by Tom Philbin
If you feel you should be let go IMMEDIATELY, please speak to the Desk Officer in precinct, even before giving him your pedigree. Sometimes the DO is hard of hearing. Speak LOUDLY; it’s what they want.
At any time did your PO dis your “colors,” do-rag, or your gang tattoos?
Did the PO use the fur-lined, soft velour, or NERF handcuffs?
If you had a weapon of some sort in your hand and the PO shot at you after numerous requests for you to “drop the weapon,” did the PO shoot you in the hand with the weapon in it?
Did your PO call you sir/ma’am? If your PO called you ma’am, are you of the female sex?
Were you transported to the precinct in an RMP [radio monitored patrol car]?
Was the A/C working properly in the back of the RMP?
Was there enough leg room, or did you have to sit sideways?
Did the PO play your “music” on the radio? And at an excessive volume? Did your PO “crank the bass” till passersby’s fillings were jarred loose? Did your PO tune in to Rush Limbaugh or some other talk show?
Did your PO offer you a cool drink or offer to stop by Mickey D’s for the dollar menu special?
IN THE HOUSE
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Did the desk officer greet you and welcome you to the precinct? Did he seem sincere in his greeting?
Were you brought to a small private room away from everyone to be “tossed”?
If answer to above question is no, and you had to stand in front of the desk, did the DO offer you a chair?
What about offering you a cool drink or your favorite beverage from the machine?
Were the cells clean and graffiti free?
Were the cells at a comfortable temperature? Was the A/C working properly?
Did your PO offer to get you a sweater if you were too cold?
Was there plenty of seating space?
Were the toilet facilities in the cell area working and in a clean and presentable manner?
Was there a pleasant smell or/and an air freshener in the toilet facility?
Was there enough toilet paper and/or sanitary napkins available?
If no, did the cell attendant get some in a reasonable amount of time?
Were the periodicals in the toilet current and was there a new copy of the New York Times?
Was the crossword already done?
Were you arrested weekdays between two and five P.M., when each and every precinct has a free food buffet?
Were the only sandwiches that were available tuna and it was only 2:15?
Did all the chocolates have little holes in them from people “peeking” as to what they are?
FINGERPRINTING
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Did your PO make the fingerprinting process a memorable one?
Did your PO explain why it takes forever for your prints to come back?
Did your PO explain only peddler arrestees—er customers—are DAT eligible?
GENERAL QUESTIONS
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How often are you arrested? A month? A week?
How would you compare this arrest to previous arrests? Would you want to be arrested by this officer again?
If not, explain.
Would you recommend to your customer friends and/or family to be arrested by this officer?
Would you want to be arrested in this precinct again?
If no, explain.
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Thank you for participating in this survey. Your CCRB has been filed and an investigator will contact you sometime while you are in CB as to what you think the punishment should be for your PO. Once again thank you for choosing NYPD as your police department to be arrested with. We’re trying harder to please you. Feel free to add your comments below.
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THE HUNTER
I had a sergeant named Richards. He was a great cop with about seventy gun collars, but he also thought of himself as a big hunter. He’d take all his time off to hunt, and without fail he’d come back with nothing. He always had an excuse. He’d say a deer was too small, or he didn’t have a permit for a particular type of game. One day Richards calls five of us to a squad meeting in a back room, but we don’t go all the way in because there’s a bird in there. It’s flying around, panicked, whacking against the window. Then it starts dive bombing at us, and one of the cops yells, “Get the pepper spray! Get the pepper spray!”
Another guy takes out his gun and says, “I’ll shoot him.”
Richards says, “Shut off the lights. He’ll go away.”
“Hey,” says another cop. “It’s a bird, not a moth! No wonder you never catch anything!”
A REAL COOL DUDE
Sometimes when you have an injury, the department puts you on desk duty or something like that until you heal and get back on the street. I hurt my hand and my neck, so I was on the T/S [telephone switchboard] for a while. Basically, you are in the front part of the station house just answering phones and directing people who come in off the street. It was pretty busy, so I decided to eat my veal parmigiana hero while I was answering the phones. It was hot and muggy, and we just got the air conditioning working in the station house. Some of these station houses are so old and run down that the heat doesn’t get fixed until March, and they fix the A/C when summer is almost over. Anyway, this old homeless guy walks past the station house as someone is walking out. He feels the cool air hit him and decides to come in. He comes over to the T/S, leans on it, looking very tired, and says as he wipes the sweat from his forehead, “Man, da big apple is like da baked apple today.”
“Yeah. It’s a hot one, no doubt about it.”
“Mind if I just rest here in the cool air, it is so hot outside?”
“Nah, go ahead.”
Like I said, it was busy, and the T/S is lit up like a Christmas tree. So I am answering calls and transferring them to the right people for a couple of minutes, and the guy is still standing there. He looks at my half-eaten sandwich and says, “Mmmm mmmm, I’m starvin’ like Marvin and dat looks good. What is dat, chicken parmajohnny?”
“No, veal. Do me a favor, pal. Go sit on the benches over there and get cool. It is too busy to be standing over me.”
“Okay, no problem.”
I turn my head for a second—I mean an instant—to tell another officer he has a phone call. The homeless guy reaches over with his filthy hands, picks up my sandwich, and asks, “You gonna finish dis half?”
I just look at him in amazement and yell, “Well, I’m not now.” I kicked him out, but I let him keep it. I figured he needed it more than I did.
WHO ARE YOU THEN?
Working in South Central, you see and hear it all. A lot of the gang bangers are tough, but you can tell when you get a guy who is just acting tough and trying to fit in because he panics when it hits the fan. We were working a day tour when we get a call about a robbery. Some lady got robbed walking away from an ATM. So we get the victim, and another unit grabs the perp and holds him there for a showup. We pull up, and the victim says he’s the guy who robbed her. I get out and tell the other sector guy, “Cuff him up, that’s the guy!”
The perp panics and yells, “I ain’t me!”
GIVE A MAN ENOUGH ROPE …
It’s no secret that cops and defense attorneys are not exactly bosom buddies. The lawyer’s job is to make a testifying cop look bad. If they can do that then they have a great chance of getting their client off, so they are always trying to trip you up. However, since they are not exactly representing brain surgeons, it can backfire. I was in court on a robbery collar, and the lawyer for this mutt starts in on me and asks, “Officer Santana, did you give him Miranda?” (You know, the whole spiel about the right-to-remain-silent jazz you see on Law and Order.)
I respond, “Yes. In the patrol car.”
The mutt jumps up from the defense table and starts yelling, “That’s B.S.! He didn’t give me any rights. That [bleeper] is lying.”
The judge tells him to sit down and be quiet, that outbursts
like that will not be tolerated. Things calm down a little, and then the defense attorney asks where I recovered the money and the gun from. I respond that the gun was in his left pants pocket and the money in his right pants pocket. Mutt jumps back up and yells, “This time he’s telling the truth!”
Thank you, jackass. End of trial.
What?
I think the trouble with a lot of the kids today is that they pick really bad role models. These four white kids dressed like gang members come boppin’ into the precinct one night about two A.M. reeking of alcohol. They just came from an Eminem concert. The conversation was as follows:
Officer: “Can I help you?”
Kid: “Myz car gots compunded.”
Officer: “Why did your car get compounded?”
Kid: “’Cause yo, myz license was provoked.”
Officer: “Do you mean your car was impounded because your license is revoked?”
Kid: “Dats what I’ve been tryin to say, offisah. Your cranium ain’t listening to your clavicle.”
HUH?
In the police academy they should definitely have a course on street lingo. Either that, or I have to start watching more MTV because I don’t know what the heck the people are saying out there. I only had about eight months on the job when I had this conversation. It was a hot night, and we get a call about a fight in the middle of the street. We were the first unit to respond, and I ask these five kids hanging out what I thought was a simple question, “What happened?”
“Well, what had happen was he came out and was like bap. So she was like oh word? and then she said boom.”
I am standing there thinking how do I put that in a report? I was looking for help with the translation from my partner or the other kids. My partner had about eight years on, and he was used to this. He understood everything and asks back, “So then what happened?”
“Yo, I don’t know. I was just chillin’ and everyone broke out.”
NOT QUITE DOA
We get a call to an apartment in the projects. A nurse’s aide has not been able to get into a patient’s apartment for days and didn’t have a key. So I pound on the door with my stick for a while and get no answer. I am thinking there’s obviously a DOA inside. I call housing maintenance, and they drill the lock. The door swings open, and they all back off thinking, “Let the cop go in.” Great, I love finding DOAs (not!). I walk in slowly, and look in the kitchen. There’s food in the pan, and it’s very old. I start to search the place and walk toward the bedroom. Sure enough, I see someone in the bed facing away, and I am thinking definitely a DOA. So, like a good cop, I want to get an idea of how long she was there. I lean over the bed to see her face, and she spins her head and yells, “What are you looking at!” I jumped back and nearly fell into her dresser. I was shot for the rest of the day.
Turned out she had been hearing voices for days and didn’t want to answer the door. The EMTs carted her away to the psych ward.
Careful What You Wish For
One summer I was working the night tour, and they made us drive a civilian reporter around. She was taking summer courses at UMass to complete her senior year and was a journalism major. She was doing a story on relations between the police department and the community for her school newspaper. I had no problem with it because I have kids of my own, and I am always trying to help them further their education. If they want a glimpse of what we do and what we face, fine by me. As soon as she gets in the car she starts spouting off. “Oh, you guys don’t really do much, I guess. Is it this slow every night? Why don’t you look for some crime? Isn’t it a waste to just cruise around here?”
I say to her, “Look, obviously when we ride with civilians we are not going to endanger their safety and bring them to anything too heavy where they can get hurt.”
She took offense at this because she was this snotty, cop-hating, rich daddy’s girl with major attitude. “Well I didn’t lead a sheltered life, you know. I am a journalist and I can handle anything you guys run into!”
Five minutes later, we get a radio run to an old welfare hotel in a seedy part of the city. A skell must have paid a whole month’s rent up front, then died the next day. About three weeks later, the smell is unbearable, and they call the police. The guy was dead for over two weeks. It had bloated, then burst, and he was being eaten by maggots. We tell the kid not to go in the room, it’s too gruesome. Ms. Reporter starts with her feminist B.S. routine, so we tell her to go ahead and take a look. In less than three seconds, she projectile-vomited across the room, hitting the wall, then screamed and ran down the stairs to the patrol car. As she is running out, my partner yells out, “While we’re finishing up here, think about where you want to eat dinner!”
YOU’LL KNOW ‘EM WHEN YOU SEE HIM
I work in a pretty normal suburban town—you know, houses with tree-lined streets, young families, that sort of stuff. I am doing a day tour when a call comes over about an escaped ostrich. I’ve seen a lot, and I know this is the suburbs—not exactly wild ostrich country. So like any normal cop would do, I pick up my radio and say, “What was that, did you say ostrich?”
The answer is yes, so I go to the complainant’s house, and sure enough, the guy tells me he is a handler at a petting zoo but sometimes, to get the animals tame, he has them at his house in the yard. He designed his yard to house these animals but never had an ostrich there before. I have no idea if it is even legal to have an ostrich, but I figure I can come back to that later. Now I have to find this huge bird. So I put the guy in my car, and I get on the radio. “Be advised we have an escaped ostrich running around. If you find him, advise me of your location. I have the handler here with me.”
Of course, everyone is getting a kick out of this except one guy, Schmidt, who is strictly by the book—an attitude that is sometimes grating. So he says: “Do you have a description of the ostrich?”
I can’t let it go. “Where do you think we are, the Australian outback? Tell ya what, you come across any six-foot bird running down the street, and he’ll do.”
A Nasty Trick
I was with another rookie named Johnston, and we were left at the scene of a DOA to await the ME and the meat wagon. The DOA, who looked like he died of natural causes, was on the floor between the bed and the wall. Johnston was a former worker at the morgue and knew most of the MEs. He recognized the responding MEs name and decided he is going to play a joke on him. So he takes his shirt off, rubs talcum powder on his face and upper body, and gets into the bed and pulls the covers over himself. A short while later, the ME comes in and asks where the body is. I direct him to the bedroom. He starts asking questions I can’t answer about medications and stuff, then pulls the blanket back, leans over, and starts to inspect the body. Johnston reaches up with both hands and grabs his throat. The ME fainted! I thought my career was toast. Thank the almighty that when he came to he remembered nothing! We just told him, “Must have been something you ate, Doc.”
DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM? SURE …
Chicago has been mobbed up dating back to the Al Capone days. It’s different from New York, where they have five families dividing up territories. Here it is just one family that controls everything. When Michael Jordan was playing for the Bulls, basketball was the big ticket, and everybody who was somebody wanted to go. So one night after a Bulls playoff game, all these limos were lined up outside waiting for their turn to leave. This one limo decides it is not going to wait and pulls a dangerous U-turn. Everyone is honking and yelling. I pull the guy over, and for safety reasons, my partner goes to the rear passenger side and makes them roll down their tinted windows. The driver starts to plead with me kind of nervous like, “Please don’t give me ticket—my passenger told me to do it.” The passenger can’t hear him because there’s a window between the front and the back.
I say, “Your passenger told you? Well, unless you have the president back there, I don’t care what your passenger told you to do.”
Then I hear my partner arguing with
the passenger, and I tell the limo driver to roll down the dividing window so I can see what’s going on. Turns out it is the well-known daughter of a top-echelon mobster who has been locked up for about five years, but the daughter is famous and making a living off his name. She has had a little to drink and is getting real annoyed when she finally screams out, “I’ll have your badge! Do you clowns know who I am?” I say, “Yeah—an inmate’s daughter.”
ONLY IN NEW YORK
We were working a midnight tour when we get a call to check out an aided case on a subway platform. We show up, and the place is pretty deserted except for one homeless guy passed out on the bench. We go over and check him out, and he is DOA, natural causes. New York in the summer can be hot, but in the subway it’s like a kiln. We were already dripping sweat. Since we had to wait for the ME to certify the guy was dead—something that could take hours—it was going to be bad. So we chose another route. We carried the guy’s body onto the next train, propped it up on a seat, and put a newspaper in his hands as if he were a drunk sleeping it off. The train pulled out of the station, and we went back on patrol.
A few hours later, we get contacted by Central that there’s an aided case but this time it is on the train, not the platform. We enter the train, and see it is the same guy just as we left him. He is still sitting up, but without the paper. The guy who called to tell us he was dead stole his paper. Only in New York.