by Bad Cop: New York's Least Likely Police Officer Tells All
Still glowing from the ride, I walked into the Nineteenth Precinct muster room and saw Sergeant Watts sitting at the bosses’ table at the front of the room with his longtime buddy Sergeant Vinny Matrice. They both had pie-eating grins on their faces when I appeared at the door.
“Hey, look, it’s Sponge Bacon,” said Watts.
Sergeant Matrice asked me, “Who’s your hook in Harbor?”
I said, “I don’t know anyone. I just put in an application.”
“Bullshit,” said Sergeant Matrice. “That’s a major hook. Come on, spill it.”
“That’s what I’m telling you, Vin,” Sergeant Watts said, leaning back in his chair and pointing at me like I was a new motorcycle in his driveway. “This kid doesn’t need a hook. He’s a worker.”
I heard a few cops laughing out on the floor, making me feel very slimy for getting praise from the boss.
Sergeant Matrice tried to rescue the embarrassing moment. “What’s wrong with you, Bacon? Why do you wanna work and make everyone else look bad? It’s not worth it. Join Harbor and make the job work for you. Just get me in there, all right? I know how to swim.”
Sergeant Watts wouldn’t let it go. “Check this out,” he said to Sergeant Matrice. “Last Friday, thirty minutes before end of tour, Bacon pulled this guy over for having an air freshener on his mirror, you know the little tree thing?”
“The fuck?” said Sergeant Matrice, giving me an angry look. “I have one of those in my car.”
Sergeant Watts doubled over in laughter. “No, no! That’s not the good part. The guy popped a warrant, and we found all this crack and other shit in the backseat. He had a passenger, too, so it was a double felony. Kid’s right out of the academy making double felony collars.”
“You’re demented, Bacon. De-mented,” said Sergeant Matrice.
“Oh, that reminds me,” Sergeant Watts said, wiping a tear out of his eye. He started to talk again, but then he waved me toward him. I huddled around his corner of the table and said, “What?”
The sergeant seemed to notice something once I got closer. “You okay, kid?” he said with a worried look.
“I’m fine.”
“You got little drops of sweat all over your face.”
“I do?” I said, patting my forehead and feeling the moisture. “Oh, right. I just rode my bike in.”
The sergeant said, “From the subway?”
“From Fourteenth Street.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“It’s easy. At top speed, I can get here in twenty minutes.”
“Damn, maybe Vin is right. Anyway, I gotta tell you something, and don’t take it the wrong way, you understand?”
I nodded.
“No more five-elevens from you,” the sergeant said.
“Why not?” I said.
“Just, according to the lieu, all right?”
“Okay, but why?”
“It doesn’t look good when you make all the same kinds of collars. Makes you seem like you got an angle.”
I didn’t think I had an angle so much as a curve, a gentle curve. An easy way to what I wanted. I understood what the sergeant meant, but I was sad that a good thing was coming to an end. “We do a lot of car stops,” I said. “If people pop, they pop.”
“They only pop if you run their licenses,” said the sergeant. “There are other ways of doing car stops, as I have tried to show you many times.”
“All right,” I said, walking away from the bosses’ table.
“And wait, Bacon. One last thing,” he said, flipping through his papers and handing me a departmental form marked, APPLICATION FOR NOTICE OF COMMENDATION.
“What’s this?” I said, noticing there were two copies.
“For your five-elevens,” the sergeant said. “You got six in a month. That’s two commendations.”
“They’re giving me medals for something I’m forbidden from doing?”
“You don’t want ’em?” said the sergeant, making like he was going to rip the applications in half.
“No, no, I’ll take them,” I said.
After roll call, I fetched our big blue van and pulled up in front of the Nineteenth station house. Sergeant Watts, Witherspoon, and Randall were waiting for me curbside. Witherspoon walked around the front of the van, as though he was planning to drive. Curious, I looked over at the sergeant, who had just hopped into the shotgun seat beside me.
“Get in back,” he told me. “Witherspoon’s driving.”
Because no one else had ever wanted to drive, I’d been behind the wheel every night since the beginning of MSU. “What’s going on?” I said.
The sergeant pointed at the Israeli laptop and said, “We’re going to the Three-four tonight, and I don’t want you anywhere near this thing.”
Witherspoon drove us to Thirty-fourth Precinct in Washington Heights, Sergeant Watts’s favorite place to do car stops. The Three-four was home to the George Washington Bridge, the only roadway connecting the island of Manhattan to the rest of the United States for miles in either direction. As such, the bridge served as a funnel for drugs, making the precinct a major distribution point for two of the city’s most impoverished areas, Harlem and the South Bronx. Based on crime statistics, nearly every block in the neighborhood was considered a “drug-prone location.”
This was why Sergeant Watts liked it. In a known drug location, busting people was easier, because the drug-prone status gave us legal justification to take action on a lower standard of proof. In an ordinary neighborhood, a person standing on a stoop was just standing on a stoop; in a place like the Three-four, we could say the person was “demonstrating behavior indicative of acting as a lookout.” This meant we could stop people, using force if needed, and pat down the outside of their clothing for weapons. The standard of proof required for us to get this far with a suspect was called reasonable suspicion.
According to the Fourth Amendment, if we wanted to take an encounter any further, we had to establish probable cause. Defining this fuzzy term isn’t as important as knowing that it’s the exact same standard for making an arrest. In practical terms, this means that if a police officer hasn’t already put you in handcuffs, he doesn’t have enough proof to search you or your belongings—no matter what he says to convince you otherwise. Any items in plain view are fair game, but if it’s in your pockets or concealed by you in any way, it’s your choice whether the cops have a look or not.
By setting the same standard of proof for searches and arrests, the amendment, written in 1789, remains the most significant safeguard of our privacy. It’s packed with implications and benefits, a bonanza of civil rights wrapped up in a neat package and tucked safely into the Bill of Rights. The problem was, and probably always will be: Almost no one really knows this law, much less understands it. It was news to me when I learned about it at the police academy, so I could understand why our suspects were so gullible.
For all the power vested in the Fourth Amendment, it was very easy to ignore. With one simple question—“You mind if I take a look?”—we could go from reasonable suspicion to finding evidence of a crime. This question could be surprisingly disarming, but in order for it to work on the street and hold up in court later, it had to be delivered with skill and precision. Expert timing was required, and it needed to sound as offhand as possible—the way your doctor might ask whether you smoked cigarettes.
Sergeant Watts demonstrated a Ph.D.-level knowledge of the guilty conscience after doing thousands of car stops with the NYPD Auto Crime Unit. Witherspoon and Randall, greenhorns in comparison, let him do all the talking whenever a car stop looked as though it might lead to bigger things. So when Witherspoon and Randall pulled over one car early that night and found something suspicious, they walked back to the van and let the sergeant know right away.
“Smells like weed, boss,” said Witherspoon. “You wanna toss the car?”
“That depends,” the sergeant replied. “You lookin’?”
Witherspoon gla
nced at his watch and said, “I better not. I’ve got plans later.”
The sergeant looked at Randall and said, “How about you?”
“Not if it’s gonna turn into a felony,” Randall said. Since felony collars required court appearances during regular business hours—they could not be taken in overtime because we already had weekends off—Randall never bothered with them. For financial reasons, he was strictly a misdemeanor man.
The sergeant shook his head at Randall, then turned to me and said, “I know you’re not a hairbag yet. So you want it?”
“I don’t know, boss,” I said.
“You gotta make real collars now,” the sergeant reminded me. “Here’s a chance to start.”
When Sergeant Watts and I walked up to the Mustang, I took the passenger side to leave him in control of the stop. Left to my own devices, I would have done a quick visual search of the cabin and probably found nothing. A halfway intelligent driver, even if he was stoned, could have easily hidden or discarded his stuff by now. Looking any deeper would require the sergeant’s talents, a combination of soft-core brutality and hard-core seduction.
The sergeant approached the driver with a flashlight in his hand and pointed it in the man’s eyes. I couldn’t see the driver’s expression from my side of vehicle, but I noticed he was clutching the steering wheel with both hands like he was still in motion.
“Wuh-what’s all this about, officer?” the driver asked Sgt. Watts.
“Probably nothing, sir,” the sergeant said. “If I could just get you to step outside the vehicle, I can turn off my light.”
The driver stared back into the sergeant’s beam and said, “Oh, okay. Yeah, that would be good. Thank you, officer.”
“No problem,” Sergeant Watts said from behind the light. He didn’t move a muscle until the man opened the door.
As the driver stepped out, I got a better look at him. He was in his early twenties, with a gold necklace and perfectly styled hair. He looked as if he was ready for a night on the town. The sergeant complimented his outfit, then walked him over to the curb to have a “private discussion.”
“So listen, bro,” the sergeant began. “I’m not trying to bust your chops here, you understand? I wouldn’t try to bust your chops any more than you’d try to bust my chops. You wouldn’t try to bust my chops, would you?”
Baffled, the kid took a moment to figure out the right answer: “Uh . . . no, officer.”
“Good, good,” the sergeant said, then pointed to our van. “So you know, my lieutenant back there says he smelled marijuana in your car. But you don’t smoke that shit, do you?”
The driver was faster this time. “No, officer.”
“I didn’t think so,” the sergeant said. “He is my boss, though, so you mind if I take a look?”
“Uhhh,” the driver stammered. “I guess not.”
Perhaps another reason why guilty parties rolled over so easily was that they’d never seen a hustler like Sergeant Watts at work. Once our boss had lulled a suspect into complacency, he’d wait till the suspect was facing away from the vehicle, then duck into the questionable car, and pull out a six-inch bowie knife from a special holster under his jacket. I didn’t even know he carried the thing until weeks after we’d started working together, when I saw a bright glint out of the corner of my eye during a car stop.
Designed for gutting bears and deer, a bowie knife made easy work of an automobile interior—though not in the way one might think. The use of a large, razor-sharp blade was not to tear up the interior, but rather to leave it as unharmed as possible in the end. While large quantities of drugs were often transported in false compartments, sometimes a door was just a door. It was one thing to stop someone for a few minutes on reasonable suspicion, and it was quite another to deface a vehicle looking for something that wasn’t there. With this in mind, the sergeant wielded the bowie like a plastic surgeon’s scalpel, popping off inside panels and prying open dashboards—all without making a mark. “Never leave evidence unless you find evidence,” he once told us.
The sergeant’s search of the interior yielded no contraband, so he asked the driver, “Is it okay if I look in the trunk?”
The driver, visibly relieved, sounded thrilled to say yes. In his haste, he must have forgotten what was inside the trunk, a set of brass knuckles, which was illegal to possess in this city.
The sergeant lifted the knuckles out of the trunk and showed the weapon around proudly. It was shaped like a dragon, with beady eyes, raised scales, and flames coming out of its mouth. The fingerholes—the points of impact—were part of its belly. A beautifully crafted piece of polished chrome, it almost didn’t look like it was made to pound someone’s face into hamburger.
“Expert workmanship, right?” said the sergeant. “So, you ready to cuff this guy?”
“Over a collector’s item?” I said.
“Last week you got some drugs. This week, it’s weapons. You mix things up.”
“Not like this. I didn’t even do the search. I wouldn’t have done the search.”
“Oh,” said the sergeant, suddenly offended. “So now the truth comes out. You don’t agree with the way I collect evidence?”
I laughed nervously, hoping he was kidding.
“You want out of the squad?” the sergeant said, pulling his radio off his belt. “That’s fine. Sergeant Lynn’s squad has room for another body. They’re next door in the Three-three to night. I’ll raise him now and he’ll come get you.”
“Wait, sarge,” I pleaded. “I’m sorry. I’ll take the collar.”
“I wouldn’t want you to do anything unethical,” he said, turning to the van and shouting for Randall.
Randall got out of the van and jogged over to us.
The sergeant handed the brass knuckles to Randall and said, “You saw a few of those in the Three-two, didn’t you?”
“Shitloads,” said Randall, turning the brass knuckles over in his hand. “Damn. This is a nice one.”
“What’s the charge for possession?”
“Class A misdemeanor,” Randall said with a grin.
“You want the collar?” the sergeant asked.
“Hell, yes,” said Randall.
After we transported Randall and his prisoner back to the Three-four for processing, the sergeant called it a night. He asked Wither-spoon to drive us back to the Nineteenth Precinct to “hide,” as he put it—hanging out in the lounge watching TV—until the end of tour. One of us would have to pick up Randall later to take his prisoner to MCB, and since I was no longer in the sergeant’s good graces, I got this assignment. I was already feeling tired, and I still had to ride my bike home, so I wasn’t happy about waiting for the overtime junkie to get his fix. I lay down on a couch in the lounge and sulked.
I figured I’d be getting home no earlier than three A.M., but Randall called my cell phone around ten and said he was ready for me to come pick him up.
“That was fast,” I said.
“The desk sergeant here’s not with the program,” said Randall. “He wants me out of here now, and he says I gotta take the guy to the Two-eight. But how the hell’s he gonna know where we go?”
The Two-eight, in South Harlem, was home to the hub site, a temporary holding facility where we could lodge our prisoners after we’d finished their paperwork. Roughly halfway between the northern tip of Manhattan and Central Booking in the south, it was built to prevent hairbags who worked uptown from lodging their perps downtown just to run up the clock. The Two-eight was also home to Clarabel Suarez, whom I hadn’t seen since graduation. I knew the Two-eight was her permanent assignment, but I didn’t know what tour she was working, so I said to Randall, “You know if PO Suarez works the four to twelve?”
“Suarez?” he said. “You mean that little Spanish girl with the big mouth?”
“I guess you could say that.”
“Yeah, I seen her there before. Why do you care? Doesn’t she bang your company sergeant?”
“I
was the company sergeant.”
“You were second-string, Bacon. Live with it.”
Clarabel had been in the back of my mind since the academy, and I had planned to make contact once I was settled in the Three-two. But I’d barely gotten established there before I was shipped off to another command, where I was now working fifty to sixty hours a week. Randall’s perp made a great excuse to drop in on Clarabel, so I pressed my partner to go to the Two-eight. He agreed on the grounds that he wanted to “take a look” at her himself. Randall rarely did anything for free.
On our way to the hub site, he treated me to a detailed musing on Clarabel’s body, likening her to a woman he’d seen in a porn video. While I gritted my teeth and tried to focus on driving, Randall and his prisoner launched into a conversation about their sexual exploits with Latinas that would have made Henry Miller blush. Even Randall felt as though he’d crossed some line of decent behavior; he apologized to me before we reached the Two-eight, and he threw in a small surprise favor when we got there.
Clarabel’s squad was just coming in from patrol as we were walking our perp in through the back door. I spotted her by the sign-out sheet across the lobby and shouted her name, but she darted into an adjoining office.
Overhearing me, Randall handed me his arrest folder. “You lodge the perp,” he told me. “I’ll take care of the girl.”
“How about the other way around?” I said.
“Trust me, will ya?” he said, grabbing my hand and placing it on his prisoner’s elbow. He pushed us both toward the hub-site door and said, “Go!”