and pirated CDs and DVDs.
You might think they’re harmless, but they’re like musicians in the subways, or mimes in the park, or those guys who dress up like Disney characters or superheroes and pose for tourists in Times Square: When there’s a few of them they’re picturesque, but when there are too many of them they’re a pain in the neck. The peddlers set up their carts or their folding tables or their blankets on the sidewalks, blocking foot traffic, aggressively soliciting passersby, blocking access to stores, and often getting in fights with each other over territory.
The street peddlers, many of whom are immigrants, are especially thick in the tourist areas of Manhattan and the commercial sections of Brooklyn. So precincts in those areas have special street peddler units, a sergeant and five or six cops in uniform or plainclothes who try to keep them under control. If they catch a street peddler without a license or committing some other violation, they can give him a summons and legally confiscate his wares.
Like any other assignment in the NYPD, 99 percent of the cops doing it do it honestly. But a few don’t. Which brings us back to the cop from Midtown North.
Medical Division notifies us that the cop—in deference to his family, not to him, we’ll call him Officer Constantine—has tested positive for cocaine. So we go out to his house and take his gun and shield, and then, because cops who are using drugs are often involved in other corruption, we take a run at him.
Look, we tell him, you can’t be a cop anymore, but there are two ways to do this. We can suspend you right now, in which case your pay stops immediately, along with your benefits, and in thirty days you’ll be fired. Or you can work with us, tell us about any corruption you and other cops have been involved in, help us with the investigation. If you do that we can keep you on for a few months, as long as the investigation takes, you’ll still be getting your pay, and then maybe you’ll be allowed to resign instead of being fired, and you can get a fresh start in another line of work.
Officer Constantine, who’s got seventeen years on the job, is seeing his whole life crash down around him because of a few lines of cocaine—or more likely, many, many lines of cocaine. He thinks it over and says: Okay, I’ll tell you, we’ve been ripping off the street peddlers. Constantine tells us that cops in the Midtown North Street Peddlers Unit are shaking down peddlers near Rockefeller Center for a hundred bucks a day, rousting the ones who refuse to pay, confiscating their stuff, and then selling it to other peddlers. It’s been going on for months, he says.
So we take him down to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office to make a deal. The ADA on the case wants to put a recording device on Officer Constantine and send him back into the precinct to gather more evidence against the other cops. But I’m not so sure.
It used to be the standard practice to take a cop who’s caught in corruption and then turn him, persuade him to work for us, and send him back to his unit wearing a wire. The Buddy Boys scandal in the Seven-Seven, the Morgue Boys scandal in the Seven-Three, the Dirty Thirty scandal—they all involved corrupt cops who agreed to work undercover against other cops in exchange for leniency.
Actually it’s kind of ironic. A lot of otherwise good cops believe in the Blue Wall of Silence, and they’ll never inform on a crooked cop. They may not like what the crooked cops are doing, they may not want to work with them, but unless it’s something really horrendous they won’t drop a dime on them to IAB. But often when really crooked cops get caught, and they’re facing a long prison term, for them the Blue Wall goes out the window. They’ll gladly wear a wire on other cops, including the good ones, to save themselves.
But putting a corrupt cop back into his precinct or his unit with a wire is risky. Most corrupt cops aren’t trained as undercovers, and a lot of them don’t have the temperament for it. For example, in the Dirty Thirty investigation, a crooked cop was caught, turned, and put back into the precinct wearing a wire. But his sudden change in behavior aroused suspicions, and when another cop accused him of being a rat, they got into a scuffle and the wired-up cop shot the other cop in the foot.
With the Midtown North Street Peddlers Unit investigation, I’m certainly not going to put a known drug user like Officer Constantine back on the job with a gun on his hip. What if the guy gets high and shoots somebody? Even setting aside the injury or loss of life, it would be a personal injury lawyer’s dream come true. You can almost hear him in the civil trial: So is it your testimony before this court, Chief Campisi, that you knowingly allowed this corrupt police officer, this admitted drug addict, to walk the streets of this city, armed and under the full color and authority of the law, whereupon in a drug-induced psychotic rage he drew his service weapon and intentionally shot my innocent client in the foot?
I don’t want to see anything like that happening. So putting Officer Constantine back in his unit with his gun is not an option. But if we send him back in without his gun, the other cops are going to know that he’s jammed up, and they won’t talk to him.
Then I get an idea. The regulations say that a cop can’t carry his gun if he’s physically incapable of drawing and firing it. So how about if we give Officer Constantine a broken arm?
No, no, we aren’t going to actually break his arm. We’ll just make it look like he broke his arm, so the other cops won’t wonder why he doesn’t have his gun. He won’t be out on the street, he’ll be on desk duty inside, but he’ll still be able to talk to the other dirty cops and maybe record some incriminating statements.
So I call a friend of mine, a
doctor in Medical Division, and without telling him why, I ask if he can put a cast on a human arm that isn’t broken. The doc ponders the medical ethics of the thing for a minute and finally decides that, yeah, if the “patient” is willing, he can do that. Constantine is agreeable, so the next morning we pick him up at his house and drive him to Medical Division to get his cast. But on the way, Constantine says to us: Uh, guys? I talked to my PBA delegate, and he doesn’t think I should do this, he doesn’t think I should cooperate with you guys. What do you guys think I should do?
What? You talked to your PBA delegate? Geez, why didn’t you just take out an ad in the Daily News? If the PBA knows about this investigation, the word is already out.
So the investigation is blown. We quickly search the unit sergeant’s locker at the precinct and find a bunch of confiscated watches and handbags that hadn’t been vouchered. We also find a victim, a peddler from Senegal who the cops were shaking down. The sergeant is indicted and fired, and so is Officer Constantine, since he’s no longer cooperating. A couple of other cops in the unit are fired after refusing to take a drug test—Officer Constantine isn’t the only one with a cocaine problem—and a couple others are transferred, but we’ve got no criminal evidence against them. End of case.
Now, so far I’ve talked mostly about the proactive side of IAB operations—debriefing perps, setting up surveillances, sending in undercovers, conducting integrity tests. But there are other cases that require us to be reactive, to investigate alleged crimes by cops that have already happened, to sift through conflicting reports and accounts and get to the truth, often amid the glare of publicity and the harsh scrutiny of a suspicious public.
Sometimes those alleged crimes by cops involve police brutality.
And sometimes they involve police bullets.
Chapter 6
* * *
OFFICER INVOLVED
It’s the summer of 1991, a sultry night in Lower Manhattan, long before I’m in IAB, and I’m standing on a subway platform with my service revolver pointed at a guy with a bloody knife in his hand. And I’m shouting and praying at the same time.
What I’m shouting is: Drop the knife! Drop the knife! DROP THE KNIFE!
And what I’m silently praying is: Please, God, don’t make me have to shoot this guy!
He’s a white guy, late twenties/early thirties, brown hair sticking up in all directions, wearing dark pants and a white pullover shirt that, like the six-inch knife in his hand, is covered in blood—another man’s blood. He’s holding the knife at waist level, slowly moving it back and forth in a “stay back” kind of motion, and he’s got his lips pulled back in a sort of weird, feral grin. He’s not saying anything intelligible, just standing there, back to the wall, snarling and growling like a wild animal. I’m guessing that he’s drunk, or high, or an EDP—emotionally disturbed person—or, worst-case scenario, all three at once.
I don’t know this guy. I’ve never laid eyes on him before this happened. But I know that under the right circumstances, if the situation gets to a certain critical point, I’m going to shoot him. As a cop, under the right circumstances, shooting him won’t just be my job, it will be my sworn duty.
But I desperately don’t want to do it. Which is why I’m shouting and praying: DROP THE KNIFE! (Don’t make me have to shoot this guy!) DROP THE KNIFE! (Don’t make me have to shoot this guy!) PLEASE DROP THE KNIFE . . .
As so often happens in police work, this night had gone from dull to potentially lethal with astonishing suddenness. Just ninety seconds earlier I’d been sitting in an unmarked Chevrolet, looking forward to a nice cup of tea and a quiet end of shift. At the time I’m a deputy inspector (DI), the commanding officer of the Sixth Precinct, which covers Greenwich Village and the West Village, and on this night I had drawn the duty. Although the duty is mandatory for precinct commanders at least once a month, I actually would do it even if it wasn’t. The duty is a chance for me to get away from the bureaucratic demands of being a precinct CO, to talk to my people, to simply get back to police work on the street for a while.
It’s been a quiet night, no major incidents, so at about three a.m. my partner, a young African American police officer named Rodney, and I decide to stop at an all-night deli for some take-out coffee—well, coffee for him, tea for me. (Technically, Rodney is my “driver,” but as far as I’m concerned, any cop riding in a car with me is my partner, no matter what the difference in rank.) Rodney parks the Chevy just down the street from the Christopher Street–Sheridan Square subway station and goes into the deli to buy the drinks, while I sit in the car, windows rolled down, listening to the soothing sounds of the radio chatter. A couple minutes later Rodney comes walking back out with two Styrofoam cups—and just as he does I hear angry words from across the street.
I look through the open driver’s-side window and see two guys, white males, standing on the sidewalk a few steps from the subway entrance, yelling at each other. I can’t understand exactly what they’re yelling, but it’s of the Fuck you! No, fuck you! variety. They’re face to face, well within flying spittle range, but they’re not in fighting stances, and nobody’s throwing any punches.
Rodney walks up to the car and says to me: Hey, boss, what’s up with that?
I shrug and say: I dunno, but I guess we better quiet ’em down.
So Rodney sets the Styrofoam cups on the hood and I open the car door and climb out. We aren’t planning on arresting these guys. If you collared everybody who’s having a loud argument on the sidewalk in New York, half the city would be locked up. All we want to do is separate them, quiet them down, send them on their respective ways, give them a chance to cool down a little. Routine police work.
And then, just as we start walking across the street, the guy on the left pulls a six-inch knife out from under his shirt, raises it over his head, and then plunges it to the hilt into the other guy, halfway between his neck and his shoulder.
Suddenly, this isn’t routine anymore.
The victim just kind of stands there, caught in a momentary embrace with the stabber, until the stabber pulls the knife out and the victim staggers backward, blood spurting like a fountain from the wound—the knife must have punctured his subclavian artery—and then his knees buckle and he sags to the sidewalk. The perp—his status has now instantly changed from angry citizen to dangerous perpetrator—doesn’t make another move on the victim, or try to stab him again. He just looks down on him, maybe with shock and horror at what he’s done, maybe with triumph and satisfaction.
All this takes about a second and a half. As soon as we see the knife, Rodney and I start running, shouting: Police! Don’t move! We’re about twenty yards away when the perp looks up at us, then he turns, knife still in hand, and takes off running down the sidewalk. I stop briefly to check on the victim—he’s sitting up, moaning, his hand pressed over the knife wound—and then I key my radio mic and call in—Central, this is Six CO, we’re in foot pursuit at Seventh and Christopher, man with a knife, victim down, we need an eighty-five and a bus forthwith—meaning that we need backup units and an ambulance ASAP. A 10-85 isn’t quite as serious as a 10-13, “officer needs help,” which would cause every unit in the precinct to drop whatever they were doing and rush to the scene, but it still gets attention.
As I’m calling this in, the perp makes it to the subway entrance and disappears down the staircase. Our radios don’t work well underground, so I let the dispatch center know we’re going to be in the subway station and probably out of contact—Six CO to Central, Christopher–Sheridan Square station, we’re going in the hole!—and then Rodney and I start running down the steps. The perp hops the turnstile, and so do we, then he runs down onto the platform. Even at three a.m. there are still a few citizens on the platform, waiting for a train, and as the guy runs past them, bloody knife in his hand, with two cops in pursuit, they start running, terrified, in the other direction. The perp runs to the far end of the platform, but now there’s nowhere to go, so he turns w
ith his back to the wall, still holding the knife, and starts with the snarling and growling.
At this point I draw my gun and take up position behind one of the steel ceiling support columns a few feet from the track. Rodney, about ten feet to my right, is against the wall, his gun in his right hand, his baton—they’re better-known as nightsticks—in his left. We both have our guns pointed at the perp, who’s about fifteen feet from us. My gun is a Smith & Wesson Model 10 .38-caliber revolver with a four-inch barrel, which weighs a little over two pounds—but right now, as it’s pointed at this perp’s chest, it feels like it weighs a hundred. I’m in good physical shape—just a few years earlier I’d finished a New York City Marathon—and during the foot pursuit I’d only run, what, less than a hundred yards? But my breathing is rapid and shallow, my skin is clammy, and my heart rate is about 160 beats a minute. The adrenaline is surging.
It’s not from panic, or fear, at least not fear for myself. I’m in a good defensive position, and I’m confident that my training and experience will allow me to resolve the situation one way or another. But I am concerned for my partner, who’s in a more open and vulnerable position.
Drop the knife! Drop the knife! Drop the knife!
At this point, the perp has three options. He can drop the knife and submit to arrest. He can jump down onto the tracks and run into the tunnel and maybe get electrocuted or smashed by an oncoming train. Or he can charge at us and hope that he can somehow make it past us and escape.
If he chooses Option 1, that’s fine. Even if he just stands there, not surrendering but not making a move, that’s okay, too. We’ll wait for backup to arrive, maybe use some of the specialized nonlethal takedown equipment that patrol sergeants have in their car trunks: a handheld water cannon to knock the guy down, a long-handled shepherd’s hook to try to pull his feet out from under him. If the Emergency Service Unit (ESU) guys are called in—they’re the NYPD equivalent of the SWAT team—they’ll have beanbag shotguns that shoot a painful but less than lethal soft projectile, and net guns that can wrap the guy up. As long as he stands still, there’s no hurry. In a standoff, time is on our side.
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