by Bad Cop: New York's Least Likely Police Officer Tells All
Set in giant capital letters and always followed by at least one exclamation point, these lifesaving reminders were the visual equivalent of a large man with a megaphone. They came in full-size poster form, and also on little fluorescent-green stickers that seemed capable of multiplying on their own. Like a prudent fungus, the messages sprouted on the sides of lockers and filing cabinets, on computers and fax machines, on cell doors and toilet stalls. Wherever we went, a sticker was imploring us to TREAT EVERY GUN AS IF IT WERE LOADED!, DEMAND TO SEE HANDS!!, CUFF, then FRISK!, and, in the one phrase that always made me feel as if some object was about to come flying at my head, TAKE COVER!!!
On our first day at the range, six recruit companies took seats in the classroom, then three members from each were selected to fetch our new guns from an outbuilding. The rest of us sat and squirmed in our seats as quietly as possible. This was the shining moment we’d been waiting for.
A month earlier, the NYPD had gathered our company in the academy auditorium to let us pick which handgun we’d be carry ing with us on patrol. Up to that point, I had never envisioned myself holding a sidearm of any kind, much less comparison shopping for one. I thought all handguns were equally revolting. Gun control was my wedge issue. Left or right, I couldn’t understand why anyone worried about violent crime would want to put more handguns on the streets, nor could I fathom why anyone would want to own one in the first place.
But now I had no choice. Or rather, I’d have a choice between three nine-millimeter models: the full-size Smith & Wesson, which looked like Dirty Harry might carry it; the midsize Sig Sauer, which had the same appearance; and the lightweight Glock, which looked like a water gun. During firearm selection, the range instructors had told us only the weapons’ respective weights and sizes, saying nothing about reliability or accuracy. However, before they made us choose the pistols, they let us handle each one and see what we liked. This was not a casual first date; according to NYPD regulations, the handgun you picked first would be yours for the rest of your career. Like that ill-advised biker tattoo, you would have years to regret the wrong choice.
I’d had no idea what I might or might not like in a gun, and after waiting in line for hours, I had about thirty seconds to decide. The trigger on the Sig Sauer felt a little hard to pull, which seemed to bode poorly for my chances of surviving a gunfight. On the other hand, the force required to engage the Glock’s patented two-piece “safety trigger” could be achieved by a light breeze. Shooting from the hip was not on my agenda, so the Glock was out. In between them was the Smith & Wesson. When I picked it up, the trigger felt perfectly tailored to the inside groove of my finger. I knew my choice had been made with one gratifying click of metal on metal. I handed it back to the instructor with a weird little twinge.
Now, a month later in the Bronx, my new pistol was hand-delivered in its own personalized case. We’d been told not to so much as breathe on the cases until they were all distributed, so I could only stare down at the blue box and wonder how I would greet its occupant. Would I be frightened? Would I be repulsed? Before the instructor let us open our boxes, I expected anything other than what I felt.
Sitting on a bed of dark-gray foam was the most radiant and powerful-looking thing I’d ever laid eyes on: a finely buffed stainless-steel hand cannon sparkling under the classroom lights like a deadly jewel. It looked bigger than I remembered, like it could take down a helicopter with one shot. Before this moment, if I had heard the word gun, my mind would have instantly free-associated a string of other distasteful terms like violence, danger, and stupidity. Now, I could only think of one word: MINE.
Slowly and quietly, I reached down to touch my new gun.
“I repeat! Open the case, but do not touch the firearm!” the instructor shouted into his microphone. My head snapped up. I thought I was busted, but I was apparently not the only recruit with a hearing problem. The instructor’s words were booming across a roomful of would be assassins.
Sitting next to me, my friend Bill Peters didn’t seem quite as excited about his new gun. Bill had chosen the Glock. In addition to being appreciably smaller than the Smith & Wesson, the Glock was made out of a dull black alloy called Tenifer, which made it look like plastic. Bill gazed over at my weapon, then back down at his own. “I should have picked the Smith,” he said with a sigh.
Bill looked truly unhappy, and I might have tried to talk him out of his buyer’s remorse if I hadn’t been waiting for chances to kick him when he was down. This was because Bill hadn’t given me a moment’s rest since the semester began. He seemed to think I was too laid-back to be a cop, and when he found out I’d once lived in California and had voted for Al Gore in 2000, he vehemently warned me away from the job, claiming that I was a danger to myself and others. I attributed Bill’s needling friendship style to his being from the Northeast—Long Island in particular, where the wise-guy mentality of the city met the dumb-guy mentality of the suburbs. Wherever the Bugs Bunny impersonation came from, it was the prevailing disposition of the NYPD, and it was starting to rub off on me. When I got an opening like this, I couldn’t resist.
“How much ammo does that thing hold?” I asked Bill.
Bill turned to me with narrowed eyes. “Sixteen rounds. Just like yours,” he said cautiously. “Why?”
“Then where does the CO2 cartridge go?” I said with a confused look—as if his weapon was designed for paintball.
For the briefest moment, Bill looked just as confused himself. “What the? Oh, fuck you, you prick.”
I’d never picked up a handgun before in my life, but I scored 94 percent at the target range after one day of practice, ranking second in my company behind Moran, an army-trained marksman. To my surprise, I found that hitting a large, stationary object with a semiautomatic weapon wasn’t all that hard. It was like taking a photograph—you just point and shoot. Oddly, though, even from the cozy seven-yard mark, most of my classmates scattered their fire around the human-shaped silhouettes as if they were trying to miss. And when we moved back to the twenty-five-yard position, their shots whizzed right over the stanchions, sending up little puffs of dust as they made impact with the enormous dirt mound behind the target line.
A few days of practice and individual instruction brought nearly everyone up to speed on the mechanics of shooting. We got all the help we could ask for in this department, but the legality of the instincts we were honing was given short shrift. From what I could piece together from a number of partial explanations, “Shoot to stop” was the NYPD’s new official mantra for gunfire situations, replacing the nasty old “Shoot to kill.” This seemed better. Rather than wantonly gunning down everybody who seemed like he might be a perp, we’d simply stop him. Wait up, sir; I’d like to have a word with you, if you wouldn’t mind.
But when I first got a look at our target silhouettes, I started to wonder. Smack in the middle of the silhouette’s chest was a six-inch circle designated “center of mass,” which the instructors told us to target at all times. Shooting someone in the center of his chest suggested something more than stopping power. This was killing power, which seemed inconsistent with the whole protect-and-serve business. So during dinner break one evening, I walked back into the main classroom and approached a range instructor about this seeming contradiction.
“I’m a little unclear about something. Can I ask you a question?” I said to the instructor, a man in his forties with dark-brown hair parted in the middle and feathered on the sides. He was sitting by himself with a half-eaten cheese sandwich in his hand and a can of Coke in the other.
“Do your worst,” the instructor said, then took a bite of his sandwich.
“If we’re supposed to shoot to stop,” I said, “shouldn’t we be aiming at the silhouette’s arms or legs?”
“Don’t shweat it, bro. You get shcored for every shot inshide the shilhouette,” he told me through a mouthful of bread and cheese. He was a little hard to take seriously.
“That’s actually not my
problem,” I said. “I’m just wondering why we aim at center of mass.”
“Becuszh,” he said, swallowing his food and taking a swig of Coke, “that’s the middle of the perp’s chest.”
“Where the heart is,” I said.
“Yep.”
“And the spine.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Okay, uh . . . won’t that kill the perp?”
“What’s your point?”
“I’m not sure anymore.”
“I see where you’re headin’, but try not to think about it too much. Shoot to stop means just that, shoot to stop. Know what I’m sayin’?”
“Not really. Can you be a little more specific?”
“Yeah, uh,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “We ain’t supposed to get no more specific about it. Youze are told stuff for a reason, and we can’t say nuthin’ else. The job’s real shaky about gun training, because of liability and whatnot.”
I walked back to the cafeteria feeling no closer to my answer than when I’d left. Mulling the oddities of NYPD regulations, I nearly bumped into something even odder. Out of the darkness came a tall, thin man in a bright-orange jumpsuit carry ing a push broom. While he looked like a janitor for NASA, he was actually a trustee from the nearby state prison. We’d been told to expect these guys, who were inexplicably bused into the weapons compound to perform odd jobs, but the scheme had sounded so unbelievable that I thought it was urban legend. Allowing convicted criminals to wander unsupervised through a world-class armory and rub shoulders with untrained police officers transcended the very concept of dumb. It turned out to be standard operating procedure.
Despite my apprehension, my first encounter with a real-life convict went swimmingly. The man walked right by me, politely avoiding eye contact, and disappeared again. The last I saw of him were the large reflective letters on the back of his jumpsuit: DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS.
Back in the range cafeteria, I rejoined my dinner circle and brought up the topic of deadly force. I had grown used to evasive answers to my questions, but this one was too important to let go. Knowing how to shoot a real person effectively and legally seemed worth a bit more research, even if it meant looking like an idiot.
Bill, having suffered my insults over the past few days, was waiting to pay me back. When he heard my dilemma, he put down his cafeteria-made meatball sandwich and said, “How can a guy so smart be so stupid?”
This caused a few of our friends around the table to snicker, while a recruit named Gustavo, who treated me like a genius because I let him copy my homework a few times, came to my defense. “You better be able to back your shit up, bro,” he cautioned Bill. “That’s Bacon you’re talking about.”
Bill said, “Well, if Bacon can’t figure this one out, God help him when he hits the streets.”
I said, “Will someone just tell me what it means?”
“It means you think too much,” Bill chided me. “It’s only three little words. Shoot to stop.”
“Shoot to stop,” I chanted, hoping this would help. It didn’t.
“What it means,” Gustavo said, “is that shooting a perp in the heat of the moment is mad hard, so aim for the part of his body that’s easiest to hit—his chest. See what I’m sayin’? Shoot to stop the guy.”
“Oh, right,” I said, finally understanding. “As in, not to miss him.”
“You got it,” said Gustavo, smiling back at me, as if proud about teaching me something.
As the rest of our bunch lavished me with applause, Bill said, “To hell with Bacon. God help us all when he hits the streets.” Cackling, he picked up his hoagie from the table and began lifting it to his mouth.
“Nahhh,” said Gustavo. “Bacon’s gonna do just fine up in the hood. He may be a college boy, but at least he’s got common sense to not eat food made by convicts.”
Bill froze with his hoagie in midair, then gave Gustavo the evilest of eyes and said, “What are you talking about?”
Gustavo flashed a wry look around the table and said, “Oh, you didn’t know?”
“Know what?” said Bill.
“The cons make the cafeteria food,” said Gustavo.
“I thought they just swept up around the place.”
“They sweep, take out the garbage, clean the toilets. And with the same hands, they make a mean meatball sandwich just for you, bro. How’s it taste?”
Bill dropped his sandwich on the table and stared at it in shock, as though it had grown a pair of eyes and winked at him. His look of surprise was quickly replaced by terror. “They probably spit in it,” he said, his face turning pale. A second later, he covered his mouth and sprinted out of the cafeteria toward the latrines.
“Pfff,” said Gustavo. “He’s lucky if they only spit in it.”
CHAPTER 9
BILL WAS OUT SICK for the next two nights, complaining of stomach cramps, nausea, headaches, and—most impressive—double vision. Returning to the outdoor range on the third night, he reported to the administrative office and learned that he’d missed his only chance to qualify on his service weapon while he was gone. Because of the facility’s packed schedule, he was now at the end of a long standby list to graduate from the police academy. It didn’t look as though they could squeeze him in before December, which meant he’d have to retake the entire recruit semester—or so he was told. It sounded very grave the way Bill described it secondhand, and I wondered if the cops in the admin office hadn’t been pulling his leg a little. It was this type of unnecessary cruelty that he brought out in everyone.
Bill took the news like a terminal diagnosis. During our dinner break, he split off from the main group and wandered into the darkening recesses of the compound. I watched his slow, robotic steps across the unlit parking lot and wondered where he was going. I half expected him to return carrying the disembodied head of a state prisoner.
Live ammunition training was now complete for everyone else in Company 02, and we wouldn’t see our pistols again until the day before graduation. Before I closed the dark-blue case on my gleaming silver hand cannon, I took a long, admiring look at it, then gazed around at my classmates to make sure no one was watching. I raised the gun with my right hand, then wrapped my left hand over the muzzle and racked the slide one last time. Shick-shick, the gun said back: “I’ll miss you, too.”
I walked to a classroom across the peninsula and waited for firearms simulator training to begin. Just moments before class was supposed to start, I noticed that everyone in my company was in their seats except Bill, Clarabel, and Moran. I had my respective suspicions about what was keeping them out in the woods.
Clarabel and Moran arrived only seconds apart and went unnoticed by all but me as they slid furtively into empty desks near the door. They both wore deadpan expressions. Moran was impeccable, but I noticed a small twig stuck in Clarabel’s ponytail. Bill arrived a few minutes after them, looking forlorn. I knew all my classmates would show up eventually. This was something no one wanted to miss.
The NYPD’s Firearms Simulator and Training System (known, inevitably, as FATS) was billed as the most effective means ever devised for sharpening a cop’s deadly reflexes. The heart of FATS was its immense video library of pretaped, live-action crime scenarios, each with a variety of alternate endings. The actors in the fictional scenarios were projected on a large screen, and we participated either by speaking to them or shooting at them, as appropriate. A range instructor chose from the possible outcomes based on our performance. If we interacted with the scenario in a firm but reasoned manner, the instructor might cue up an outcome in which the suspect was either compliant or not a criminal after all. On the other hand, if we were timid or reckless, he might turn the very same person into a violent psychopath wielding a deadly weapon.
In the hands of a determined instructor, FATS was unbeatable. Someone you thought was innocent would turn out to be a perp, or an apparent suspect would end up being a victim and you wouldn’t find out until after you’d shot them.
It was like a test where the questions would change after you’d filled in your answers, and in this way, perhaps it did teach us a little about our future careers.
Above all, FATS was an exercise in reverse psychology, as Officer Kurtz, our range instructor, demonstrated from the start. When he asked for volunteers to go first, he waited to see who didn’t raise their hands, and then he drafted a guinea pig from the lot. First up was Haldon, the shiest and oldest member of our company. With sunken cheeks, stooped shoulders, and a soft voice, Haldon bewildered everyone just by showing up. If we’d had an academy yearbook, this thirty-eight-year-old recruit would have been voted most likely to die in the line of duty.
Haldon rose to his feet amid howling gales of laughter. He took it in stride, chuckling back at us, as if he were in on his own joke. Stepping up to the screen, Haldon grabbed the mock gun off the table and holstered it on his gun belt with some difficulty. He then turned to the instructor and gave a hearty thumbs-up.
Officer Kurtz nodded at Haldon and switched off the overhead lights without bothering to quiet us down. We hushed ourselves when the six-by-ten-foot projection screen lit up with a haunting image: a garbage-strewn back alley, with no people in sight. Before the action began, a prerecorded male voice came over the booming speakers advising Haldon of the situation:
911 receives a call from a woman who states that a dangerous man has kidnapped her infant child. She states the man is currently located in an alley outside her apartment. Officer is requested to check and advise.