by Bad Cop: New York's Least Likely Police Officer Tells All
“Which apartment?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you show us where he lives?”
“I don’t know.”
“So, you don’t know where he lives?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, you know where he lives? Or yeah, you don’t know where he lives?”
“Bacon, Bacon, Bacon,” Petredes said. “This guy’s a collar.”
“We don’t know that for sure,” I said.
Gustavo said, “At least cuff him.”
“Why?” I said, terrified. I’d never taken anyone into custody.
“You got reasonable suspicion for trespass, and he might have weapons,” said Gustavo.
“But I need to see a bulge,” I said.
“Look at him,” said Gustavo. “He’s one great big bulge. If you don’t cuff him, I’m cuffing you.”
I took a deep breath, then pulled my cuffs off my belt and walked back toward the man. He began to shake as I approached, and then so did I. Seeing my reaction, the man gave me a puppy-dog look, so I asked him to turn around and put his hands behind his back. This made the task much easier. I slid up his jacket sleeves and bound his wrists. A light round of applause from my colleagues ensued.
“Now toss him,” Gustavo said—toss meaning frisk.
I asked the man, “Do you have anything sharp in your pockets that might hurt me?”
“No, of course not, officer,” he said, and I started reaching into his jacket pocket.
“Whoa, Bacon!” said Gustavo, leaping off the radiator and pulling my arm back. “You’re not gonna take his word for it, are you?”
“Why would he lie now?” I said.
“What’s he got to lose?”
Instead of reaching into the pocket, I squeezed it softly around the outside. I felt something rigid. I pulled open the flap, looked inside, and found a dirty syringe lying in a bed of lint and crumbs. I closed my eyes and looked again. It was still there.
“What is it?” said Gustavo.
“A hypo,” I said, my voice cracking.
Petredes clapped his hands and said, “Collar!”
I moved around to his other jacket pocket and patted it down, feeling a number of small, hard objects. Peering inside, I couldn’t believe it.
“Well?” said Gustavo.
“Folding knives,” I said.
“How many?”
“Maybe a dozen.”
Petredes jumped off the radiator to see the bounty of illegal weapons for himself. He slowly reached inside the man’s pocket, pulled out one of the knives, and flicked it open with a snap of his wrist.
“Gravity knives,” he said happily. “With intent to sell. That’s a felony collar.”
Searching my first prisoner, Mr. T. Enzo, forty-eight, of the Bronx, was a long and nerve-racking experience. Dressed for winter in four jackets, two windbreakers, and three pairs of pants, the man had more pockets than a politician. I lost track of my progress during the search and had to start over. In the middle of the second search, I found another zipper, which led to another flap, which led to another complete wardrobe under the first.
I’d started off very methodically, beginning with the man’s upper-right-hand quadrant and working around his body in a clockwise direction. This was how I’d been trained in the academy, and I’d practiced it enough times in gym class to remember the general flow. Beyond that, I was at a loss, because I’d only performed this skill on fellow recruits wearing T-shirts and shorts. We’d had very few hiding places, and, thankfully, we never had to reach between each other’s legs. To save us the trouble, the instructors told us to just say “Crotch!” when we reached that point of the exercise. To have actually touched someone’s crotch in the academy would have been unthinkable. Now it was hideously, embarrassingly unavoidable. If I missed any weapons, I, another cop, or another prisoner could be killed, or my perp might commit suicide in his cell. Even if something dangerous just happened to drop out of his pocket at the station house, I’d be disciplined by my boss and probably run out on a rail by my coworkers, because there was zero tolerance for this kind of mistake.
I grasped Mr. Enzo’s thigh just above the knee and slowly moved my hand upward. One half of my mind was trying to interpret the contours while the other half was trying not to. I wound up pulling my hand away before feeling anything at all. I decided to take my chances and let the folks at Central Booking perform the full-cavity invasion.
As for the rest of Mr. Enzo, I was trying to apply every academy lesson about making an arrest at the same time, causing serious brain lock: Did I have reasonable suspicion to stop the suspect? Does he feel unfairly targeted as a member of a minority group? Shouldn’t I be wearing gloves? What if he has another needle in here? What’s all this white powder? What’s all this gray powder? What about this comb? Could it be used as a weapon? Are his handcuffs too tight? Should I double-lock the cuffs? Did I even bring my cuff key? Am I blading my body away from the suspect to safeguard my firearm? Where is my firearm? Whew, it’s still there.
Twenty minutes and thirty-six pockets later, my own heavy layering of winter wear was soaked through with sweat, and I was ready for a stiff drink. I wanted to catch my breath before I raised the dispatcher, so I turned Mr. Enzo toward the nearest wall and told him to stare at it quietly until further notice.
“Three-two Impact Post Twelve to Central,” I said, and waited nervously for the dispatcher to respond. When she acknowledged me, the words somehow came flowing out: “Show me with one under at One-Four-One and Powell, and request the Impact sergeant to eighty-five my location nonemergency.”
“Ten-four, Post Twelve,” said Central. “Your under time is 1935.”
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?” said Gustavo, slapping my shoulder hard enough to leave it sore for days. “Your cherry is now officially broken.”
Many cops likened their first arrest to losing their virginity, a comparison I’d always found a little creepy. In my case, it turned out to be even better, at least in terms of my ego, because this victory came with an audience. Five minutes after my arrest hit the airwaves, the elevator doors opened again, and out poured four of my fellow rookies. Stunned to hear me putting over a collar, the group had cut short their own vertical to see this impossibility with their own eyes.
“Way to go, Bacon,” said the infamous Darren Randall, who normally wouldn’t give me the time of day.
“I really didn’t do anything,” I said. “He just fell in my lap.”
“Nah, nah. It’s a great pinch,” said Randall, throwing his huge arm around my shoulder. “I’ve seen this douchebag in front of the junior high school before, but I never had anything on him.” Randall reached into his jacket for a pack of cigarettes, tapped one out of the box, and said, “You want a smoke?”
I did have a hankering, but I noticed that our sergeant had just pulled up in front of the building. Another patrol car pulled up soon after and double-parked next to the sergeant with the roof lights on. Their mere presence started to draw a crowd of onlookers, including more rookies who arrived on foot. My first arrest was turning into a major do.
* * *
Afterward, Randall came back to the station house with me and offered to help with the paperwork. It seemed as though he was taking me under his wing, but after we put Mr. Enzo into the temporary holding cell, I learned his real motivation.
Randall looked at his watch and said, “We’ve got three hours to end of tour, but I’m sure we can stretch this is out for seven or eight.”
“Sounds good,” I said. I was happy to let Randall milk my arrest if he’d show me how to handle the process.
Randall tried to tutor me, but I had no hope of keeping up. Eventually I just sat back and watched as he filled out endless forms, typed vouchers, sorted and bundled piles of evidence. Five different computer systems were required to process a single arrest, and Randall already seemed like an expert on all of them. He was especially skilled on the Live Scan machine, a
formidable six-foot-high electronic-fingerprinting system with a mind of its own. None of the other arresting officers, not even the veterans, could make the thing accept their prisoners’ prints, but Randall seemed to have some kind of spiritual connection with it.
Randall added to our billable hours by offering to print other cops’ prisoners, while I received congratulations from my fellow rookies on their way in and out of the station house. Everyone was excited that I’d gotten a felony on my first try. Mr. Enzo slept soundly in his temporary cell. He didn’t complain or even ask to go to the bathroom. The night flew by, making me wonder why I hadn’t locked up someone much earlier.
Hours after the Impact squad had signed out for the night, Randall showed me his watch and said, “You see? Now it’s too late to lodge the perp at the Two-eight hub site.”
“Is that bad?” I said.
“Not for us,” Randall said. “The perp’s gotta go straight downtown, which means another couple hours’ overtime. This is some real hairbag shit, but don’t worry. The midnight boss here loves me.”
Hairbag was a classic bit of NYPD slang, a word you wouldn’t find in any dictionary but couldn’t go a day in the precinct without hearing. Every cop I’d asked to define the term just laughed, pointed at another cop, and said, “It’s what he is.” From what I gathered, hairbags were cops who knew the job too well. They knew how to duck responsibility to save time and trouble, how to ignore procedures to the same end, and how to make inordinate sums of money as public servants.
Bosses knew who the hairbags were and held them in distrust, as I learned when I followed Randall out of the arrest room and into the main desk area. There, we presented ourselves to the midnight sergeant, who would eventually have to approve our overtime. Seeing us approach, the sergeant put down his sports page and eyed us warily. “Where’d you guys come from?” he said.
“Yeah, boss,” said Randall. “Can we get a car to go to Central Booking? We just finished up a collar.”
“A collar?” said the sergeant. “As in one?”
“That’s right.”
“What’s the arrest time?”
“About seven thirty.”
“It’s three in the morning now! Get the hell out of here,” the sergeant said, waving us off like we were panhandlers. “And bring me your OT slips before you change!”
Randall and I ducked into the muster room and closed the door, then we laughed until we cried. This, he told me, was “the most important step in the arrest process.” Randall reached into the pouch of his Kevlar vest carrier and pulled out a sheaf of overtime slips. He handed one to me and started on his own. This should have been the easiest step in the process as well, but overtime was calculated in fractions of a sixty-minute hour, and I was no good with numbers to begin with. It took Randall about thirty seconds to fill in the time grid, so I just copied his work.
“Three and a half hours overtime,” I said to Randall. “How much money is that?”
“Almost a hundred bucks,” he said, chuckling.
“That’s great,” I said.
“In five years, when we’re getting top pay, it’ll be three times as much.”
“Wow,” I said, thinking I could really get used to this whole arresting-people thing.
When Randall and I handed in our overtime slips, the midnight sergeant noticed my name immediately because the Impact sergeant had left me a note. I accepted the paper with a rush of excitement, expecting it to be thanks for a job well done. Instead, it said:
Member: PO BACON, P.
Notification: Transfer Order, Patrol Borough Manhattan North
Location: Mobile Stabilization Unit, 19th Precinct—153 East 67th Street
Report : 3/7/03—1735 Hrs.
“That’s tomorrow,” I said.
“Actually, it’s this afternoon,” Randall said solemnly. “At least you made one collar in your career.”
Getting transferred to the dreaded mobile unit was the threatened punishment for getting a late start on my arrest sheet, and while it was disappointing, it came as no surprise. Then the sergeant found the other notification in the box. It was for Randall. For some reason Randall, who had more arrests than anyone in our squad, was also being sent to the unit. After the sergeant handed him the slip, Randall took one look at it and crumpled it into a ball.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.
“Fuck this job,” Randall said, grabbing his coat and stalking off toward the stairs. On his way to the locker room, he stuffed his notification into the summons box marked DANDY’S BOX OF LOVE.
CHAPTER 17
WALKING INTO THE Nineteenth Precinct locker room, I saw that Randall and I weren’t the only rookies cast aside by their commands. Down every aisle, other young cops were stomping around in a boisterous search for empty lockers, cursing each other and the NYPD. Watching us with quiet trepidation were our rookie counterparts on permanent assignment to the Nineteenth Precinct. They’d started claiming their lockers months ago. Just when they were getting their own spaces sorted out, here came a hundred more of us, like a tide of refugees with too much luggage.
Adding to the confusion, no one knew why we were here. Mobile Stabilization Unit? What did that even mean? The locker room buzzed with rumors about our new assignment. Some people heard we were part of a secret antiterrorism force still in its infancy; others were told we’d be directing traffic on FDR Drive for the next two years while it was completely repaved. The truth, we learned at our first roll call, was somewhere in between.
MSU was a ticket-writing detail aimed at bringing down crime numbers across the city, which meant it was basically Operation Impact on wheels. While we were stationed at the Nineteenth Precinct on the Upper East Side, our territory was the whole of Manhattan North, from the upper edge of Midtown to the far-flung neighborhood of Washington Heights. Each night we would be visiting a different precinct; if robberies were up in a certain neighborhood, our mission was to bring them down by canvassing the area with tickets.
Someone at the borough apparently could not divide by eight, because while every other squad in MSU had exactly that number, mine had only three. But by sheer luck, my small squad would contain two other prodigal rookies from my previous command: Randall, the collar king, and Witherspoon, an aspiring detective and fellow company sergeant I’d met in the academy. Our new supervisor was an equally fortuitous pick, a gregarious former auto-crime detective named Watts. When I first saw Sergeant Watts, I thought he was an old hairbag cop. He had five o’clock shadow and a beer belly and was walking around the crowded Nineteenth Precinct muster room, slapping guys on the back and laughing at his own jokes.
As a newly made sergeant, Watts said he’d always hated bosses and only took the promotional test to coast through his last few years on the job. He promised to hold our squad to the lowest possible summons-activity standards, and when he learned that Randall and Witherspoon had already made a phenomenal forty collars between them, he dropped the bar even lower.
Shortly after our first roll call, the sergeant and I were standing outside the station house when he seemed to come to an epiphany. We were watching the other rookies scurrying down the street to their newly assigned vehicles when he turned to me and said, “So you guys are all workers then?”
“I guess so,” I said, choosing my words carefully. Randall and With-erspoon were a few blocks away looking for our squad’s van, and I didn’t want to sound as though I was riding their coattails.
“Then forget about summonses,” said the sergeant. “What’d they say is your nightly quota?”
“Five apiece.”
“How about one apiece for anyone who collars up by the end of the night?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “I mean if the other guys . . .”
“Then one it is,” he interrupted me. “If the borough complains about our numbers, I’ll just say, ‘Hey, give me more fuckin’ cops.’ ”
It was not his decision to make, but arrests had this k
ind of weight in the job’s internal economy. Arrests took hours, sometimes days, to process, so any cop who made them on a regular basis was presumed to be a hard worker. And since most of the NYPD’s regulations were written to deter laziness, cops with long arrest sheets, as well as their supervisors, glowed with an aura of untouchability.
A few minutes later, Randall’s scratchy voice came over our radios. “MSU Squad Nine sergeant on the air? ”
The sergeant keyed his mike and said, “You guys find it?”
“I’m not sure,” said Randall. “It’s a traffic department van, and it’s got a flat. Want us to keep looking? ”
“No, that sounds like the one,” the sergeant said, rubbing his chin with a blameful look. He stared off into the distance for a moment, then told Randall, “Just slap on the spare and bring it around.”
“Ten-four,” Randall said miserably, bringing a wide smile to the sergeant’s face.
“I think I’m gonna like being a sergeant,” said the sergeant.
Witherspoon was behind the wheel when I saw our vehicle. My first thought was that it must have been taken from an impoundment lot and pressed into service. It had roof lights and all the proper NYPD decals, but it looked like it had been seized from a snakehead operation—or maybe it belonged to a washed-up Phish roadie, busted for selling dope to NYU kids. It was a giant prehistoric sky-blue van riddled stem to stern with dents, and as long as a house.
After Witherspoon pulled up and stepped out of the van, he handed me the keys and said, “Not It.” Randall, seated in the back, shouted that he had called Not It, too, so I pulled the driver position by default. I had to grab the steering wheel with two hands to lift myself up into the driver’s seat, but when I slammed the door shut, I felt enormous. I’d spent the last decade cursing SUV owners. Now I knew I’d just been jealous all along.
While the other squads rushed out to the Thirtieth Precinct in West Harlem to write tickets, we stayed on the Upper East Side and ate Chinese takeout in the van. The sergeant told me to park in a bus stop so we wouldn’t have to walk too far for the food. “Just put on the roof lights,” he told me. “So it looks like we got someone pulled over.” It seemed that our new supervisor was a hairbag, which thrilled us all. For our first hour on “patrol,” we laughed and horsed around while shoveling rice into our mouths. Then the sergeant had me park in another bus stop on the next block so we could get coffee. After we returned to the van with refreshments, our conversation turned to the job. Despite the sergeant’s devil-may-care attitude, he seemed genuinely interested in us getting ahead in our careers. He asked us what we were hoping to accomplish in MSU, and Randall was the first to respond. “More overtime,” he said. “I just bought a new Mustang.”