by Bad Cop: New York's Least Likely Police Officer Tells All
“Sounds familiar,” said the sergeant, “How about you, Wither-spoon, are you fully leveraged already?”
“Not me,” said Witherspoon. “I’m just trying to get enough collars to make detective in five years.”
“You’re off to a good start,” said the sergeant. “Bacon, what’s your dodge?”
“Same as Witherspoon. Maybe taking a bit longer, though,” I admitted. “And I’m hoping to go into Intel or Ops, something to do with counterterrorism.”
“Ouch. Good luck with that. You speak any foreign languages?”
“Japanese,” I said. I’d learned it ten years ago, when knowing Japanese was like having a Harvard Business School degree.
“Mmm . . . pretty worthless,” said the sergeant. “We don’t get many Japanese perps, and they’re not trying to blow up the place. How about Arabic?”
“No.”
“Any special degrees or training?”
“I’m a divemaster.”
“A what?”
“It’s like a scuba guide,” I explained. “I’m certified to organize dive trips, take groups of people underwater, show them fish, keep them off the coral, watch their nitrogen so no one gets the bends.”
“You’re kidding,” the sergeant said. “Why are you even a cop?”
“Divemasters don’t get paid very much,” I said.
“The Harbor Unit pays,” said the sergeant.
Witherspoon said, “Don’t you need a massive hook to get into Harbor?”
“Not with the shit he’s done,” said the sergeant. “The NYPD doesn’t attract a whole lot of professional divers.”
“The job has a scuba team?” I said.
“Who do you think pulls DOAs out of the river?” said the sergeant. “The coast guard only takes care of live bodies.”
“That doesn’t sound very fun,” I said.
“But it doesn’t happen much anymore,” he said. “Nowadays they just tool around in boats on directed patrols, watching for terrorists and waving at chicks. It’s how they look busy.”
“I could do that,” I said. “You know, until I find my niche.”
“Oh, this will be your niche, I guarantee it,” said the sergeant. “Cops who go into Harbor stay until retirement.”
“Who do I call?” I said. This was fantastic—I’d be back making bubbles in no time.
“Well, you gotta get off your two-year probation first, but it wouldn’t hurt to call ahead anyway. It’s a specialized rescue job, and they have hard physical tests, so you’ll want to find out what they are and start training for them now. Stay up on your collars, too. Make as many as possible. All the cool things you see cops do on TV are hard to get into. They’re like point-one percent of the job, so they’re competitive as shit. And your sick record. Don’t touch it. If you catch a cold, take a couple vacation days. Don’t go sick unless you’re literally in the hospital with an IV in your arm. It’s just a number against you, whether you’re going for Harbor or detective or anything off patrol . . . Hello, Bacon? You listening to me?”
I stared numbly at the sergeant’s waving hand.
Witherspoon leaned forward to pat me on the arm. “You just gotta be Superman, dawg. That’s all.”
Someone began raising our supervisor over the radio. “MSU Nine sergeant, on the air? ”
Sergeant Watts said, “Shit, it’s lieutenant what’s-his-name.” He pulled his radio off the dashboard, keyed the mike, and said, “On the air, lieu.”
“Go to six,” said the lieutenant.
“Ten-four,” the sergeant replied, then switched his radio to channel six, a private band reserved for unrecorded point-to-point conversations between cops. “You on the air, lieu?” he said.
“Call me on my cell,” the lieutenant replied.
“Ten-four,” the sergeant repeated, then took his thumb off the radio button and said, “Un-fucking-believable.” He pulled his cell phone off his gun belt, flipped it open, and scrolled through the number list. “You guys watch your back around this Lieutenant . . . shit, what’s his name?”
Randall said, “He had you go to six, just to tell you to call his cell phone?”
“Can’t use cell phones on the job,” said the sergeant. “This guy’s like that. Very tightly wrapped. Probably wants our summons numbers. Ah, here he is, Lieutenant Carothers. What a tool.”
A moment later, our supervisor was connected with his supervisor, and the two had a highly unenlightening conversation about summonses. “Nope, no parkers,” said the sergeant. “No movers . . . and, uh, right, no pissers . . . What? . . . Yeah, sure, we’re at Seventy-ninth and First Avenue . . . Okay.”
“He’s coming over here?” said Witherspoon.
“Quick!” said the sergeant, “hide all these Chinese food boxes, and Bacon, get us the hell out of this bus stop!”
I looked back into oncoming traffic, waiting for a hole in traffic large enough to insert the van, then pulled into the lane and peeled away. Only then did it hit me: “Where am I going, sarge?”
The traffic had already swallowed us up, so when the sergeant pointed to a parking spot on the opposite side of the seven-lane avenue, I had to tell him, “I think it’s too late for that one. You want me to go lights and sirens?”
“No, you know what? Forget it,” the sergeant said, relaxing back into his seat. “Let’s just let this river take us somewhere. I’ll think of some shit to tell the lieu later.”
“Ten-four,” I said, and slowed down to a more reasonable speed.
* * *
Two blocks later, the sergeant found his shit. “Bingo! Look at those fuckin’ tints,” he said. “Bacon, pull over that silver Lexus with the blacked-out windows.”
“How?” I said.
“Whaddaya mean, how?”
“I’ve never pulled anyone over before.”
“Just get behind him and hit the siren. Trust me, in this thing, he’ll get the point right away. But you gotta get behind him, so go!”
I brought the engine to an exhilarating roar to catch up with the Lexus, which was still speeding along a half block ahead.
Witherspoon said, “You a tint man, sarge?”
“Not particularly,” said the sergeant. “Why?”
“I’m not a big fan, either,” said Witherspoon, a seventeen-year army veteran and a stickler for tactics. “I can’t see what I can’t see, you know what I’m saying?”
“Everything will be fine,” the sergeant said. “We just have to put a car stop over the radio before the lieu realizes we ditched him.” The sergeant then turned back to Randall and shouted, “Will you start putting us over to Central?”
“No prob,” Randall shouted back. “But where are we?”
Wondering the same myself, I took my eyes off the road to look in vain for an unobstructed, legible city street sign.
The sergeant slapped the dash and shouted, “You’re losing him! And you’re about to lose the light. Ease off the brakes, will ya? You’re not gonna make any collars driving like this.”
I floored the gas pedal, beating the red light by a hundredth of a second. I then made a dash for the nearest open lane, cheating death as I slipped between two yellow cabs jockeying with each other to make the next light. The traffic melted away as the huge van roared ahead, until I was breathing down the blacked-out back window of the silver Lexus.
“Hit the siren for me, sarge?” I said, too riveted to let go of the steering wheel and reach for the button panel on the dash.
“There’s one on the wheel, too,” said the sergeant, pointing between my hands. “Like a horn.”
I pressed my thumb into the center of the wheel, calling up a sassy little chirp that didn’t quite meet my expectations. The Lexus didn’t even slow down. “Do we have a more authoritative-sounding siren?” I said.
“No, the guy’s just stalling,” the sergeant said. “Stay sharp. It could mean trouble.”
“Trouble?” I said. “Aren’t we already in trouble?”
“You
get into one kind of trouble to avoid another. This is the job.”
The driver of the Lexus put on his blinker and started to slow down.
“Well, you see. He’s pulling over. We gotta finish it,” the sergeant said, then looked back at Randall. “You put us over, guy?”
“All set, boss,” said Randall. “Eighty-third and First.”
The sergeant pointed his finger between my eyes and said very soberly, “Remember that address in case you have to call for backup.” I repeated the address aloud a few times, like a mantra for safety as I rolled into a very foreign situation.
When the Lexus came to a stop, the sergeant grabbed the hand microphone for the PA system built into the dash. “Driver,” he said, his amplified voice echoing off the other side of the street, “Put down all your windows, remove your ignition key with your left hand, and show it to us out the window.”
Witherspoon said, “Why you making this a felony stop, sarge? You expecting gangbangers on the Upper East Side?”
“I thought you said you didn’t like tints,” Sergeant Watts snapped back with a cheeky look, then turned to me and asked, “You ready to go, bro?”
“Yeah, okay, um . . . You wanna talk to the driver then?” I said, nervous about approaching a possibly armed driver on my first car stop.
“Bad move,” said the sergeant. “That’ll make us cross in front of the van. The driver could put his car in reverse and cut us in half.”
“Can’t we cross behind the van?” I offered.
“I’m not walkin’ all the way around this thing,” said the sergeant. “Relax. I’ll be going up with you on the other side. Just keep an eye on the guy’s hands, and you’ll be fine.”
* * *
As the sergeant and I walked up to the Lexus, I tried to recall what I’d learned at the academy about doing car stops. Much more was involved than watching the driver’s hands, I just couldn’t remember what. I only had a few seconds to invoke a week’s worth of lectures and role-playing scenarios, and every mock roadside scenario we performed had ended in a mock disaster for the recruit.
It was around six thirty on a weeknight, so the sidewalks were still crowded with pedestrians, and even though we were in a well-to-do neighborhood, I was expecting an ambush. I peered inside the car from ten feet away, but the windows were so dark. I couldn’t make out any details until I’d reached the car’s rear bumper. That’s when I saw what looked like two very large men in the backseat. The outlines of their heads were gigantic, sumo-wrestler size. I could only assume the rest of their bodies were just as huge. I swung wide around the bumper in case they suddenly burst out of the car.
Coming around the side of the Lexus, I noticed that all the windows were open, and the driver was holding out his keys, as the sergeant had instructed. I peeked into the backseat and found it unoccupied. The giant heads I’d envisioned were regular-sized headrests.
I laughed at myself while I approached the driver, but he was not as amused. He was a fifty-year-old man in a dark-blue suit with a gold Rolex and a head of perfectly combed silver hair. A copy of the New England Journal of Medicine was lying on his passenger seat; I thought he was probably a doctor.
“Are you confiscating my car?” the man said, still dangling his keys out the window.
“No, sir,” I said. “It’s just for my safety.”
He pulled his arm inside and said, “Your safety? How am I threatening you?”
As cars whizzed behind me only a few feet away, I dispensed with the usual apologies to keep the conversation short. “Your tinted windows make it hard to see inside, which is why they’re illegal.”
The man looked stunned. “I don’t know much about vehicle law, but these came with the car.”
This struck me as a good excuse to let the driver go with just a warning. I glanced over at the sergeant to see his reaction. He was leaning casually into the passenger side with his arms crossed on the door, like he was ordering food at a pickup window. He told the driver, “Just cuz you pay money for somethin’ don’t make it legal.”
It wasn’t the response I was hoping for: the sad truth, mixed with bad grammar.
The driver snarked back at him, “It don’t?”
The sergeant’s eyelids popped open as he leaned a few inches into the car. He looked ready to drag the man out and hog-tie him on the sidewalk.
“Sir,” I said softly, “if I could just get your driver’s license and registration.”
The driver, visibly shaken by the sergeant, turned back to me with a look of humility and said, “Uh, yes. Of course.”
When the driver handed me his paperwork, I started copying his information onto a moving-violation summons.
“What are you doing?” the sergeant asked me.
“Writing him a ticket,” I said.
The sergeant shook his head and said, “Back in the van.”
It hadn’t occurred to me that I could sit in the van and write a ticket. Back in the Three-two, I’d written all my summonses in the blistering cold while standing face-to-face with someone who was either pleading for mercy, threatening to kill me, or both. The idea of having a warm, safe place to do my job seemed almost decadent.
I said as much when I got back in the van, but the sergeant ignored me. “Yeah, yeah. Come on,” he said, holding out his hand for the driver’s license. “Let me run this guy.”
A minute later, the sergeant relayed the driver’s license number to our radio dispatcher, then gave me the card while he waited for the results to come back. Within seconds, his eyes wandered toward my black summons binder, which was lying closed on my lap. “You, uh . . . need the VTL code for tinted windows?” said the sergeant, trying not to sound pushy.
“No. I got it,” I said, getting the hint. I rolled back the soft leather cover and continued the ticket I had started writing in the street. I still needed the driver’s date of birth, so I looked at his license and found my eyes wandering to his photo. It was an unusually flattering picture for an ID. His smile looked genuine, and his eyes were perfectly symmetrical. He looked trustworthy and smart, the way I thought a doctor should look. It felt wrong putting the screws to a member of the medical profession. They saved people’s lives, and I had a dangerous job. What if I got shot some night, and he was the only physician on call?
“I can’t write a summons to a doctor,” I decided. I peeled apart the carbon copies to see if maybe I hadn’t pressed down hard enough.
“I don’t think that guy’s a doctor,” said the sergeant. “He’s got no MD on his plate.”
“Maybe it’s his wife’s car.”
“Could be, but I got a weird feeling about him.”
“So do I. And I don’t want to risk it.”
“Risk what?”
“It’s just, I don’t know, bad karma,” I said, wishing I had chosen to say “bad luck” instead.
“Karma?” laughed the sergeant. “What are you, a hippie?”
“Yeah, watch out, boss,” Randall said from the back of the van. “I think Bacon’s a liberal.”
My reputation as a liberal dogged my every move in the NYPD. I never talked about politics around my coworkers; I think they just put the pieces together. Unlike most white males on the job, I lived in Manhattan and was occasionally spotted reading the New York Times.
“Sorry to hear that,” said Sergeant Watts, “but you already started the summons. If you want to void it out, you’ll have to type a form and give it to the CO, because that kind of shit looks like corruption. So don’t worry about who’s driving. Just keep writing, and I’ll keep listening for Central.”
After I finished the ticket, I stared at it for a few minutes, wondering what terrible energy it would unleash upon me. I thought it was the worst of my problems, but then we heard back from Central.
“Your ID comes back to a Mattingly, first name Arden,” the dispatcher said. “Class D suspended.”
I slumped forward in defeat. In the back, my coworkers celebrated.
&nbs
p; “Collar!” Witherspoon shouted with glee.
“Paging Doctor Douchebag,” said Randall.
“Not bad, Bacon,” the sergeant said, looking at his watch. “Two hours in. This has to be the first pinch in MSU.”
I walked up to the Lexus slowly, trying to postpone the coming scene. I was sure the man was going to tell me he was due in surgery first thing in the morning, and I’d have to say he wasn’t going to make it because of one unpaid traffic ticket. I’d feel like a sleaze the whole time I was putting him through the system, and it wouldn’t end there. Having spent the last ten months with wisecracking cops, I knew they’d never let me live this down.
When I reached the driver, I leaned down to his eye level and tried to show the full extent of my remorse. “Sir, I’m afraid to tell you that your license is suspended, which means I’m afraid you’re going to have to come with us, I’m afraid.”
He looked surprised. “I’m under arrest?”
“Technically, not yet, sir,” I said. “But soon.”
“Oh, I can’t go through the system tonight,” he said, and I was on hooks. “I have to be in court first thing in the morning.”