Paul Bacon

by Bad Cop: New York's Least Likely Police Officer Tells All

  I did have one more tool at my disposal. My cell phone was hanging on my belt. But whom to call? I didn’t know the number to the security booth, and Clarabel was probably still dealing with her collar. I wasn’t going to reach out to anyone else in our command. They’d come help me, sure—but I’d be a laughingstock for the rest of my career. Calling 911 was a possibility, too. I just didn’t think I’d ever have to do that as a cop. It seemed unprofessional somehow. No, I told myself, I’ll wait for someone to come by.

  A few minutes later, a Pepsi distributor truck happened to park on the street right in front of my car. Salvation! I screamed and waved at the driver when he got out, but he didn’t seem to notice. Banging on the window finally got his attention, and I could see him peering in from about fifteen feet away.

  I got as close as I could to the window, then shined my flashlight up at my face and yelled, “Help! Help!” The man’s mouth fell open like he’d seen a ghost, and then he fled. He jumped right back in his truck and drove off. I thought he was just a cop hater at first, but it occurred to me: Who’s gonna help some maniac locked in the back of a police car? I should have pressed my shield or my arm patch against the window, not my face.

  It was merely a problem of perception, I thought. So I used my finger to write, HELP, I’M A COP, on the steamy window, just in case someone else came along. I wrote the message backward so it could be read from the other side of the glass. After ten minutes of staring at the message on the window, it started to look embarrassingly like an admission of a personal problem—like I needed a therapist, not a Samaritan. Still in denial that I was in the wrong line of work, I erased the latest evidence with a wipe of my jacket sleeve, then stared out the window for another savior to come along. A few breaths later, my view of the outside world went all fuzzy again, except the faint outline of my distress call, which had returned to haunt me:

  HELP,

  I’M A COP

  “What am I doing?” I said to the glass. I grabbed my cell phone and flipped it open, then took a deep breath. After dialing 9-1-1-SEND, I waited a few rings and reached an operator.

  “911,” said a woman’s voice. “What’s the emergency?”

  “It’s not an emergency,” I began. “I’m an NYPD officer posted on a security detail near One Police Plaza, and I just need one unit to come to my location. I don’t have my radio, so will you reach Central Dispatch for me?”

  “No problem, officer,” she said. “Do you have a partner she can raise?”

  “I do, but he’s inside a security booth.”

  “Where is the security booth?”

  It dawned on me that I didn’t even know where I was, other than near the Brooklyn Bridge, which was like being near Cleveland. I also didn’t know Lawrence’s post ID, and I couldn’t use his name, because we never put names over the air. I looked out my windshield for a landmark. I spotted some large red letters on a faraway building and squinted until I could make them out.

  “It’s near . . . Pace University,” I told her. “Or a billboard for Pace University, I’m not sure.”

  “That should be fine,” she said. “I’ll contact your dispatcher right away. Just for my rec ords, what is your condition?”

  “I was kinda hoping I wouldn’t have to tell you,” I said.

  “Oh-ho,” she tittered. “Are you locked out of your car?”

  “Actually, I’m locked in my car.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yep.”

  She burst out laughing, and then the line fell silent without going dead. I thought it was polite of her to put me on hold while she chuckled, but when she came back on the line about ten seconds later, I could hear a room full of people hooting and hollering in the background.

  “No problem, off—officer,” she said, trying to control herself. “Someone will be there. If not, you call us back, okay?”

  “I will. Thanks,” I said meekly.

  “Thank you for calling the city of New Yo—” she said, probably laughing too hard to finish the sentence with a straight face.

  I sat back and relaxed. The hard part was over. I’d look like a moron to whomever came to open my door, but at least they wouldn’t be from my home command. I might survive unscathed.

  A few minutes passed, and I sat up again to look around, expecting Lawrence to walk up or a police car to come by. A few minutes after that, I heard a siren. Then a second siren, and a third. The first patrol car entered my view from the west, streaking across the intersection with flashing roof lights, then disappeared behind a foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. A second unit sped in from the east and made a quick turn to the north, where it encountered two more incoming vehicles and swerved around them. Everyone was driving around like maniacs. Why all this fuss for a low-priority assistance call?

  I called 911 again with a sick feeling in my gut. At any moment, one of the careening vehicles could get in an accident, hurting or killing some innocent bystander. I had a horrible vision of the next day’s New York Post. My department ID picture would be on the cover next to a picture of the civilian or fellow officer who’d fallen victim to my unauthorized nap. The papers would call me the Backseat Cop, and I’d be guilty as charged, facing a life of shame and civil litigation.

  When an operator came on, it wasn’t the same person as before, so I had to explain myself all over again and then wait while she put me on hold a while longer. Returning to the line, the operator told me that my original call for light assistance had gone over the air as a ten-thirteen, which meant “officer down,” as in officer dead or officer dying.

  “Call it off, please! Call it off immediately!” I begged the operator, who said she’d do what she could and then hung up.

  I gazed out the windshield at the mounting catastrophe until I couldn’t bear watching any longer. Staring down at the floor of the prisoner compartment, I realized that Bill Peters had been right: I was a danger to myself and others. He wasn’t the only one who’d felt this way. Family members and close friends who’d seen me contorting myself into the shape of a police officer over the last three years had all expressed their doubts. There was no arguing with them anymore. If I made it out of this hermetically sealed cage before I ran out of air, I would never wear a police uniform again.

  Outside, the ten-thirteen had caused such a stir that it finally roused my sleepy partner Lawrence from the security booth. I saw him walking slowly down the hill into the parking lot. I shined my flashlight at him, again making loops with the beam to catch his eye. He stopped walking about thirty yards away and pulled out his own flashlight. After making a few loops of his own, he started walking back up the hill.

  “Come back! Come back!” I screamed, pounding on the window hard enough to cut the skin on my knuckles.

  Lawrence got the message and walked down to the car. He lifted my outside door handle, and, just like that, I was free.

  “You all right?” he asked me.

  Squinting through his flashlight beam, I looked up at him and said, “Would you accept my resignation?”

  After I was sprung, Lawrence and I hurried back up to the booth and played dumb when the response team came roaring up—him out of natural obliviousness and me in silent solidarity with the roughly seven thousand people who had false-alarmed me in my years on the force. Luckily, no one had been hurt, and by some miracle, nobody at the Two-eight ever heard about it, except Clarabel.

  I told her the story a few days later at the station house, shortly after I’d turned in my gun and shield. I’d taken the weekend to think about quitting, and nothing had changed my mind. When I came back to work, I gave two weeks’ notice and learned that it wasn’t required. In fact, I was told, it was illegal for me to even put on an NYPD uniform once I’d announced my resignation. This severe job came with severe rules, making my last day more bitter than sweet. I was ready to leave, but once I’d made the decision, I was looking forward to my last two weeks as a cop.

  I was also hoping to spend a little more t
ime with Clarabel. Our disparate lives could only have intersected in this strange workplace, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever see her again. I waited around at the Two-eight until she came in for meal, caught up to her, and suggested we go have a drink sometime. No, she said; she didn’t do charity. (I had pretty well figured this out by now.) So I offered to take her out to lunch; no. A cup of coffee? No. Anything that sounded remotely like a date: No. As hard as that was for me to take, it was probably kinder than leading me on.

  Clarabel’s way of saying good-bye was to take me home in her patrol car. With less than an hour to make the round trip between Harlem and West Fourteenth Street, she drove across the island going lights and sirens, one last hurrah before I returned to the world of the nominally law-abiding. But on the West Side Highway on our way downtown, we got stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Inching along the Hudson River gave us a lot of time to talk, and we laughed about some of the things we’d been through together. She apologized again for the pepper spray, but she said that my cooping caper was just what I deserved. Though she didn’t say so, I think she was relieved to not have to go out on patrol with me again.

  I did get her to open up a little bit about Moran in our final conversation. She admitted to dating him exclusively since they’d met in the academy. She said they still saw each other often, but she had no idea where their relationship was heading, if anywhere. After nearly three years, Moran still kept her guessing while he got “mad ass” on the side.

  When we reached my apartment building, Clarabel surprised me by parking in a bus stop and turning off the car. We were all talked out, so unless I was mistaken, she wanted to prolong our good-bye. I looked out the windshield, feeling my pulse begin to race. I thought I’d earned at least a farewell pity kiss. Flashing back to the scene of our first kiss in Central Park, my cheeks grew warm with anticipation. I quietly licked my lips and swallowed, waiting for the courage to do it.

  Without looking at me, Clarabel said, “I can hear you blushing.”

  “It’s your imagination,” I said.

  “Hey,” she said softly, and I turned to see her finger beckoning me across the transmission hump.

  Leaning in close, I pressed my lips against hers and closed my eyes, inhaling deeply. When we pulled apart a few seconds later, I said, “I’m . . . never . . . gonna . . . let go . . . of this breath.”

  She faked an elbow to my stomach, then punched my arm with her bony fist after I flinched.

  I grabbed my stinging triceps and said, “Okay, so I won’t miss everything about you.”

  “Get out!” she ordered me.

  Walking past her front bumper on my way to the curb, I realized there was one last thing I wanted to tell her. I stepped around to the driver’s side, laid my hands along the top of her door, and said, “Just so you know, I’d marry you in a second.”

  “That’s sweet,” she replied, patting my hand, “but the only reason I’d marry you back is for the life insurance, ’cuz you’re not long for this world.”

  EPILOGUE

  THREE YEARS LATER, I still wear a lot of heavy equipment to work. My job is dangerous, and I’m under extraordinary pressure. Every day, I see grown men and women walking around in their underwear, drinking in public, and neglecting their children. This all happens in Maui; but I’m not a cop anymore, I’m a scuba instructor.

  Breaking out of the police department was the best decision I’d ever made, curing everything that had ailed me: chronic fatigue, hypertension, intolerance, love handles, you name it. I miss the friends I made on the force, but I don’t miss the feeling that I was making enemies everywhere else. I was no good as a bad cop and not bad enough to be good cop. I’m lucky I made it out alive. And I’m glad I didn’t have to shoot anyone; I never once drew my gun.

  Now, instead of taking people to jail, I take them on fun-filled adventures. And while I’m not cleaning up the streets anymore, I feel like I’m making the world a better place, because at the end of the day, most of my customers tip me in cash and tell me I’ve changed their lives.

  If my divers aren’t satisfied, I don’t take it personally, since it’s usually Mother Nature’s fault. One day, the waves suddenly doubled in size while I was underwater with a teenage diver from Orange County. I didn’t notice their effects until the boy and I surfaced at the end of the dive and found ourselves stuck in a longshore rip current—the muscle-bound, cracked-out perp of the sea.

  After five minutes of strenuous kicking brought us no closer to the beach, the skinny sixteen-year-old went into passive panic. The look of anguish on his sunburned face disappeared as he rolled over on his back, stared into the sky, and went limp. He started floating in the direction of Kaho’olawe, a small, uninhabited island twenty-five miles away across a channel infested with tiger sharks. If I’d followed my police training, I would have just let him go. The NYPD’s position on water safety was that one person drowning was better than two. But this wasn’t the East River, so I turned around and chased my diver. I grabbed him by his tank valve and battled the current again, towing an extra body and an extra set of scuba gear.

  Meanwhile, a couple dozen tourists were lying out on the beach about fifty yards away. Just behind them were my coworkers at the hotel water-sports center. There were dive instructors and surf instructors, sunglass salesmen and timeshare salesmen, cabana boys and cashiers. We had everything but lifeguards, because this was not a county-run beach. My colleagues were all hanging out and talking with each other, and no one seemed to notice us out in the water. I flailed one arm and tried to shout over the crashing surf, but I couldn’t do this for more than a few seconds at a time. As soon as I’d turn to look at the shore, I’d feel us slipping faster into the current.

  Rolling on my back, I cradled the boy between my knees and started shaking him. “Wake up! Wake up!” I screamed at the top of his head. He didn’t respond, so I tipped him over to one side and let him drink a little salt water. He quickly came to, coughing and spitting and cursing me, “What the fuck, man?”

  I said, “Start kicking!” and he did.

  A few minutes later, we hadn’t gotten any closer to the shore, and the boy gave up. He folded his arms across his chest and said he was “over this shit.” Seeing him float away again, I recalled meeting him for the first time. While most hotel guests showed up for a dive in just a bathing suit and flip-flops, the boy wore a ball cap, a Lakers jersey, shiny sweat pants, and a pair of Air Jordans so pristine they belonged in the Smithsonian. In one hand he’d had a cell phone; in the other, an iPod. He’d looked like Vanilla Ice, and he’d acted like he was Jacques Cousteau, even though he’d only dived once before. He hadn’t paid much attention to my predive briefing, when I’d explained the potential hazards of the site. So, later, when I finally talked him into fighting the current again, he said, “We’re supposed to swim perpendicular to the flow to get out of a rip current. Don’t you know that?”

  “Every rip is different,” I reminded him. “If we don’t fight this one, we’ll go farther out or get caught in the waves.”

  “Those waves?” he said. “Those are nothing. I’ve bodysurfed gnarlier ones in California.”

  “No, you haven’t,” I said.

  He started swimming toward the waves, which were not only head-high but breaking over a shallow coral reef. In a few seconds he’d be in the impact zone—the most dangerous place in Hawaii, as well as in Harlem. Unless the boy timed his exit perfectly, the swells would pick him up and smash him down on the razor-sharp reef, over and over and over. He’d have better chances of surviving a shark attack, so I swam after him. I grabbed his tank valve again, then put us back in a fighting position against the current.

  “What are you doing?” he said, jerking his head around to see me. “Let me go.”

  His attitude was starting to make me panic now. I found myself screaming, “I have to get you back, don’t you understand? This is my job!”

  “Jesus. Relax!” he said.

  I said, “
Will you please kick?”

  He didn’t move his legs, so I swam around to his feet and grabbed his fins. I tried pushing him against the current, noticing this gave me a much better vantage point. I could now contact the multitude of possible rescuers on the beach. I shouted myself hoarse, causing a chain reaction of alerts—starting with an observant sunbather and ending with my fellow dive instructor, Max.

  No, I thought, anyone but him. Max was about fifty years old, with as many inches around his waistline. He lumbered past the sleek, twenty-year-old surf instructors and took one of their student boards. For some reason he picked the smallest one available, a seven-foot foam board made for children. He tucked it under his arm and carried it down the shore to a deep-water channel where the waves weren’t breaking. When he laid down on the board, he completely submerged it. He began paddling toward us. Moving with the current, he quickly arrived at our location, but he overshot us by ten feet and kept on moving. Max was getting dragged away from shore faster than we were.

  My lingering cop instinct told me to go after my partner. The dive instructor inside me said take care of the kid first, because if anything happened to him, my career on this island was finished. I looked back and forth between Max and the boy for a few seconds, waiting for the choice to be made for me.

  “I’ll be fine!” Max said while shrinking into the distance. “And ditch his gear, for chrissake!”

  “Yes!” I shouted. Why didn’t I think of that? Streamline the boy; his wet suit would keep him afloat. I got behind him and stripped off his bulky inflatable vest and air tank. When I let his equipment go, I saw he was in passive panic mode again. This meant even less resistance to deal with, so I did not rouse him. I dragged him out of the current in only a few minutes.