Blue on Blue Page 2
Three stories about the kind of cop I didn’t want to be.
Story One. It’s an early-summer evening in 1977, in Brooklyn’s 73rd Precinct, the Seven-Three, and I’m chasing a kid down a cracked and cratered sidewalk lined with stripped cars and boarded-up and burned-out apartment buildings. There’s another Seven-Three cop with me, and we’re both yelling—Police! Stop! Police! Stop!—but of course the kid’s not stopping. He keeps running—and the funny thing is, we’re actually gaining on him.
Ordinarily we wouldn’t have a chance with a kid like this. We’re both wearing full NYPD gear—blue uniforms, hats, belts, guns, extra ammo, radios, nightsticks, handcuffs, flashlights, clunky Knapp shoes—while the kid, a teenager, is wearing a white T-shirt and dark pants and black Chuck Taylor Converse sneakers; he ought to be leaving us in the dust. But the kid’s problem is that over his right shoulder he’s carrying a big black plastic garbage bag filled with swag from a burglary, and it’s holding him back.
Stop! Police! Police! Stop!
We’re almost on him, and now the kid makes a decision. He lets go of the plastic bag and takes off like a shot. Without the bag slowing him down, it’s like he’s turned on the afterburners. No way we’re going to be able to run him down.
And then something dangerous happens—something dangerous to the kid and, as it turns out, dangerous to my future as a cop.
Of course, dangerous occurrences aren’t unusual in the Seven-Three; in this precinct, dangerous occurrences are just another day at the office. The Seven-Three, which covers the Brownsville and Ocean Hill neighborhoods of Brooklyn, is what’s known as an “A” Precinct or an “A” House, meaning it’s a high-crime precinct—and for cops, it’s a hard-luck precinct as well.
There are a lot of good and dedicated cops in the Seven-Three in 1977, but it’s also fair to say that the vast majority of them wish they were somewhere else—almost anyplace else. A few Seven-Three cops like the action, but most wound up there either through bad luck of the draw, like me, or because they’d gotten jammed up with their bosses in another precinct and had been sent there as a kind of unofficial administrative punishment. A precinct like the Seven-Three has a certain end-of-the-line quality to it. The attitude is: So what if my shoes aren’t shined at roll call? So what if I duck that radio run? What are they going to do, send me to the Seven-Three?
Still, even as they wish they were elsewhere, cops in an “A” House like the Seven-Three often take a perverse pride in working in a high-crime precinct. They look down on cops in lower-crime “B” and “C” precincts as something less than real cops, shirkers almost, and they give their own precincts nicknames that reflect the seemingly besieged and forgotten nature of their existence. The South Bronx has the 41st Precinct, the Four-One, which is called “Fort Apache”—later made famous in the Paul Newman movie Fort Apache, The Bronx—and to the west of us, in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, there’s the 77th Precinct, the Seven-Seven, known as “The Alamo.”
At the Seven-Three, we are “Fort Zinderneuf,” or “Fort Z” for short, named after the far-flung and doomed French Foreign Legion outpost in Beau Geste. In the movie, the Legionnaires propped up the bodies of their dead comrades in the parapets to make the hostile tribesmen think the fort was more strongly defended than it really was. And that’s what we are in the Seven-Three: bodies propped in the parapets, trying to hold crime at bay.
And crime—murder, rape, robbery, drug dealing—is the one thing Brownsville has no shortage of. Once a thriving immigrant community, with a commercial section of furniture stores and greengrocers and kosher butcher shops along Pitkin Avenue, over the preceding decades its population has dropped by half—and what’s left is a mile-square portrait of urban catastrophe. Half of the apartment buildings are abandoned, and half of those are blackened hulks, victims of arson or squatters’ cooking and trash fires; the rest are boarded up in a hopeless attempt to keep out the skells and the junkies. Garbage pickup is haphazard at best, stripped cars sit for months without being towed, most of the fire hydrants don’t work; in 1977 the city is still in a financial crisis, and Brownsville, which is almost exclusively black and Hispanic, is the last place the city is going to spend any money it doesn’t have to. The remaining shops along Pitkin Avenue—drugstores, shoe stores, pizzerias, small grocery stores, most of them white-owned—struggle to hang on, but they hide behind heavy steel grates and shutters, even in the daytime, and at the end of the day, ideally before darkness sets in, the owners close up and scurry away, fearing for their lives.
It’s not that there aren’t good people in Brownsville, and in Ocean Hill, too, another neighborhood in the precinct that’s gone to rot. They’re poor people—in 1977, except for the bigger drug dealers, every single person who lives in Brownsville is poor—and they’re good people. But sometimes even the decent people look at us as if the disaster they’re living in is our fault: You’re the cops. Why can’t you do something? As for the bad guys—the players, the dealers, the cornerboys, the gang members—they look at us with pure, undisguised hatred.
The hatred isn’t always passive. Some years earlier a guy had lunged out of an alley near the corner of Saratoga and Blake and virtually decapitated a Seven-Three police officer with a butcher knife. Gunfire is a nightly occurrence, and you constantly have to watch out for “air mail”—bricks or bottles or chunks of concrete or other debris being thrown from a rooftop or a window onto your head. Seven-Three cops even have a little jingle they sing about it: Bricks and bottles rain down on me / Because I work in the Seven-Three!
Sometimes the missiles thrown at us are less dangerous but more disgusting. Once, earlier on, I’m in a sector car with a Seven-Three veteran when we get an Aided call at an occupied three-story apartment house—“Aided” means someone is having some kind of medical problem. When we roll up to the address I start to get out of the car, but my partner grabs my arm and tells me to hold on a second. He’s looking through the car window at the building, up at the roof, and either experience or some sixth sense tells him something’s wrong.
This is a piss-bag, kid, he tells me, and sure enough, a few seconds later—splat!—a waxed brown paper lunch bag full of piss hits the sidewalk next to the car and bursts apart. Someone had telephoned in a phony Aided call just for the sheer joy of throwing a bagful of human urine at us. And it wouldn’t be the last time, either.
Piss-bags raining from the rooftops. Welcome to Fort Z.
Like I said, in 1977 there are a lot of good cops in the Seven-Three. But if you aren’t careful, if you take the crime and the misery and the hatred and the piss-bags personally, there’s a good chance you might start thinking about throwing the piss-bags back.
Which maybe explains what almost happens to the kid with the black plastic garbage bag.
I’m not a complete rookie, I’ve got a few years on the job, but I’m new in the Seven-Three, so I don’t have a “seat,” a permanent assignment; I show up at roll call and I go where they tell me. On this particular early-summer evening I’m assigned to a foot post on Pitkin Avenue between Rockaway and Stone, and the adjoining streets—about six blocks in all. It’s been a quiet tour so far, and when I get to the boundary of my post I see another Seven-Three cop who’s working the adjoining post.
I don’t really know this guy—we’ll call him Officer Romeo—but he’s got a few more years on the job than I do, and he’s been in the Seven-Three longer. I’ve heard some vague talk that he’s got an attitude, and that some cops don’t like to work with him. But it’s just that, vague talk. So I walk across the street to his post to shoot the breeze for a minute.
Hey, what’s goin’ on?
Nothin’ much. You?
Nothin’ much.
Then, while we’re talking, a citizen leans out of a second-story window in the building next to us and calls out: Officer! Officer! They’re robbing the beauty parlor around the corner!
So Romeo and I take off running, and as we round the corner we se
e the kid clambering out of a first-story window with that big plastic bag. We see him, he sees us, and the chase is on.
There are a couple of things I notice at this point. One is that while the guy in the second-story window had said it was a robbery, which is the taking of property from a person by force or intimidation, it actually looks more like a burglary, which is criminal trespass with intent to commit a crime, in this case larceny. There’s a “Closed” sign on the beauty parlor door, and the kid with the bag came out a window, so there’s probably nobody inside the beauty parlor, which means it’s not a robbery. Burglary and robbery are both felonies, but in practice burglary is a less serious crime.
And the other thing I notice is that after the kid drops the black plastic bag and starts to pull away from us, Officer Romeo draws his gun, stops running, and takes a combat stance with his .38 revolver pointed at the running kid’s back. He’s taking careful aim.
And I’m thinking: He’s going to shoot this kid.
No way. I stop, too, and I reach out and push Romeo’s gun toward the ground, yelling, Don’t shoot! DON’T SHOOT! And Romeo gives me a look that’s first surprise, and then pure rage.
What the fuck are you doing? he yells at me.
What are you doing? I yell back. We can’t shoot! He’s just a kid!
Fuck you! He’s getting away!
In the old days it might have been different. Back then, under the law, a cop could in some circumstances legally shoot a suspect who was fleeing the scene of a dangerous or violent crime such as an armed robbery. But in the early 1970s both state law and NYPD policy began changing. Now the Department allows cops to shoot only if the suspect poses an imminent threat of death or serious injury to the cop or someone else. The short form is that in most cases you can’t shoot a perp who’s running away.
Still, there are gray areas—there always are. If Romeo shoots that kid, maybe he can claim that he thought the kid had reached for a weapon in his waistband. If he tells a good enough story, maybe the shooting will fly, especially if his partner, meaning me, backs him up.
Fortunately for the kid, and for Romeo, and for me, it doesn’t happen that way. As Romeo and I are arguing, out of the corner of my eye I see the kid duck into an abandoned apartment building a half block down the street. Argument temporarily forgotten, Romeo and I run down the street and into the building.
Like the hundreds of other abandoned buildings in Brownsville, this one is a mess. The mongo men, the scrap metal scavengers, have already been through it, stripping out everything they can get a few cents on the pound for—plumbing, electrical wires, kitchen sinks, doorknobs and hinges, radiators. The skells and the junkies have camped out in it, throwing their garbage in the corners, sleeping or shooting up in one room and taking their dumps and pisses on the floor in another room—assuming they had the initiative to go to another room. The smell in the building is beyond belief—so bad, in fact, that even the junkies and bums have abandoned it.
With our flashlights out—guns out, too, just in case—Romeo and I start a room-to-room, looking for the kid. In a second-story apartment, in a trash pile with a hinge-less door dragged on top of it, I see a black Chuck Taylor Converse sneaker poking out—and the foot inside it is shaking.
All right, buddy, I call out, we got you. Come out of there, and let us see your hands.
So the kid crawls out, covered in trash, hands up and still shaking. Later I find out he’s sixteen. He’s probably expecting some street justice for having run from us—not a savage beating, but at least a few thumps. And maybe under other circumstances, with another cop, his expectations might be justified. Remember, this is 1977. And this is the Seven-Three.
Please don’t hurt me, the kid says.
I don’t feel sorry for this kid. He’s old enough to know better, and chances are this isn’t the first crime he’s committed, and it won’t be the last. But I don’t take his running away from us personally.
We aren’t going to hurt you, I tell him. But you’re under arrest.
So we search the kid—no weapons—and then cuff him and start marching him back to the precinct. On the way we grab the black plastic bag, and inside it there’s a bunch of old hair dryers and brushes and scissors and half-empty bottles of shampoo—junk. The whole score probably isn’t worth ten bucks.
At the precinct, Romeo takes the arrest—it was his post, so it’s his collar—and starts processing the kid into the juvenile justice system. I go back to walking my post.
And that should have been the end of it. Except that over the next couple days I notice that some of the other cops in Fort Z are looking at me sideways. Like I said, I’m pretty new in the precinct, and they’re looking at me like they’re wondering what kind of cop I am.
It turns out that after we brought the kid to the precinct, after I had gone back on post, Romeo started bad-mouthing me to other cops. I didn’t back him up, he said. I was weak, he said. I was a pussy, he said, a coward.
Calling a cop a coward is the second-worst accusation you can make against him, especially in a precinct like Fort Z. If other cops think you don’t have the guts to fight when fighting is necessary, or that you won’t back up a partner, they won’t want to work with you, or even talk to you. You’ll be shunned, ostracized. The only way you could be more shunned and ostracized is if the other cops think you’re a cheese-eating rat, an informer, a guy who squeals on other cops.
But what am I going to do? I can’t go around saying: Hey, I’m no coward! That in itself would seem pathetic and weak. All I can do is keep my mouth shut and do my job.
The next day the Seven-Three delegate to the PBA—Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the cop union—catches me in the locker room. He’s a veteran, been there forever. He’s heard the talk. So he asks me: Hey, kid, what really happened out there?
Talking to your PBA rep is a little like talking to a priest. He isn’t going to tell the bosses what you say; you aren’t ratting anybody out. So I tell him the whole story, and when I’m done he pats me on the knee and says: Well, kid, you probably saved yourself a trip to the grand jury—meaning that if Officer Romeo had shot that kid in the back, I probably would have been called before a criminal grand jury to testify.
I don’t tell the PBA rep this, but if that had happened, I know what I would have done. I would have told the truth—that the kid was running away, that I hadn’t seen a weapon, that in my opinion there was no reason to shoot. Even if it ruins my career as a working cop, even if in other cops’ eyes it makes me a cheese-eating rat, I’ll tell the truth.
After that I don’t hear any more about it. The PBA rep doesn’t really know me, but I guess he knows Officer Romeo, and he must have passed the word that I’m okay. I don’t get any more sideways looks.
As it turns out, I don’t stay in the Seven-Three that much longer—and neither does Romeo, although for different reasons. A few years later I hear that he’d gotten jammed up for shooting and wounding a family member during a domestic dispute and was kicked out of the Department.
Of course, in the context of the Seven-Three, this incident with the running kid was no big deal. Romeo hadn’t actually done anything illegal, nobody got shot, we made the arrest.
But it made me realize something about myself. I knew that no matter how many piss-bags rained down from rooftops, no matter how much crime and violence and hatred I saw, I wasn’t going to let the job turn me into the kind of cop who would shoot a running teenager in the back over a two-bit burglary. And if I saw another cop do something like that, no matter what the consequences, I wasn’t going to cover it up.
That wasn’t the kind of cop I wanted to be.
* * *
Story Two. It’s the spring of 1974 and I’m fresh out of the Academy, assigned to Manhattan Traffic Area, which covers Manhattan south of Ninety-Sixth Street from the East River to the Hudson. I’m standing in a coffee shop on Second Avenue, arguing with the owner about whether I have to pay for a cup of coffee.
This little drama had started just a few minutes earlier. It’s a rainy day, so my partner and I are in an RMP—Radio Mobile Patrol, a marked patrol car—in uniform, riding around and responding to radio calls. At one point, my partner, Ed, a classmate from the Academy, and I decide to get a cup of coffee.
Well, it’s coffee for Ed. For me it’s hot tea, milk no sugar. Yeah, I know. Cops are supposed to drink coffee, the blacker and more viscous the better; if your spoon won’t stand up straight in it, it’s not really coffee. But I like tea.
Anyway, we pull the car in front of a coffee shop on Second Avenue. It’s my turn to buy, so Ed, who’s driving, stays in the car while I go in.
It’s a small place, half a dozen stools at the counter, a few booths along the wall; there are maybe ten customers in there. I walk up to the counter and give the counterman/owner my order—large coffee, black, extra sugar, large tea, milk no sugar, to go, please—and he turns around and walks over to the coffee machine. A minute later he comes back with two steaming Styrofoam cups.
This is 1974, remember, so a cup of coffee costs a dime, and the same for tea. I don’t have any coins, so while the counterman is getting the coffee I fish a dollar bill out of my wallet. But when I try to hand him the dollar, he puts his hands in the air and steps back like the dollar bill is radioactive.
Oh, no, Officer, he says. For you, no charge. Free.
Thanks, I tell him, but I’ll pay. Just give me the change.
No, no, no, he says. Free. No charge.
Thanks, but no, really, I want to pay.
Hey, like I said, no charge.
I know this coffee shop owner isn’t trying to bribe me with the free coffee. He’s not trying to give me free coffee because he’s afraid if he doesn’t I’ll start hanging summonses on every car that’s parked in front of his shop. He wants to give me the free coffee because he likes having uniformed cops in his shop. It’s like an insurance policy against crime. Even the most brain-dead mope isn’t going to try to rob a place that has cop cars parked out front and a steady stream of guys in blue going in and out. And for most cops, free coffee or a discount on a meal is just part of the job; they don’t give it a second thought.