Paul Bacon

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

  I left my hands at my side and said, “Sorry, sir. I already wrote it. Nothing I can do.”

  “But I was just getting a salad,” he said.

  I felt obliged to explain the situation in more detail. If he understood why he was getting a ticket, I thought, maybe he wouldn’t double-park again. “I’m afraid it doesn’t matter how long you were inside the establishment. Your car is blocking a traffic lane, which is dangerous to other motorists, especially at rush hour.”

  “But I can move it now,” he said, once again offering me the ticket back.

  When I didn’t take it, he huffed, then pulled the summons out of the envelope and read it. “No, wait,” he said, pointing at the list of offenses. “This isn’t right. The fine is supposed to be a hundred and five dollars.”

  “It’s gone up,” I said.

  “It just went up,” he said.

  “Like I said, I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “Nothing you can do, huh? What kind of man are you?”

  This seemed rhetorical. It was probably the wrong time to explain to him that I was the sensitive kind of man and merely hoping to make the streets safer and better for him, one deli at a time. Well, I could try. “Sir, double-parking is a serious violation. It’s the number-one cause of vehicular . . .”

  “No, you’re just squeezing it out of me, everything I have. You don’t want us to get ahead.”

  “No, I’m just telling you why the fine is so . . .”

  The man placed the salad on the hood of his car, then turned around and put up his fists. “Drop that gun belt, you fuckin’ pussy, and I’ll show you who’s a fuckin’ man.”

  Obviously he’d crossed a line here. I could have written him a summons for disorderly conduct at the very least, but I knew that most likely would just invite him to teach me the meaning of the word disorderly. I’d need to see his ID to write the summons, and if he’d refused to show it to me, I’d need to lock him up or risk looking as if I had issued an empty threat.

  The veins in the man’s neck and temples were throbbing, so I didn’t think he’d go down easy. He also had a pen in his front jacket pocket. I envisioned it being shoved into one of my eyes. But he was insulting my manhood, my profession, my very humanity. Meanwhile, a growing number of onlookers was taking his side, forming a chorus of hecklers that attracted an even larger crowd. In my ner v-ous ness, I scanned the nearest roofline and thought I saw someone’s silhouette standing above me, holding a brick.

  The motorist was trying to break me down, and he was doing a good job. I could feel myself shaking, and I knew this would only embolden him. Finally I turned and started walking away.

  “You’re damn right!” he shouted.

  As Sergeant Langdon had predicted, Operation Impact was getting a lot of attention from the media. Initially it was lauded as an innovative way to take back the streets. We were generating the first big headlines about the department since 9/11, when an unprece dented twenty-three police officers were killed in one day. Sympathy for cops was still in vogue, with civilians all over the city wearing NYPD caps and T-shirts. The early media coverage of Operation Impact reflected the positive mood in glowing feature articles and interviews with members of my rookie class.

  Then we started actually doing our jobs. A month later, a wave of angry media attention came in, blasting the NYPD for its “silly summonses.” As it happened, a transit cop had written up someone for “Unauthorized Use of a Milk Crate” on a slow news day, and the story made it all the way to CNN. About this time, one of the local tabloids began running a daily feature in which people were photographed holding their freshly minted tickets and staring at the camera with crusty looks of indignation.

  While I had initially felt sorry for the pregnant woman who’d been charged with “Blocking Pedestrian Traffic” for sitting on a subway staircase, I now felt as much sympathy for the cop who’d written the summons. I could see both sides of the issue, and I didn’t like either perspective. The way that man had exploded in my face when I wrote him a ticket, it was as much a penalty for me as it was for him. Plus, it didn’t seem wise to anger people in the same place I spent forty hours a week dressed like a target. I knew it was illegal for the job to push quotas on us; setting predetermined police-activity levels was unconstitutional. I had logic and the law on my side, so I decided to write a bare minimum of summonses from now on—just enough to prove that I had showed up for work.

  I tried to explain this thinking to Bill while we were walking back to the station house one night, but it only added fuel to his argument that I was not cut out to be a cop.

  “Like I said,” he concluded while we were rounding the last corner before reaching the precinct, “You’re a liberal, a danger to yourself and others.”

  A hundred yards from the station house, he pointed to an ambulance parked out front. “Look at this,” he said with disgust. “Probably another skell who’s gonna get a free trip to the hospital and a nice warm bed for the night because of liberal laws made by bleeding hearts like you.”

  When we reached the ambulance, we learned that it had been called not for a prisoner, but for one of our colleagues, a rookie named John Holloway, the most active ticket writer in our squad.

  Holloway was sitting on the back bumper of the ambulance while a paramedic dabbed blood from the crown of his head. Despite what looked like a serious wound, Holloway did not appear to be in shock. A lit cigarette jammed in the corner of his mouth, he just seemed pissed off.

  Bill said, “Holy shit, Holloway. You get in a shoot-out?”

  “Nah, just air mail,” Holloway said, then recoiled when the paramedic touched on a sore spot. “Ow! Be careful,” he shouted, his cigarette dropping out of his mouth and onto the street. As Holloway bent to pick it up, I caught the paramedic shaking his head with a look of exasperation.

  “What happened?” Bill asked.

  Holloway explained, “I was writing a double-parker in front of the projects on Powell, and one of those assholes tried to drop something on my head.”

  “Looks like they succeeded,” Bill said, cackling at himself.

  “What’d they throw?” I asked.

  “A clock radio,” said Holloway.

  “That could have killed you,” I said. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

  “Well, I’m not,” Holloway grumbled. “Captain says I’m not even getting a line-of-duty injury for this shit,” he said, nearly as upset about having to come to work tomorrow as he was about his near-death experience.

  Walking up the steps into the station house, Bill said to me, “Fuck-ing savages. A clock radio.”

  “A wake-up call,” I suggested.

  “Appeaser,” said Bill.

  Inside, we were late for return roll call, an end-of-tour procedure inflicted on rookies for the official reason of a head count. The real reason for taking us off the streets thirty minutes early, leaving the neighborhood to fend for itself, was to count something else.

  “How many summonses you get, Bacon?” said our patrol sergeant, standing at a podium in front of a squad of tired-looking rookies.

  Hustling to the back of the formation, I said, “One, sarge.”

  My catch for the night, a single ticket for an expired registration sticker, was pretty pathetic. But I wasn’t alone. Apparently our numbers as a group had started to plateau. This meant one of two things: We were either doing our job so well that we were deterring violators, or we weren’t looking hard enough. When Captain Danders appeared at our muster-room door that night, I guessed he wanted to personally inform us which way he saw it.

  “Attention!” the sergeant shouted, causing the roomful of weary foot soldiers to stiffen.

  The captain slid into the room, working the crowd. “How’s everybody?” he said, pointing at different faces. “How you doin’? All right. Oh, hey, wassup?”

  He stepped up to the podium, gave himself the requisite single clap and said, “Okay, the good news is crime is down in the
Impact Zone on the four-to-midnight tour, including robberies, so y’all are doing a excellent job. An excellent job. The bad news is that your summonses are also down. But don’t get me wrong, because we don’t have summons quotas. I have never said that, ever. Have I, sergeant?”

  “No, sir,” the sergeant replied.

  “That’s right,” said Captain Danders. “So I’ll just let you know that the crime that was happening on your tour has been shifting to the midnight tour, and anyone that doesn’t want to shift with it better bring up their numbers. That’s all I’m gonna say,” he concluded, giving himself another clap.

  After return roll call, I walked up to the precinct desk and slid my summons into a wooden box with a narrow opening at the top. Valentine’s Day was tomorrow, and I noticed that next to the greedy little slot, someone had carved something into the wood: DANDY’S BOX OF LOVE.

  Up in the locker room, I ran into Bill, who was sitting on a bench counting his summonses with an intense look on his face. When he heard me coming, he looked up and said, “Ha! Enjoy the midnights, you pansy.”

  “It’s no big deal,” I said. “I’ll just write a bunch of tickets.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Bill. “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

  CHAPTER 15

  THE NEXT NIGHT, Bill insisted on walking my beat with me to make sure I wrote summonses. Pairing up was against the rules for rookies in the Three-two: we were supposed to have one cop on every block—no more, no less. But Bill was on a mission to convert me to the dark side. And as much as I preferred working alone, I had to allow that I had new priorities.

  A big storm had just moved through the area, leaving three inches of snow over everything. The blanket of white powder made the otherwise depressing neighborhood look like a winter wonderland and turned our search for violations into a halfway-amusing game. Brushing off little patches of fluff from the windshields to reveal the stickers was like scratching a three-thousand-pound lottery ticket.

  My first winner was a nice, juicy one: a brand-new Lincoln Navigator with expired temporary tags. If I disliked writing tickets in general, I lived for the chance to penalize SUV owners for their bad ecology and monstrous taste. I happily wrote up the summons, whistling the whole time. When I was done, I slipped the orange envelope under the snow on the windshield so the driver wouldn’t see my handiwork until it was staring him in the face. This was penalty as per formance art. For once, I wished I could be around when somebody found one of my tickets.

  Moving down the line of cars, I found a tag with yesterday’s date. Bill was canvassing the other side of the street, so I shouted over to him, “What’s the grace period on emission stickers?”

  “Grace period?” he shouted back. “There’s no such thing.”

  I looked down at the sticker again, tapped my pen on my chin for a moment, then walked to next vehicle.

  “Wait!” said Bill. “Was it expired?”

  “Yeah, but only by a day,” I said.

  “And he had all year to get it renewed.”

  “But that seems so fussy.”

  “It’s an emissions sticker, right? Well, Mr. Environment, time to do your part for Planet Earth.”

  I thought about it for a second. “Yeah,” I said. “Screw this guy.”

  After taking some easy ones from the side streets, it was time to hunt for bigger game on Lenox Avenue. Lenox was the backbone of our precinct, a main route for traffic between Manhattan and the Bronx. It was also lined with fast-food joints and liquor stores, so it was always clogged with double-parked vehicles.

  The moment we reached Lenox, we spotted two violations in one. A beat-up old Ford Escort was parked in the flow of traffic while also blocking a bus stop.

  “There you go. Hurry up. I’ll watch for air mail,” Bill said, waving me toward the vehicle. “And no mercy because it’s Valentine’s Day, you hear me?”

  Taking my first long look at the Escort, I got cold feet. Whoever owned a vehicle this ragged would be ruined by one ticket, much less two. I shook my head and started walking again. “Forget it,” I told Bill. “Let’s keep looking.”

  Bill caught my arm and said, “What are your numbers this month?”

  “Let’s see,” I said, “I’ve got three parkers, and, well, that’s it.”

  “So you need twenty-seven more by next week. Remember, February is a short month!”

  “All right!” I said, finally prepared to battle my conscience. I walked back to the pathetic little car with a stiff upper lip, but the closer I got, the more I felt my resolve melting away. The front bumper was about to fall off, one of the headlights was missing, and there weren’t even any windshield wipers to leave a ticket under.

  “What are you waiting for?” Bill barked at me.

  “It’s hard to read the sticker,” I said, stalling for time. “It’s . . . dirty.”

  “Then fucking wipe it—” he said, cutting himself off when something behind me caught his eye.

  I turned around and saw Captain Danders’s unmarked Impala turning a corner and heading our way. The XO’s car was approaching very slowly, which usually meant he was “breakin’ shoes,” as he called it—patrolling the area for goof-off cops and two-man posts. I started putting space between myself and Bill. “Meet you later,” I said, and began jogging down a side street away from Lenox.

  “Run away! Run away!” Bill said. “You won’t have me to worry about on the midnights!”

  That was all it took. I turned around and started walking back to the Escort. Before Bill jogged around the corner, he shook his finger at me and said, “And you better have two tickets written when I come back!”

  I made it to Lenox just in time. I ran around the Escort’s front bumper, pulled out my summons book, and perched above the registration sticker on the windshield with a scrutinizing frown. A few seconds later, Captain Danders drove by, flashing me a congratulatory thumbs-up.

  When the captain was gone, I stared down at my summons book in shame. The two violations I was about to write were $115 each—probably more than the car itself was worth. I usually dealt with double-parking situations by stopping into the nearest establishment to find the vehicle’s own er first, a gesture that earned me thanks and blown kisses. But the only place still open was A Touch of Dee, a hole-in-the-wall bar for the fifty-and-over set. It was currently hosting a Valentine’s Day party and packed beyond capacity. Smiling se n-ior citizens stood outside the bar in loud suits and fancy hats of red and pink. The rest of the businesses on the street were boarded up, burned out, or shuttered behind graffiti-covered metal gates. Going into a bar in uniform was forbidden, and with the shoe breaker out tonight, I decided I had no choice but to penalize.

  I flipped open the cover of my summons binder, and just as my pen hit paper, I heard someone screaming, “Wait, wait! That’s my car!”

  I turned around and saw a woman in her sixties trying to escape A Touch of Dee. The woman, who was rather overweight, was having a hard time reaching the sidewalk. People stood back-to-back in the entranceway, blocking her exit and sending her into a fit. “No! Please, no!” she kept shrieking, like I was holding a gun to someone’s head.

  Her hands were full of personal items, making it even harder to press her way out. When she finally broke through the wall of bodies, she popped out of the doorway like a jack-in-the-box. Her purse exploded onto the sidewalk, leaving behind a trail of cosmetics and sweetener packets as she ran.

  I started waving her down out of fear of being trampled. Before she got within striking distance, I slipped to the side and watched her come to a screeching halt just short of the vehicle.

  “Oh, Lordy, Lordy! Please don’t give me a ticket!” she wailed, then doubled over and began panting. I was glad I hadn’t started writing her ticket yet. Anyone who could shout “Lordy, Lordy” with a straight face deserved a break in my book.

  The short sprint from the bar had left her completely winded, so I recommended she lean against her car before she collap
sed. She thanked me, then handed me a small box that she’d been clutching even after she’d thrown her purse to the side. Whatever was in the box must have been important, I thought, so I looked down and read the label. FLIRTY BABY DOLL STRETCH MESH TEDDY, it said. The word flirty was written in little red hearts, and the box featured a picture of a much younger and much sleeker woman modeling the item within. I tried to imagine this woman in the same revealing underwear, then quickly wished I hadn’t.

  When the driver mustered the strength to stand back up, she said, “Thank you, officer. I’ll move the car right now.”

  “Take your time,” I said, wondering if she was drunk but too embarrassed to ask. She looked old enough to be my grandmother, and I’d been raised to treat people her age with unquestioning respect. When she got behind the wheel, she pulled a key ring from her jacket pocket and selected the ignition key without even looking, which seemed like a good sign.

  She fired up the tiny, whirring engine, and I walked over to the driver’s-side door to return her box.

  “Uh, ma’am,” I said, feeling a little uncomfortable. “Your . . . teddy.” “Oh, yes,” she said, accepting the package without a hint of embarrassment. She set it on the dashboard and said, “Thank you again, officer. You’re one of the good ones. Have a safe night.”

  “You too, and happy Valentine’s Day,” I said.

  Maybe I was cut out for this job. My deeply ingrained sense of fairness was a gift to the community. I knew Bill would return shortly and rub my nose in it, but until then I wanted to enjoy my good deed. I took a breath of cold, invigorating air and watched the nice woman pull away from the curb $230 richer than she might have been at the hands of a lesser officer.

  Then, for some reason, the nice woman drove right through the next traffic light. The light happened to be red at the time. Perhaps she was drunk after all. I also noticed later that she’d left her purse and all its contents on the sidewalk, an act that didn’t exactly scream, “Sobriety!” She barreled through the stoplight and nearly got cut in half by an oncoming vehicle, which had to come to a noisy, skidding stop to avoid hitting her. Seeing the other car, she swerved hard in the other direction.