by Bad Cop: New York's Least Likely Police Officer Tells All
CHAPTER 6
THE NEXT MORNING, I was sitting in a bagel shop across from the Police Academy on East Twentieth Street, feeling perfectly situated for the day to come. I was decked out in my 100 percent polyester recruit uniform—a short-sleeved, button-down gray blouse and dark-blue pants with dangerously sharp creases. And I had an hour to kill before my first class, because I’d gotten an early start. In this city, any number of calamities, from a transit strike to a bomb threat, could throw a wrench into one’s commute. Now, with the academy in view, only a nuclear detonation directly above my head could have kept me from walking through the doors on time. I slowly sipped from a cup of coffee, looking at the building and wondering what to expect.
From the outside, the NYPD’s primary training facility didn’t look like an academy in the military tradition, with broad staircases and stately white columns. It was more conservative than that. The building looked like a corporate headquarters from the early 1960s—a drab, unadorned steel-and-glass box that could have been designed by an accountant with a nasty head cold. While it may not have looked like the proving grounds for the world’s most legendary police force, its unwelcoming façade matched my image of the department so far. Since I’d started the application process, every document I’d read was set in all capital letters, and everything I’d been told was presented in the form of a threat. If the department was less than cordial in its communications, I could understand why. It had only six months to teach two thousand recruits everything they needed to know about becoming cops.
There were twelve different disciplines in which to qualify. On top of the core academic subjects—Police Science, Behavioral Science, and Law—I’d also learn how to act as a professional witness in a separate unit called Excellence in Testimony. I’d be learning how to use a gun at the Firearms and Tactics Range in the Bronx, and learning how to chase people in a police car at the redundantly named Driver Training Education Facility in Brooklyn. Somewhere inside the main academy building was hidden a full-size gymnasium, where I’d be doing daily calisthenics as well as learning how to defend myself with every weapon at my disposal other than my gun. I’d become conversant in CPR and first aid, as well as narcotics recognition, insurance fraud, and counterterrorism tactics. The idea of getting paid to study all these things was a big enticement to put my anxiety aside and go with the flow. As the officer at orientation had told me, I could quit anytime I wanted. The handcuffs were mine to keep.
Ten minutes before class time, I left the bagel shop and crossed the street. The first thing that greeted me in the small academy lobby was an oversized department logo and the phrase ENTER TO LEARN, GO FORTH TO SERVE. If that sounds corny, it didn’t at the time. After all the preparation and expense, I was thrilled to finally be walking into this hallowed place. What ever it looked like, I was now a part of it. I belonged to the NYPD, and by association I belonged to the great city that spawned it. I was no longer just a New Yorker, I was New York.
And while I might have scoffed at the idea of “going forth” to do anything, my wry sense of humor was another thing I wound up leaving at the door. My nonconformist attitude was replaced by a constant state of fear when I got my first real look at our curriculum. There seemed to be a million new bits of information to process every single day, all of it testable material determining whether I received a posting or a pink slip at the end of the semester.
The first class I attended was Police Science, which would have been more accurately named Police Procedures and Paperwork. Its main reference, the NYPD Patrol Guide, comprised six hundred letter-sized, double-sided, single-spaced pages. Apparently too large to bind, our professional bible was distributed in two volumes of loose photocopies lashed together with pot roast strings.
Our Police Science instructor was Officer Joey Weil, a strangely flamboyant forty something cop from Staten Island with a bushy pompadour and a broken front tooth. He beamed with joy as the thirty recruits in my company walked inside the classroom one by one and heaved their personal copies of the Patrol Guide off the table. When the last person in line had carried the mass of pulp to his newly assigned desk, the instructor took his seat at the front of the room to hold court. He got out half a sentence before someone interrupted him.
“Excuse me, sir?” It was Clarabel Suarez, the beautiful young woman I’d met at orientation.
“Excuse me, sirrrr? Sirrr? Sirrrrr?” Officer Weil mimicked Clarabel in an annoying screech that sounded nothing like her voice.
A few recruits chuckled at his mockery, while the rest of us stared at the instructor, wondering what Staten Island had done to him to make him like this.
Clarabel looked around the room angrily and said, “Shut up! We’re supposed to call him ‘sir.’ Look in your stupid recruit pamphlets, if you can read.”
Officer Weil rolled his eyes, pursed his lips, and said, “What’s your question?”
Clarabel asked, “How much of this do we have to learn before graduation?”
“Everything,” said Officer Weil. A collective gasp came from my classmates.
“Everything?” said Clarabel.
“It’s all equally important,” said the instructor.
“Whoa, whoa, sir,” blurted Bobby Franks, a tall, muscular recruit with a sidewall haircut. Franks already looked like a state trooper, but he seemed overwhelmed by the academy. Seated in the back row, he had untied one of his pot roast strings and was flipping through the pages in horror.
“Whoa-oh-oh, sir-r-r, sir-r-r,” Officer Weil said in a deep voice, now eerily channeling Mr. Ed.
Franks asked him, “You mean we have to know basically what’s in here, right? A working knowledge?”
“I mean you have to memorize it from cover to cover.”
“How can a human being do that?”
“I did it when I was a recruit,” said Officer Weil. “And it stuck like glue.”
“So you’re saying you still know how to . . .” Franks said, reading the harrowing headline before him, “Process Requests for Police Department Documents Received from Assistant District Attorneys and Assistant Corporation Counsels?”
“Absolutely,” said Officer Weil.
“How do you remember it all?” said Franks.
“It’s easy,” said Officer Weil. “Just use acronyms.”
Officer Weil went on to explain that every topic in the Patrol Guide could be broken down into lists: lists of procedures, lists of documents, types of evidence, types of individuals, and so on. If we took the first letter of each item in a given list and made a word out of it, he said, we could remember what was in the list when we were tested on the material. I’d used acronyms many times in high school—I could have never passed biology or Western civ without them—but Officer Weil acted as if he’d invented the study method himself. And while he seemed to think his own acronyms were ingenious, I thought they were completely forgettable, such as MR. AC GRAPES (each letter representing a stolen item constituting grand larceny). Other meaningless phrases he offered as surefire memory enhancers were DOT IF CASED (types of vehicles not qualified for rotation towing), SNUF B (forms of currency not to be stamped as arrest evidence), and BRIDAL MOUSE (types of ambulance calls requiring immediate notifications to next of kin).
Plus, his acronyms scarcely covered a fraction of what we had to learn. So I went home that night and started making up an entire vocabulary of my own. I thought this would be easy, but then I found why Officer Weil clung to his grapes and bridal mice. Naturally occurring acronyms weren’t the most poetic of phrases, and the chances of creating one that reminded you what it was about were very slim. I bucked the odds anyway. The only way to ensure a passing grade, I thought, was to shoot for a perfect score.
Yet this was a habit of long standing for me; I’d been obsessing over my grades since elementary school. All the men in my father’s family were that way: unable to stop working or to be satisfied with the results. My mother called it “productivity angst,” or “PA.” My moth
er was a pattern seer of the first stripe, so I made sure not to point out that PA also stood for Police Academy. I also failed to mention that I was now staying up late every night making flash cards of my spanking new acronyms.
One early favorite was USE FJORD, a handy reminder of which types of juveniles were not eligible for release on personal recognizance. My mnemonic for that one was, of course, An impassable fjord. The letters stood for:
U = Unidentified or Unconscious
S = Supervision (as in none, i. e., no competent adult present)
E = Endangered child
F = Family court is in session
J = Juvenile offender (see MRS. BRA CAM)
O = Outstanding warrant
R = Return date (skipped out on previous court appearance)
D = Danger to community
And who could resist FIRM PEE, for criminal possession of a weapon in the fourth degree? It even rhymed. To distinguish it from first, second, and third degrees, I decided that a stream of pee, if wielded against someone, would probably be, at worst, a less-than-lethal weapon. The letters did the rest:
F = Foreigner + possession of a dangerous instrument
I = Intent to commit a crime + possession of RAID (razor, armor-piercing bullets, imitation gun, dangerous instrument)
R = Refuse to relinquish to police officer a rifle/shotgun that one is unfit to possess (see flashcard #157 for defn. of “unfit”)
M= Mere possession of a deadly weapon
P = Previous felony conviction + possession of a firearm
E = Educational premise (present at) + possession a firearm
E = Exploding-tip bullets, mere possession
The granddaddy was CAMP PAPA MUD. I needed three words to cover all the different types of workers and vehicles authorized to cross police lines at a fire scene. Likewise, the mnemonic for this one was practically a novella: Fire = The family CAMPing trip, when PAPA got MUD on himself.
Persons = CAMP
C = Cards: persons w/ working press cards & fire-line cards signed by Fire Commissioner
A = Agencies: members of governmental agencies in performance of duty
M = Mayor: hizzoner himself
P = Public: employees of public service corporations in performance of duties
Vehicles = PAPA MUD
P = Public service corporation vehicles
A = Agencies (of city) vehicles
P = Prison (Corrections Dept. vans), only if transporting prisoners
A = Ambulances
M= Mayor’s car, w/ or w/o mayor
U = U.S. Mail vehicles
D = Department: police and fire
Once I could get past the acronyms and see the bigger picture, I found our curriculum fascinating—even uplifting. Contrary to most of the Spike Lee movies I’d seen, I found the NYPD to be politically correct to the point of obsession. I mean this as a compliment. If anyone should have to be PC, it’s the police. I was happy to see that sensitivity was a cardinal virtue of the department, at least on paper. The academy spent more time teaching us how to spot sexual harassment in the workplace than it spent teaching us how to track down criminals. We minored in Equal Employment Opportunity Law, and our first class presentation was an oral report on the history of some ethnic group other than our own. This was part of a course on racial and social awareness called Behavioral Science, aka Silly Science. My classmates acted as if it was the biggest waste of time of all, but I was thrilled by the syllabus, made of hundreds of articles from university textbooks, obscure periodicals, and nonprofit groups working for the rights of people of every conceivable orientation and ancestry, and of all known physical and mental disabilities.
The instructor for this course was Officer Whiteman, who happened to be a black woman. I did not envy her last name. None of my classmates dared make a joke, though. She was our superior officer.
On our first day in Behavioral Science, Officer Whiteman passed around a list of ethnicities that we could research for our oral reports. Most of the major groups who’d lived in or immigrated to New York were on the list: Native Americans, Dutch, West Africans, Italians, Chinese, Irish, Jews, Puerto Ricans, Pakistanis, Russians, et al. There were more ethnicities to write about than there were people in our class, but when the list reached Clarabel, she raised her hand and said, “Ma’am? I notice that Wiccans aren’t on here.”
“I’ve never heard of Wiccans,” said Officer Whiteman. “Where did they come from?”
“No one really knows,” said Clarabel.
“Well, this isn’t an anthropology class,” said the instructor. “Why don’t you pick one of the other groups?”
“But I want to write about Wiccans,” said Clarabel. “I should be able to, right? Isn’t the whole point to explore culture?”
“Yes, of course,” said Officer Whiteman. “Who are Wiccans exactly?”
“They’re witches,” said a recruit sitting behind Clarabel.
Clarabel turned around and snapped at him, “Don’t talk about crap you don’t know, all right?”
“Suarez, please,” said Whiteman. “We can’t speak like that in uniform.”
“Sorry,” said Clarabel. “But Wiccans aren’t just witches. They’re duotheists. Their god is part man, part woman.”
“You gotta be kidding,” said another recruit, causing a round of laughter from the group.
“Quiet down, everyone,” said Officer Whiteman. “Are you sure you want to study Wiccans for this class?” she asked Clarabel. “You seem to know a lot about them already.”
“That’s because I am one,” said Clarabel, folding her arms with a self-satisfied look.
“Of course you are,” sniped a classmate.
Officer Whiteman looked relieved. “Then you can’t report on Wiccans. Remember, we’re writing about groups other than our own.”
“Oh, right,” said Clarabel. “Well, can I add them to the list anyway? I’m sure someone else will want to research them.”
In the manly atmosphere of the academy, Clarabel was a hippie, a running joke, but I thought she was a breath of fresh air. She radiated personal strength and a kind of moral integrity that I found just as sexy as her body. In my mind’s eye, a sparkling shield was pinned to her breast pocket, and her hips were draped with deadly weapons. I gave her the gun, the baton, the extra ammo—everything but the police hat, which made her look like a thumbtack, and the curve-busting Kevlar vest, for obvious reasons.
My mother also happened to be something of a firebrand, a staunchly single woman who hunted for sport, drove a vintage American muscle car, and lived with two pit bulls in a bad part of Oakland. With a shotgun-owning, self-described feminist as my first female role model, I admit I had a rather skewed idea of a dream girl. My biggest celebrity crushes as an adult had been gun-wielding starlets: Linda Hamilton in The Terminator, Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs, and Gillian Anderson of The X-Files. My first-ever crush in 1976 was on a thirteen-year-old Tatum O’Neal, who may not have carried a sidearm in The Bad News Bears but was nonetheless fetching with a baseball bat slung over her shoulder.
In her living room in Oakland, my mother had a poster of a possum hanging by its tail upside down on a tree limb that said, EVERYONE’S ENTITLED TO A POINT OF VIEW: MINE. This was Clarabel to a tee. I shuddered to think how similar they were—the woman who raised me and the woman I wanted to sleep with. To keep from grossing myself out, I had to remind myself how they were different. My mother, of purported “Viking stock,” had blonde hair and blue eyes, while Clarabel, a second-generation Dominican, was more the Salma Hayek type. Was it Oedipal if they didn’t actually look alike? I hoped not.
Their biggest difference by far was in temperament. My mother was usually easy-going, and Clarabel liked to pick fights. I wished they were more alike in this way. I was attracted to Clarabel’s bravado, but I wasn’t sure if I could handle it. Suffering from classic small-dog syndrome, she was forever testing the limits of her power against enemies ten times her s
ize. I thought that anyone who hung out with her would inevitably have to bail her out of some predicament. I’d avoided conflict all my life, particularly the kind with fists involved. Ideally I’d pick up fighting skills in the process of becoming a cop, but until then, my only hope was that she was as tough as she made herself out to be.
Clarabel and I lived in the same neighborhood, and some days we rode the bus home together. As required, we commuted in our full recruit uniforms while carry ing our enormous duffel bags, bursting at the seams with school supplies. Since we had no personal locker space at the academy, we had to take everything we needed to and from the building, including our books for four different classes, our gym clothes, and every piece of equipment we’d ever use on patrol except our guns. Amazingly, most of this load fit into our duffels. The only thing we couldn’t get inside the bag was the one thing we most needed to stow, our batons.
Despite what Bill Peters had said, our nightsticks were not “Wif-fle bats filled with sawdust.” They were big and hard and dangerous in crowd situations if they weren’t properly secured. The only way to safely transport a twenty-four-inch nightstick through a city as densely populated as New York was to holster it on your belt and let it hang down beside your leg. This was how we’d carry them eventually, but until we were trained in their use, we had to strap them to our duffel bags, which supposedly put them farther out of our reach. It was sound logic from a liability standpoint; from a subway standpoint, it was madness.
My nightstick measured eight inches longer than my bag, leaving four inches sticking out on both ends. Add the weight of the bag’s contents and my natural human tendency to swing my arms when I walk, and I was in danger of inflicting serious injury on anyone in my path. Lugging my bag through the city’s congested transit system was an exercise in humility and self-sacrifice. At rush hour, I couldn’t move ten feet without bashing someone in the shins, forcing me to make endless apologies. The biggest challenge was walking down a flight of subway stairs while a mass of humanity was coming the other way. Most New Yorkers seemed too busy to actually look where they were going, and certainly no one was expecting to see a police baton coming straight at their eye socket, so when I took the Fourteenth Street subway, I walked backward down the stairs. This became ridiculous after a few days, and I started taking the much slower Fourteenth Street bus instead.