by Bad Cop: New York's Least Likely Police Officer Tells All
The sergeant picked up his own radio and cut off the dispatcher. “Ten-four, Central, we got the picture.”
I walked back to Mr. Harris and found him surrounded by my coworkers. The young man was spouting off their pedigree information one by one, as though he meant to report us to a higher authority. “Officer Ramsey, shield number 70349, male, black, six foot three, approximately two hundred eighty pounds,” he said, then started unzipping his jacket. “I can’t remember all this. Don’t shoot me, okay? I’m just reaching for a pen.”
“You reach for anything,” said one of my squad mates, “and I’ll break your fuckin’ arm.”
When Mr. Harris saw me, he said, “Officer Bacon, shield number 1627. Male white, five foot eight . . .”
“Five foot nine,” I said. “Frederick Harris. Failure to appear, CPW, first degree.”
He looked stunned for a few seconds, then he smiled at me. I smiled back. I said, “Turn around and put your hands . . .”
“I know, I know,” he said, offering himself up for arrest.
The next day, I woke up around noon and found that the magnetic force under my bed had returned. I could barely move my eyelids, and I stared at my ceiling for an hour wondering what to do. Something was clearly wrong with me, so, following Sergeant Watts’s advice, I called the Nineteenth Precinct to request a vacation day rather than go sick. None of the bosses there would do me the favor on such short notice. This left me with only one option, short of adding another sick day to my record: I’d have to go to the department’s medical division to request another run of limited duty.
Since patrol work entailed physical and mental stress beyond the pale of most professions, the NYPD was accustomed to hearing complaints of exhaustion from its employees. The department showed what it thought of these complaints by placing its medical division not at One Police Plaza in downtown Manhattan—a central location where most employee relations were handled—but at an office complex in the hinterlands of Queens called Lefrak City.
The gatekeepers at Lefrak City, known as “department surgeons,” were actual doctors, but their bedside manner left much to be desired. “So you’re telling me you’re too tired to go on patrol?” said the doctor, sitting across the desk from me in a gleaming white jacket.
“That’s right, and I know how that sounds,” I said, slumping on the armrest of my chair for effect. “But I just got over pneumonia.”
“That was almost four months ago,” said the doctor.
“But it was pneu-mo-nia,” I said. “Did you know it used to be the leading cause of death before the invention of antibiotics? It killed more Civil War soldiers than gangrene.”
“But antibiotics have been invented,” the doctor pointed out, “and according to your hospital records, you’ve received a full course. You can’t still have pneumonia. You don’t even have a temperature.”
“I would not be making this up, doctor. I was raised in Christian Science. I’m the exact opposite of a hypochondriac.”
“Then you’re a perfect candidate for a speedy recovery.”
I went to work that night, toughed it out, and woke up with another case of magnet-bed, even stronger than the day before. I visited a private physician in my neighborhood, but this doctor was as skeptical as the department surgeon, and he wouldn’t write me a note to excuse me from work without objective symptoms. So I went back to the Nineteenth Precinct and asked Sergeant Watts to help me out. He vouched for me to the commanding officer of our unit, who allowed me to go on unofficial limited duty for two months. I worked the phones again until it was time to go back on patrol. I was able to handle patrol for about a month before I could barely pull myself out of bed, and the cycle repeated itself.
CHAPTER 21
I BOUNCED BETWEEN LIMITED and full duty for almost eight months. I emerged with my credibility in tatters, and I knew something had to change. The absolutely-not-a-quota quotas of MSU were driving me to an early grave. I thought a change of mission might help, so I approached Sergeant Watts in the MSU office to ask for a transfer.
The sergeant was sitting at a desk going over his annual squad activity report when I walked inside.
“Sponge Bacon,” he said with a big smile. “I was just going over your numbers from last year. They’re all zeros.”
“Sorry about that,” I said.
“You ready to go back out?”
“Not exactly. I’d like to be put in a precinct.”
“You want out of MSU? Get in line.”
“Morale is that low?”
“Afraid so. What command do you want?”
“The Three-two would be good.”
“The Three-two, huh?” He pulled open a desk drawer and showed me a pile of transfer requests. The requests were bound together with paper clips and organized by command of choice. “There are nine rookies ahead of you,” he said.
“Ahead of me? We all came out of the academy together.”
“Yeah, but they got numbers.”
“What about the other commands?” I said.
He looked through the other requests and gave me the sad statistics: The Two-four had five MSU cops waiting to get in, the Two-six had eleven, and the Three-four had seventeen. My choices were limited to the Manhattan North patrol borough, so that didn’t leave much.
I asked the sergeant, “Are there any precincts that don’t have a pile of requests?”
“That’s easy,” he said, not bothering to look. “The Two-eight.”
“Really?” I said. That was Clarabel’s precinct. “Can I put in for that?”
“You don’t want the Two-eight. It’s a dump. Haven’t you been to the hub?”
“I have. But anything’s better than this.”
Sergeant Watts said, “I know it seems like MSU really sucks. And it does. But doing real patrol in the Two-eight will drive you nuts. You’re stuck in a car answering radio runs all night.”
“But that’s what I want,” I said. “I want to be a first responder—you know, coming to the rescue. I want to help people, not shake them down.”
The sergeant laughed.
“I know,” I said. “It sounds naïve. I want to give it a try, though.”
Sergeant Watts leaned back in his chair, steepled his hands, and stared into my eyes. I could see the gears turning in his head as he tried to think of something to dissuade me. His eyes lit up when Sergeant Matrice walked past the open doorway.
“Hey, Vin!” he shouted, and Sergeant Matrice came back. “Bacon here wants to go to the Two-eight. Can you talk him out of it?”
Sergeant Matrice said, “Why would I do that? It’s the perfect place for him.”
CHAPTER 22
I SHOULD’VE KNOWN SOMETHING was seriously wrong with the Two-eight when even MSU cops wouldn’t go there. I’d had some doubts of my own as well, going as far back as Operation Impact. While nearby precincts had received hundreds of new cops, the Two-eight in South Harlem had gotten just two. Granted, the precinct was only a half mile across, but it was home to thirty-five thousand people, and its crime numbers rivaled that of its neighbor, the Three-two. The Two-eight was also one of the few precincts that “lost” the previous year, meaning it had a net increase in serious offenses while others followed the citywide trend of ever-safer streets.
Statistics aside, the Two-eight just seemed a strange place to neglect. It was the undisputed capital of Harlem, with famous landmarks like the Apollo Theater, Sylvia’s Restaurant, and 125th Street within its confines—along with dozens of mosques and Baptist churches, and a chapter of the Nation of Islam. Al Sharpton was a regular visitor. So was U.S. Congressman Charles Rangel, and even Bill Clinton, whose first post-Oval office was only a few blocks from the Two-eight station house. Considering all the history and high-profile visitors, plus the violent crime and drugs, the neighborhood could hardly have been more of a tinderbox, but the department didn’t seem to think it merited much attention.
Perhaps they didn’t know the Two-eight was ther
e. The station house was easy enough to miss. A boxy two-story cement fortress designed to look modern in the 1970s, it now resembled a piece of prehistoric office equipment, a Commodore 64 of a building. And while it was supposedly frequented by cops, it failed to deter crime even within shouting distance. A week before my transfer, a restaurant just across the street had been robbed at dinnertime by two men carrying rifles.
Nothing about the Two-eight bode particularly well, but since this fact had enabled me to get out of MSU in the first place, I couldn’t be too choosy. I actually liked my first impression of the neighborhood. Coming up the subway steps on 125th Street, Harlem’s main thoroughfare, I was transported to the New York of another era. Unlike the heavily regulated sidewalks of downtown Manhattan, where the most exotic thing for sale was a hot dog with sauerkraut, there were outdoor vendors hawking everything from black-light paintings and black-power literature to bootleg Disney and porno DVDs. Pedestrians darted freely between the gridlocked vehicles on the street, while a thick layering of music—hip-hop, soul, and gospel—blasted from enormous speakers in shop windows.
As I rounded the corner to Saint Nicholas Avenue, three blocks from the Two-eight station house, I started to realize why none of my coworkers wanted to come. Standing between me and my destination, and taking up most of the sidewalk, were a half dozen men in dark-blue tunics and open-toed sandals. I recognized their biblical battle gear immediately. These were the Black Israelites, a group I had seen demonstrating in Times Square on many occasions.
In that particular setting, I had enjoyed their antiestablishment creed. It was a refreshing break from the pulsating corporate logos and oversized TV screens. For years, midwestern tourists in search of the Great White Way had been greeted by a portable stage full of uniformed men screaming that the white man was the devil. It was kind of fun. And that the Israelites could set up on such a coveted piece of real estate and berate everything it stood for seemed like the embodiment of free speech. I may not have agreed with much of what they had to say, but I knew as long as they were there, something was still held sacred.
Strolling past them as the only white face in sight, however, was another experience entirely. “And behold the nimrod, ladies and gentlemen,” shouted a man in a satiny blue robe holding a megaphone in one hand and pointing at me with the other, “A servant of the devil come in the guise of a god! He comes to gather all nations around him in defiance of the most high’s sovereign right to rule over mankind! But we SHALL NOT bow to him! Just as we shall not bow to the Cesare Borgia! Or the Charles Manson! Or what ever disguise Satan uses to proffer himself as OUR LORD Jesus Christ!”
I waited to cross the street to the non-race-baiting side while the man with the bullhorn continued to rant. Then two cops in a Two-eight patrol car pulled up and blasted him down with their siren. Everyone around me plugged their ears, but my hands were full with all my stuff, so I could only stand there and go deaf.
The cops in the car laughed at me for a few seconds, then the driver picked up the PA mike and spoke to me over his bullhorn.
“You the new guy? ” he said.
I nodded.
“You want a lift? ”
I hauled my gear over to their vehicle, and the Israelite with the megaphone directed his sermon to my black coworkers: “And behold, the so-called African-Americans ENSLAVED to the nimrod . . .”
I threw my bags in the backseat and jumped in. “That was interesting,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been called a nimrod before.”
The cop in the shotgun seat said, “Nimrod built the Tower of Babel.”
“Welcome to the Bible Belt of Harlem,” said the driver. “I’m Naples, and this is Robertson.”
I introduced myself, then looked back out at the sidewalk scene as we pulled away. “Is everyone here this hostile?” I said.
“Of course not,” said Naples.
“Yeah, most people are worse,” said Robertson.
“It wasn’t like this in the Three-two,” I said. “People were a little more tolerant there.”
Robertson craned his neck around to tell me, “You got that right. The Three-two’s motherfuckin’ Sesame Street compared to the Two-eight. You got all your major hate groups here, your hate crimes, your hate speech—it’s all about haters.”
“But crime’s worse in the Three-two, isn’t it?” I said.
“On paper, maybe,” said Robertson.
Naples threw Robertson an admonishing glare that I didn’t think I was supposed to see.
“On paper?” I said.
Naples moved right past the subject. He locked eyes with me in the rearview mirror and said, “Don’t sweat the Israelites. They don’t care what color you are as long as you’re blue. Just keep your distance. They’ve got a small army around here.”
I acquainted myself with my new command and learned that it too was a small army—with the emphasis on small rather than army. Unlike my first day at the Nineteenth Precinct, which had been so crowded with new cops that most of us had to double up on lockers, I was able to choose between twenty different places to store my gear. And when I went upstairs for 1530 roll call, I found the muster room completely empty until 1540, when a handful of sleepy-eyed officers took seats around the periphery of the room.
At 1545, my new supervisor, a bespectacled sergeant named Gloria Ramirez, walked into the muster room while studying a computer printout in her hands. She stepped behind a lectern, put down her roster list, and offered what I would come to know as her standard greeting.
“Ah, Jeez,” she said, squinting as though she couldn’t see the back of the room. “Is this everybody?”
A chuckle of recognition rose from the group.
The sergeant pulled off her glasses, scanned the formation, and said, “Where’s Daniels?”
“Traffic court,” said someone.
“What about Anderson?”
“Stuck on the FDR.”
“And what about Knowles?” said the sergeant. “Where the hell’s Knowles?”
“He collared up last night,” said someone else.
“So?”
“His perp was a porn vendor, so he had a lot of DVDs to voucher.”
The sergeant raised her eyebrows and said, “Maybe he should spend more time vouchering and less time watching.”
Her remark unleashed a torrent of laughter, followed by the shouting of a number of apparently well-known porn video titles—all involving a stunningly imaginative array of terms for women’s buttocks.
When the group quieted down, the sergeant pointed at me and said, “Everybody, this is Bacon, the new guy.”
After an unwelcoming silence, someone said, “The one new guy.”
A cop next to me named Carlyle turned and said, “So, how did you fuck up?”
“I didn’t,” I said.
“Then what are you doing in this shithole?” Carlyle said. “Most people only come here as punishment.”
“I put in for it,” I said.
“You’re joking,” he said. “Why?”
It didn’t seem polite to explain why I’d chosen the Two-eight, or wise, since one of the reasons was the crush I had on the person who was about to walk into the room.
“Sorry I’m late,” said Clarabel, donning her patrol cap as she walked through the door. “I was getting reamed by the CO.”
It was the perfect setup: A woman walks into a room full of foulmouthed cops and says she’s just been reamed by the boss. But no one said a word about it—not even “Ouch.” I filed the conspicuous silence away in my mind under Mysterious Occurrences, next to the surreptitious glance that Officer Naples had given his partner earlier that afternoon.
Sergeant Ramirez assigned Clarabel to work with me, and she gave us four sectors to patrol instead of the usual two because of the shortage of cops. Clarabel was ticked off, but I welcomed the extra workload. I was eager to atone for my sins after working in MSU—a goal I thought I’d reach faster if I was working twice as hard.
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br /> I walked out of the muster room into the crowded main desk area, where I noticed a line of high-maintenance prisoners being ignored by everyone in uniform. Two of the perps were screaming at each other, one was screaming at the desk sergeant, and the fourth was relatively calm, but so intoxicated that he could barely stand up. As the group ranted and raved and wobbled and belched, no one else seemed to take any notice. Just a few feet away from them, a potbellied black-and-white cat lay motionless on the floor.
When the drunken prisoner finally collapsed, he fell backward onto the hard linoleum within inches of the cat. Still, the animal didn’t flinch—until the man’s arresting officer, a six-foot cop named Samuels, walked over to pull the man off the floor. Seeing Samuels, the cat rolled over on his back, exposing his fluffy white belly and letting his paws dangle in the air, as though waiting to be ser viced.
Samuels looked up at me and said, “A little help?”
I quickly dropped my equipment bag to the floor and began to help Samuels lift the perp to his feet.
“Not with this bozo,” Samuels said, then nodded toward the cat. “With Shredder. He needs scratching.”
“This is Shredder?” I said.
Samuels, who had at least a hundred pounds on his perp, easily hoisted the man up, then dropped him in a chair and left him slumped over to one side. Then, with considerably more care, he knelt over the docile cat and began massaging its stomach, so loose and formless that it could have been filled with sand.
“He doesn’t look like much now,” said Samuels, “but back in the day, he was the baddest cat in Harlem.”
“Whose is he?” I asked.
“He used to belong to the Three-two. He started putting on the pounds, though, and he lost a fight with another cat in the neighborhood. One of their cops brought him here for his own protection. He’s just a reject like the rest of us.”