by Bad Cop: New York's Least Likely Police Officer Tells All
She plunged into the crosswalk a few feet ahead of Bill, who had just come out of hiding. He jumped back in time to save his own life, then started swearing loudly enough for me to hear a block away. When the old woman floored the gas and disappeared down the street, he turned back to me and shouted, “What the fuck?”
I threw my hands up in the air, feigning ignorance. He pulled his police radio off his belt and I did the same, expecting to speak with him, but he was raising our dispatcher instead.
“Three-two Impact Post Seventeen to Central,” Bill said.
“Proceed, Post Seventeen,” said a female voice.
“Be advised, Central,” said Bill. “We got a reckless driver, possible DWI, proceeding southbound on Lenox Avenue, One Hundred Fortieth Street on the cross. It’s an early-model Ford Escort, white in color.”
“You got a plate, Post Seventeen?” the dispatcher asked.
I clenched my teeth. This was not going to turn out well.
“Stand by, Central,” Bill said. Putting his radio down, he shouted to me, “Bacon! Tell Central the plate!”
I screamed back, “I didn’t see it!”
“Look on your summonses!”
“I didn’t write any!”
Bill dropped his head in resignation. A moment later, he picked up his radio again and mumbled as he spoke. “No plate, Central,” Bill said with a wince. “Disregard.”
“Disregard the DWI?” Central said in disbelief. No cop in his right mind would broadcast such an order. Bill slapped his face while our dispatcher continued to raise him: “Three-two Impact Post Seventeen, repeat your message. Did you say disregard the DWI? ”
Even from a distance, I could see Bill was ready to lose it. I’d just made him look very stupid, and I wanted to apologize before he blew his stack. I started jogging in his direction, but when he saw me coming down the block, he put up his hand and shouted, “Oh, no! From now on, you stay the hell away from me!”
A few days later at roll call, Captain Danders appeared at our door and waved Sergeant Langdon out into the hallway. Whispers and muffled laughter broke out in our ranks to ward off the sense of impending doom. We figured the captain was telling her who was shifting to the midnight squad for low summons activity. With our numbers so low as a group, I think nearly everyone expected their names to come up. The sergeant came back a couple minutes later, pursing her lips. My eyes followed her across the room, locked on her expression, weighing her every step. The sergeant looked bitter and disappointed—a bad sign. It was going to be a bloodbath.
Then she opened her mouth and surprised us all. “Summonses are up, the captain’s happy, so the new flavor of the week is collars.”
The sudden change of subject from tickets to arrests struck me as odd. Our numbers hadn’t gotten any better, so I wondered if the captain had been serious about shifting us to the late tour, or if he was just trying to make us work harder.
The sergeant continued by taking a quick poll, asking us who had gotten an arrest so far. When nearly every one of thirty rookies in the room put up a hand, she rephrased the question.
“Okay, okay,” she said, “who hasn’t gotten a collar?”
Five of us sheepishly raised our hands, causing a lot of rubbernecking and snickers.
The sergeant seemed to take pity after singling us out. “Mind yer business!” she shouted at the hecklers. This only prompted more cruel laughter. I felt about three feet tall. I was standing in the last row of the formation, so only a few people noticed me raise my hand, and I was spared most of the indignity. But there turned out to be more than my pride at stake.
“Listen up!” the sergeant said. “The borough’s putting together a new rookie unit. It’s some kind of mobile outfit, which may sound cool, but rumor is they’ll only write summonses. They want ten bodies from our command, and since the flavor of the week is now collars, that’s how we’re making the cut. So, those with no collars, you better start humpin’. Any questions?”
I wanted to ask if I could excuse myself to turn in my gun and shield. A more reasonable question came from a man named Raymond Gerard, one of the other under-performers. “Yeah, boss,” he said in a downtrodden voice. “How are we supposed to make collars when we we’re out there alone on foot?”
“Like everyone else,” Sergeant Langdon shot back. “You stop some mope for pissin’ on a Dumpster, you run his name through Central, he pops a warrant, and you lock him up.”
Wisely, Gerard said nothing. I looked over to see his expression and I saw my own disappointment written on his face. Watching the Twin Towers crumble had prepared me for some kind of duty, and it wasn’t looking for mopes peeing behind Dumpsters. This was a surefire way to make an arrest, however, since most New Yorkers were scofflaws on some level. So many tickets went out, and so few were answered, that popping a warrant was like pulling jury duty. Sooner or later it happened to everyone. The collars were out there for the taking; we just had to be motivated.
The latest threat of expulsion was motivation enough for me, whether I believed it or not. It didn’t seem like a good idea to test the captain when I might get stuck working in a mobile ticket-writing squad like some kind of meter maid. It was time to start collaring up.
CHAPTER 16
AFTER THE SERGEANT TURNED us out from roll call, I looked around the scattering ranks for someone to help me make an arrest. My colleagues seemed to be in an extra hurry to get out the door, like we were in a race all of the sudden. The muster room cleared out in less than a minute, leaving me with no partner for the night.
I walked to my post alone and considered my options. I found myself peering into shadowy areas I’d never paid attention to before, searching for people who might be relieving themselves just in time for me to walk by. I prayed I wouldn’t find anyone.
When I reached my post for the night, the busy commercial intersection of 145th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard, I turned up my radio to hear it over the din of traffic. I recognized the first voice I heard as Darren Randall, a burly chain smoker in his late thirties who had dark rings under his eyes and always sounded as though he’d just woken up. Despite his sleepy disposition, Randall led our squad in arrests, making him a regular presence on the radio.
“Yeah, Central,” Randall said in his usual deadpan tone, “show me with one male stopped at One-Four-Three and Douglass, requesting a name check.”
I thought about Randall’s location and pictured a dismal scene. All of the nearby buildings were abandoned except one four-story walkup that was said to be a crack house.
“Stand by,” Central told Randall.
Stand by? I thought. He was standing next to a time bomb.
“Ten-four, Central,” Randall replied calmly.
I may have been overthinking the situation, but the way I saw it, whoever Randall had stopped was just seconds away from going ballistic. If this person had an outstanding warrant, he was quietly planning to either elude or overwhelm Randall before he could find out this fact himself. At best, the person would bolt; at worst, he’d attack with who knows what.
I couldn’t imagine putting myself in the same position. Just writing an occasional ticket and trying to avoid A Touch of Dee was enough excitement for me. I could keep the kiddie park open and shoo away the teenage drug dealers, but I didn’t have the nerves to be a bounty hunter.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to go it alone. There was a way around the one-block, one-cop rule. It was called a vertical patrol, the department’s fancy name for walking around inside a tall building. We were actually required to do vertical patrols in teams, since the tactic was designed for public-housing developments, or the projects, as we called them. These were sprawling complexes of city-subsidized apartment buildings found in nearly every part of New York City. They were originally conceived in the 1950s as a solution to urban blight, but then they became the blight. Filled with low-income residents, and haunted by drug dealers and gangs, the projects were considered the most hostile t
erritory for cops.
They might have seemed like fertile ground for arrests, and they would have been if only we’d had the power of invisibility. Each tower had a thousand eyes and ears, and since we stood out like clowns with our radios blasting most of the time, we were forever walking into fresh crime scenes that criminals had handily left. A common sound in the projects was a door slamming around the next corner; a common smell, a recently exhaled puff of marijuana.
Without the element of surprise, searching for perps in the projects wasn’t as effective as snooping around Dumpsters. It was a lot warmer, though: The city-run complexes were like furnaces on the inside. Even in subfreezing weather, the residents left their windows wide open for a breath of cool air, and you could practically see your tax dollars flying out. This made vertical patrols popular on cold nights. With the temperature in the teens, even the most active rookies would duck inside for as long as they could get away with it.
I was walking down Powell Boulevard looking for a coworker to help me do a vertical when I ran into my old classmate Gustavo from Company 02. I knew I could ask him for backup; I’d lent him my homework for last-minute copying many times back at the academy, and he was the type who never forgot a favor. Gustavo made a comforting partner, too. With his top-heavy pit bull physique, deeply set eyes, and protruding brow, he was the very picture of armed vigilance. When I found him that night, he was glowering on the corner in his woolly police hat with earflaps, steam pouring out of his nostrils in short, determined bursts. Put a Kalashnikov in his hands, and he could have been a Siberian prison guard.
“Hey, you wanna do a vertical?” I asked Gustavo.
“I could do a vertical,” he said, his frown disappearing. “Let’s do a vertical.”
To prolong our time indoors, Gustavo and I walked the extra five minutes to the mother of all verticals, the twenty-one-story Drew Hamilton Houses. From that kind of elevation, air mail became FedEx, so we stayed back a block while Gustavo radioed for another cop named Petredes to join us. As it turned out, Petredes was already inside the building.
We dashed inside as quick as mice to avoid any falling objects, then took the long, miserable elevator ride to the top floor. Like most lifts in city housing, the elevator doubled as a urinal. While I held my nose, my coworkers—former public-housing residents themselves—added to the misery by giving it a voice.
“Damn. I don’t miss this,” said Gustavo, grimacing as if he’d just bitten into a lemon.
Petredes agreed, “Yeah, piss is some shit you never get used to.”
All talking ceased when the elevator doors opened on the twenty-first floor. The top two floors of any housing development were considered a combat zone, perhaps the only place that all cops took entirely seriously. We listened for other people in the hall before stepping out. Hearing nothing, we quietly exited the lift one by one, each man peeking his head down a different bend in the hallway to clear the top floor. The place was empty, so we unholstered our pistols and headed up to the roof.
We had to be careful, because people often gathered on the roofs of the projects to deal and take drugs, and to fire their guns in the air. Every day was the Fourth of July up here, unless it was raining or cold. We could be reasonably sure nobody was around in the middle of February, but we stayed on our toes anyway. When Gustavo reached the top step, he used the tip of his boot to push open the metal door a few inches, then slipped the muzzle of his gun into the crack. He pulled his flashlight off his belt, leaned his shoulder against the door, and pushed it wide open. He did a blindingly fast sweep of the immediate area, then disappeared through the door.
Petredes and I followed Gustavo and spread out on the roof, using our flashlights to clear the entire area, a dark environment with many hiding places. Once the search was complete, the roof became our playground. We were free to hang out and talk and pelt each other with snowballs for as long as we could stand the cold. The Drew Hamilton Houses were the tallest buildings in the area, offering an enviable 360-degree vista of Manhattan. To the south, we could see the glimmering towers of the Midtown skyline; to the west, there was the massive George Washington Bridge; and to the north and east there was, well, the Bronx, which was admittedly not much to look at.
From twenty-two stories up, the mean streets below looked cute and harmless. The rotted-out tenements were like so many toy brownstones in the opening sequence of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. The roaming thugs on the sidewalks looked like tiny roaming ant thugs; the passing cars made almost no sound. All we could hear was the constant wail of fire engines, which seemed to roll from one catastrophe to the next without ever returning to base.
While Petredes and I enjoyed the repose, Gustavo seemed a little preoccupied. Pointing down at the avenue below, he shouted, “That cocksucker is still double-parked in front of the barber shop!”
Back inside the building, we began clearing it one floor at a time—a bit of a charade, since the only criminals still around were either careless or very brave. We made it down to the eighth floor before we saw another human being. The moment I laid eyes on him, I got a knot in my stomach, knowing we’d be putting him through the motions. He was in his late teens and sported the complete wardrobe of a fashion-conscious young gangster. On his head he wore the mandatory three-color baseball cap with the mandatory flat bill pulled down over his eyes. His puffy black jacket was about ten sizes too big, and his sneakers, two-toned and unlaced, were in mint condition.
As the boy came out of the stairwell, Gustavo held up his hand and said, “Yo, you live here?”
The boy said, “Pff,” then pulled a set of keys out of his pocket and shook them in Gustavo’s face.
“I got some of them too,” said Gustavo. “Let’s see some ID.”
“I ain’t got no I-D,” the boy said bitterly.
Petredes started in, “Then why shouldn’t we lock you up for trespass, bro?”
“ ’Cuz I live here, bro,” said the boy.
“Which apartment?” said Petredes.
“7-D,” the boy said, pointing down the hall.
“Let’s take a walk,” said Gustavo.
When we reached 7-D, the young man put the key in the lock and turned it. Gustavo gave him a condescending pat on the back and said, “Sorry. Our boss says we gotta stop everyone in the building. Nothing personal, all right?”
The boy turned around and glared at us, then shut the door slowly without saying another word. His accusing look floated in front of the door even after he was gone, making me feel like an invader, an occupier.
“You know, what we just did was unconstitutional,” I pointed out to my partners. “Technically we have no right to stop anyone without reasonable suspicion.”
“Bacon, please,” said Petredes. “You’re killin’ me.”
“I’m serious,” I said, swelling with empathy, like Oprah on patrol. “You guys grew up in the projects. How did it feel when the cops came to your home and hassled you?”
“When I was a kid,” said Gustavo, “Most of the cops were too scared to even walk into my building. But whenever they came, I was happy as shit.”
Petredes added, “After school, I used to call in false alarms to the top floor and wait for the cops to come, so I could ride the elevator without getting mugged.”
“Oh, well . . .” I said, floundering. “Times have changed. Don’t you think we should change with them?”
“Times or not, this is still housing,” said Gustavo, spitting out the word as if it had been caught in his throat. “As long as the city pays for people’s rent and food, this place will be filled with skells.”
By the second floor, I was ready to chalk up the vertical as nothing more than a little time off the street. We decided to rest a few minutes in the elevator lobby before heading back out into the cold. An enclosed radiator was the only horizontal surface available, and it was quickly occupied by two tired butts, neither of which belonged to me. As the last man standing, I was the first to greet the elevator
when it chimed a moment later, and the door slowly opened.
I turned around to see a small, disheveled man in his midforties looking me right in the eye as he stepped out of the crowded lift. He froze in his tracks for a moment, his weather-beaten face twitching with indecision. He seemed to be considering whether he should act natural and exit the car, or if he should step back and look evasive. The elevator door began to close and made the choice for him by knocking him off balance. Miraculously, he remained on his feet as he tumbled into the lobby.
“This one’s yours, Bacon,” said Gustavo, pointing at the man as he tried to scurry around the corner. “Go, go! He’s getting away!”
“Excuse me, sir!” I said, running around the man to make eye contact. “Do you live here?” I asked him.
“No,” he said, then changed his mind. “I mean, yeah.”
“Which is it?” I said.
“Both,” he said.
“What do you mean, both?”
“I mean I live in the other building.”
I remembered why I didn’t usually take a leading role in stop-and-question situations. I turned around and looked at Petredes for guidance.
Petredes rolled his eyes. “What other building?”
“Over there,” the man said, pointing out a window that faced New Jersey.
Finally realizing he was lying, I said, “Sir, what are you doing here?”
“My friend let me in,” he replied. This was a new wrinkle.
“Okay, fine,” I said. “Where does your friend live?”
“Down . . . there,” he said again, this time pointing down the nearest hall.