Paul Bacon

by Bad Cop: New York's Least Likely Police Officer Tells All

  Forty-odd pairs of eyes turned to the door as Bill Peters emerged from behind it with a mortified expression.

  “Come in,” the sergeant said impatiently.

  Bill scurried across the room and wedged himself in between the two cops closest to the door, causing a ripple as the formation had to re-form around him.

  “Any time now,” said the sergeant, a tall, broad-shouldered woman with a blonde ponytail. The gold emblem on her chest was so new it still looked wet, but she had an old-school revolver at her side and two blue hash marks on her sleeve, indicating at least ten years of service.

  When everyone had settled into their new places, the sergeant said, “All right, at ease. We got a lot of ground to cover, so let’s get started. My name is Sergeant Langdon, and I’m the C-squad patrol supervisor. I don’t know if you’ve been told, but we’re all part of a pretty big first-time deal here. It’s called Operation Impact, and it’s happening all over the city in certain high-crime precincts. We’re gonna get a lot of attention from the department and from the media, so everyone’s gonna be on point, all the time. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” we responded in unison.

  “Starting to night, you’ll be doing solo foot posts in what we call the Impact Zone. It’s a twenty-two-block area in the center of the precinct—the worst part, as you can see on the maps around the room. Your job is to maintain a regular presence in the Impact Zone, not answer radio runs or goof off with your buddies. Stay on your posts unless someone puts over a ten-eighty-five, in which case, run like hell to give backup. This is a busy command, and crowd control is a major issue. Any questions?”

  Someone in front raised a hand to ask, “When is our field training?”

  “Yeah, about that,” the sergeant said, turning to a man in a brown silk suit standing near the door. “Captain Danders, would you like to take the first question?”

  Our executive officer was a lanky, clean-shaven man with a flattop and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. Switch his tailored suit for high-waters and suspenders, and he could easily have been confused with Urkel from Family Matters. His nerdy gaze was softened by an elegant bearing once he started walking across the room. He glided soundlessly across the floor on wing-tip shoes, then stepped behind the podium with a beaming salesman’s smile.

  Clapping his hands together once, he began, “Thank you for your question. I understand that some of you are expecting a period of hand-holding and babysitting that is often referred to as field training. We’re not going to do that. You’re part of a special operation, and you’re going to get special treatment. Any other questions?”

  None of us raised our hands, but two cops in front of me stole a secretive glance at each other, both looking confused. What was special treatment, exactly?

  “Outstanding,” said the captain, giving himself another clap. “Before I give it back to your sergeant, will everyone please pull out the parking tickets that Lieutenant Ortiz gave you? There’s been a mix-up with the old parkers, and I want to make sure everyone has the ones that just came out. So look down the list of offenses to double-parking, and make sure it says a hundred and fifteen dollars, not a hundred five.”

  “A hundred and fifteen?” one of my coworkers blurted out.

  An awkward silence followed, until the other bosses standing at the front of the room started cracking little guilty smiles. One of them laughed, “I’m glad I’m not writing parkers anymore.”

  We turned out from roll call at five P.M., hitting the street like a gang of heavily armed hoodlums in the waning twilight. I purposely lagged behind the others. They talked too loud and took up too much space on the sidewalk for my liking. I was actually relieved that I’d be working alone; I didn’t fear for my safety as much as I feared offending my constituents. By myself, at least I could control the impression I made.

  Ten minutes after leaving the station house, we reached the Impact Zone. My post was on the closest edge of the territory, so I was the first to peel off from the group. Nobody seemed to notice except Bill.

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he yelled after me. I smiled back at him and shrugged—like he was right, and that I was about to meet a terrible fate. The truth was that I wanted to say the same thing to him. As he and the other rookies swaggered up the avenue like they owned the place, I worried about the mayhem they were about to unleash.

  From the moment I stepped foot on my post at 137th and Frederick Douglass, I felt a rush of freedom and opportunity. While I was confined to a one-block area, it was my one-block area, and I didn’t mind that it looked like the set of a Charles Bronson movie. Harlem had supposedly gentrified in recent years, but you wouldn’t see it here. The most glamorous spot on my post was a liquor store, the most frequent sight, a pile of chicken bones. Old people drinking out of paper bags sat on milk crates in front of buildings with no windows. Young people drinking out of paper bags sat on the hoods of cars with no wheels. Empty garbage cans lay on their sides amid piles of garbage. The only sign that anyone cared about the neighborhood was a gaping pothole in the street that had been shored up with an old mattress.

  According to the NYPD, the main goal of Operation Impact was to bring down big crimes like rape and robbery by cracking down on small crimes like littering and public urination. The idea was that I could help turn things around here by just writing summonses. (The previous mayor, Rudy Giuliani, had employed this tactic with great success in the past, albeit in parts of the city that were not so far gone as this.) But what ailed my post seemed far beyond the scope of police intervention. It didn’t need a crackdown on minor violations. It needed an army of social workers with a wrecking ball.

  So I decided that this righteous ticket-giving was the wrong approach. Rather than poking around for trouble, I would deter it by giving off wholesome law-and-order vibrations. I walked around my block a few times, staying under streetlights to broadcast my identity.

  My post was a no-man’s-land, a deserted stretch of frozen sidewalk and boarded-up brownstones. It got a little lonely after dark, so I headed across the street to the city playground, which was full of kids. As soon as I reached the gate, I was swarmed by a dozen wide-eyed children with outstretched hands—reaching, alarmingly, toward my cargo of weapons and restraining devices. This didn’t seem to frighten the toddlers; what I saw as a walking dispensary of doom, they seemed to see as a delivery system for shiny, exotic-looking toys. I stepped out of the park for their safety and mine, leaving behind all but a few truly devoted stragglers whom I thought I could manage. Then a high-pitched voice asked me, “Is that real?”

  I looked down to see a four-year-old boy reaching up to my holstered gun with a tiny, probing finger. I slowly knelt down to meet him at his eye level and asked him his name. The boy did not respond; his eyes merely widened as the gun drew nearer to his face. He pressed his palm on my holster and began caressing it with soft, reverent strokes, like he was petting a sleeping dragon. When I turned to nudge the weapon out of reach, the boy seemed to realize for the first time that it was attached to a person. He gazed up at my face and, after a few seconds of staring at my patrolman’s cap, he said, “Cap’n Crunch?”

  Still squatting, I stared into his eyes, wondering what to say.

  The boy’s older sister appeared shortly after. A towering twelve-year-old with antenna-like pigtails and a withering pout, she looked like the real law in these parts. “He thinks you look like Cap’n Crunch,” she taunted. As soon as she got within reach of the boy, she yanked him back by his shoulder, making him cry.

  “Ooo. That’s okay,” I said, hanging on the little man’s pained expression. “I don’t mind.”

  “No, he’s messin’ with you,” the girl said. “He thinks if you’re as nice as Cap’n Crunch, you won’t close the playground. But I told him not to front the popo anyways, because you weren’t fixin’ to shut it down, were you?”

  A sign on the gate said the park was supposed to be closed from dusk to dawn. Th
is seemed hard to enforce in the middle of winter, when the days were brutally short. Plus, the playground was well kept, well lit, and full of life—the only apparent source of positive energy in the neighborhood.

  I told the girl, “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  She stared at me with her hands on her hips. “Are you closin’ the playground or not?”

  “Not,” I said, and the girl ran back inside the gates.

  “Thank you, Cap’n Crunch,” chirped the boy with tear-stained cheeks.

  “You got it,” I said with a wink. “Play safe now.”

  Watching him toddle away, I felt like a king. I didn’t have to write summonses to do this place some good. I could just dispense justice as I saw fit. If I wanted the park to stay open, it stayed open. I felt as if I’d already done a day’s work, but then I heard a quick siren blast over my shoulder. I turned around and saw Captain Danders sitting behind the wheel of an unmarked green Chevy Impala. I ran up to his car and put up a salute.

  “What the hell are you doing?” said the captain.

  “I was just, uh, safeguarding the . . .”

  “Bullshit,” he said, then pointed across the street. “You see those mopes pumpin’ at the bogey over there?”

  I looked where he was pointing and saw four young men standing near the entrance to a convenience store. I said, “I believe so, sir.”

  “If they haven’t bounced in five minutes, I’m giving you a rip, you understand? I’ll hit you back later.”

  I appreciated the heads-up. But what was he talking about? After the captain drove away, I looked at the young men for some kind of context. They were all wearing puffy ski jackets that came down to their knees and made them look like they were smuggling balloons. They seemed like they’d have no problem “bouncing,” if that’s what the captain meant, though I wasn’t sure what that would accomplish, or how I would make them do it.

  He might have wanted me to make them leave. I wondered how. I couldn’t legally eject them from a public sidewalk if they weren’t causing trouble. They were quiet enough—no shouting, no blasting radios—so I had to gather evidence.

  They acted oblivious as I watched them from across the street. It didn’t take long for one of them to do a hand-to-hand transaction with a nervous-looking passerby, and I figured they were dealing drugs. So brazen, I thought, right in front of me! If they would peddle drugs in plain view of a police officer, what else were they capable of?

  Now I understood what the captain was talking about. Well, most of it. The “rip” must have been some kind of punishment for not doing my job, which obviously was to keep drug dealers off my post. I hoped I didn’t have to arrest anyone in the process. I had probable cause to search based on the hand-to-hand, but I assumed they were armed and dangerous, given their line of work. I was outnumbered, so I decided to just approach them, tactfully state my case, and let them go with a warning.

  I walked up to them slowly while planning what to say: “Excuse me, young men? I noticed your group exhibiting suspicious behavior, but I might have been mistaken. Perhaps you’d like to move along while I put in my contact lenses.”

  I was still about fifty feet from their spot when they all turned around and started walking the other way. I didn’t have to say anything, and the crowd of scary-looking teenagers left without a word of protest or a hard look in my direction.

  Corner-taking was immediate gratification, a shot of courage straight into the vein. As if I needed any more of an ego boost at this point, a man in his thirties walked up and thanked God that I was there. “If you weren’t holding down this corner,” he said, double-gripping my hand, “the hoods would be.” He pointed across the street at the building where he grew up and told me he’d spent his life in fear of taking a stray bullet. “One of these jokers gets a little smart, and the air fills with gunfire.”

  I’d felt presumptuous about being a white authority figure in Harlem, but now all that mattered was that this one man felt safer because I was there. After he left, I looked at the slab of concrete beneath me with new eyes. Littered with paper bags, beer cans, and dog turds, it looked beautiful somehow. Everything that I had done, everyone I had known, and everywhere I had ever been had somehow led me to this place where I was actually making a difference. If it wouldn’t have looked so stupid, I would have picked up some of that trash on the sidewalk and brought it home as a souvenir.

  CHAPTER 14

  NOT EVERYONE IN MY COMMAND was feeling the love. After the first week of Operation Impact, some rookies complained about being targeted with objects from rooftops, an occupational hazard known as air mail. People just waited for us to walk by, and they’d drop anything they could fit out a window or lift over a ledge. Glass bottles were a common form of air mail, as were small household appliances and used diapers. The Three-two was already an air mailer’s paradise, with thousands of high-rise public-housing units, and our sudden, encroaching presence took it to a new level. No one had gotten hit yet, but the increasing number of near misses suggested it was only a matter of time.

  I kept a sharp eye in this hostile 3-D environment, and I never ticketed a parked car if I thought the driver would catch me in the act. Issuing someone a fine was like handing them a license to come unglued in public. When they started to get loud, it was time to start watching the rooflines. Heated exchanges over tickets had a way of attracting air mail, serving as a battle cry to anyone with a little elevation and an ax to grind with the police.

  I wasn’t thrilled about writing tickets in the first place. Now, faced with the risk of being hit with a soggy diaper every time I flagged somebody’s expired registration, I stopped writing them altogether. I just walked my post instead. After two weeks, my slumping numbers caught Sergeant Langdon’s attention, and she called me up to her podium after roll call.

  “What’s with the goose eggs?” she asked me, referring to the many zeroes in my nightly activity reports. “You a conscientious objector or something?”

  I told her, “I don’t feel safe writing tickets in the Impact Zone.”

  “You don’t feel safe? Every night I see you on post, you act like you’re walking around your own neighborhood. It looks like you’re having fun out there.”

  “Because I’m not writing tickets.”

  “What are you afraid of?”

  “Air mail,” I said. “Isn’t everyone?”

  “I hope so, but everyone isn’t bringing me goose eggs,” she said, raising her eyebrows. “I can’t order you to bring up your numbers, so you gotta figure it out yourself. If you need a hint, Captain Danders loves double-parkers.”

  I’d run out of excuses, so I went to my post that night aiming to write up a double-parked car. Finding one wouldn’t be a problem, of course, since they were everywhere—it was the follow-through that I dreaded. People who double-parked were rarely far from their vehicles.

  Making things harder, some of the information required for the summons was only provided on a computer-generated sticker inside a vehicle’s windshield. The lettering on the registration stickers was small and often faded, requiring a flashlight to read after dark. I only had two hands, and holding a flashlight, a summons book, and a pen took three hands, leaving me with less than no hands to reach for my gun or my radio if I had an urgent need to do so.

  With not much daylight left, I took the first opportunity I came across. At 143rd Street and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, an unoccupied Pontiac Fiero was double-parked in front of a delicatessen. I assumed the driver was inside the deli, so I stayed away from the store’s windows while I got started with the ticket. I hid behind a cement staircase to jot down the easy stuff: color, make, place of occurrence, et cetera. In less than a minute, I’d signed my name and shield number and was ready to go in for the final bits of information on the sticker. I casually walked by the deli counter as if I was just passing by. Once I was safely out of view, I took a hard left turn and stopped between two legally parked cars for cover while I waited for
a break in traffic.

  I was just a few feet away when an old woman in a trench coat and rubber galoshes walked up and asked me in a sweet voice, “Excuse me, officer. Are you lost?”

  “No, but thank you, ma’am,” I said, waving her off as politely as I could before she blew my cover. “You can move along now. Thank you.”

  “Well, you look very new. If you have any questions, I live right up there,” she said, pointing at an apartment building across the street.

  “That’s so nice, ma’am,” I said. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind . . .”

  “On the third floor,” she continued. “I live with my son. Actually, he lives upstairs now. He moved into his own place when he married his wife. She’s a schoolteacher, which is funny, because when he was in the first grade . . .”

  There was no stopping the woman, so I turned around while she was still talking and watched the traffic light down the block. When it turned red, I waited for the remaining cars to pass by, then I dashed out into the boulevard to find the registration sticker on the driver’s side of the windshield. I wrote down the required information, then separated the triplicate versions of the ticket and slid a copy into the accompanying envelope. One side of the mail-in envelope was fluorescent orange, so I turned it over to the less conspicuous white side before I slid it under the windshield wiper.

  I was hustling back to the sidewalk thinking I had it made when a heavyset man in a leather jacket emerged from the deli carrying a plastic food container. When his eyes wandered from me to his car and back to me, I got a lump in my throat.

  “Oh, no, I’m sorry, officer,” he said in an unusually penitent voice. Most people were up in arms the moment they saw me next to their cars. The man hustled past me, reached across his windshield, and took the ticket.

  “I was only in there a few minutes,” he said with a smile, handing me the summons like it was a valet check.