Blue on Blue Page 5
In those days, Bushwick was about 90 percent white, while Bed-Stuy was largely African American—which meant that for Bushwick kids to venture into Bed-Stuy to go to school was a little dicey. I always thought it was more a matter of turf—Hey, what are those Bushwick boys doing in Bed-Stuy?—than it was about race. At least it was for me. I never heard my parents utter a single racial epithet, in English or Italian, and I didn’t do it, either. Still, the St. John’s kids from Bushwick always traveled to and from school in groups of four or five, and while there were a few scuffles with the local kids, it was nothing serious—unlike now, back then kids didn’t routinely shoot other kids.
(That would change, in Bushwick as in so many neighborhoods. In the 1970s and ’80s Bushwick became increasingly black and Hispanic, but while most of the white families moved out, my parents stayed; they had no problem with minority people. Neither did I, but I did worry about the increasing crime rate. That hit home one day in 1991, when I was a deputy inspector in the Sixth Precinct and I got a call from a cop who had responded to an Aided call at my parents’ apartment. My mother had found my dad in his easy chair, dead of a massive heart attack at age eighty-one. When I rushed over to help my mother the street was swarming with cops and patrol cars and ambulances; there’d been a drug-related shootout on the corner by my parents’ building that left three young men DOA. The shootings didn’t have anything to do with my father’s death, but it was only then that I finally convinced my mother to move out to my neighborhood in Queens.)
Maybe it was the Catholic school environment, but the things that for most young people defined the 1960s—marijuana, LSD, long hair, acid rock, antiwar protests—pretty much passed me by. My most prominent act of rebellion was a mustache that I started growing when I was sixteen. Like the other guys I hung out with, I was into sports—baseball, football, roller hockey—and while I wasn’t particularly outstanding in any of them, I was enthusiastic. (In roller hockey, for example, I was a third-line defenseman, but only because the team didn’t have a fourth line; if it had, I would have been a fourth-line defenseman.) Our idea of a great time was going to Knicks and Rangers games at the old Madison Square Garden, which was a fifteen-cent subway ride away. Except for a few illicit beers in the park—which I never really developed a taste for—I didn’t drink or smoke, not even cigarettes, much less joints; a couple guys in my crowd who did start smoking dope were quickly shunned. As for Vietnam, when I was seventeen a Marine recruiter almost got me and some of my buddies to sign up—he told us we might even be officer material!—and I actually talked my dad into signing the enlistment papers. But then my mother got wind of it and he changed his mind. A high draft lottery number ensured that I wasn’t called up.
And I still wanted to be a cop. Even though you couldn’t join the Department until you were twenty-one, at age eighteen you could sign on as a paid NYPD “trainee”—no gun, no shield, and you weren’t a sworn officer; you’d do clerical work, or answer phones at a precinct. I figured I could work as a trainee and go to college at the same time.
So on a Saturday morning when I was seventeen I went down to George Washington High School in Brooklyn to take the NYPD written exam so I could get my name on the hiring list. Something like twenty-five thousand people took the NYPD test that year, of whom about fifteen thousand passed—all of them vying for about three thousand openings a year in the NYPD.
(I also took the tests for New York Housing Police and Transit Police—back then they were both separate from the NYPD—and the Fire Department and the Sanitation Department. The idea was that if the NYPD wasn’t hiring, I could take a job in another city agency and then “roll over” to the NYPD, with the time in Fire or Sanitation being added to my NYPD retirement pension. When you work for the city, you think about angles like that.)
I scored pretty high on the NYPD test and wound up Number 440 on the waiting list. I also had to pass medical and psychological tests—two arms, two legs, no heart murmurs, uncorrected vision 20/30 or better, not demonstrably crazy. Check, check, and check. I also had to take a physical fitness test—chin-ups, lift sixty pounds with each hand, get through an obstacle course, get over a seven-foot wall. For me it was easy. The background check was a little harder. You had to fill out a form, some twenty pages long, listing almost every place you’d ever been, every person you’d ever known, every job you’d ever had, every school you had attended (with documentation to match), every traffic or parking ticket you’d ever gotten, with an explanation as to why you’d gotten it and proof that it had been paid. It was pretty extensive.
Unfortunately, as I was going through this months-long process the NYPD eliminated the trainee program, which meant I had to wait until I was twenty-one to be hired. In the meantime, with a couple of small scholarships and money I’d saved up I had enrolled at Long Island University–Brooklyn as a psychology major. I guess the idea of getting into people’s heads appealed to me.
It was at LIU that I first realized that not everyone shared my admiration for cops in general, and the NYPD in particular. This was at the height of the anti–Vietnam War, anti-establishment protest era, and while LIU-B wasn’t exactly a hotbed of activism, it wasn’t unusual to hear the word “pigs” being applied to cops. As part of my NYPD application process I had to supply reference letters from people in responsible positions, so I asked one of my professors, Douglas Stafford, to give me one. Professor Stafford, a Harvard PhD, was a great guy, a great teacher, an African American who wore his hair in cornrows and sometimes wore a dashiki to class, and I admired him. But when I asked for a reference letter, he tried to talk me out of it. Why would anyone with a college education want to be a cop? A job like that was beneath me, he said. He finally relented on the reference letter, but it struck a nerve. Of course I’d known people who didn’t like cops, but I’d never known anybody I respected who actually looked down on them.
Throughout high school I had always worked at a variety of part-time and summer jobs, and I continued that in college—driving a truck, working in a warehouse, even driving the “morgue wagon” for a local hospital, transporting dead bodies from the hospital to the Kings County morgue. One of the best jobs I had was as a “pin chaser”—technically, a mechanic’s apprentice—at the Hart Lanes bowling alley on Hart Street. I mopped floors, conditioned the alleys, oiled the automatic pin-setting machines, manned the front desk. The pay wasn’t great, but there were certain fringe benefits. Bowling was a big thing with young people back then, so every Friday and Saturday night the place would be packed with girls, all wearing their best dresses, and more interested in flirting with the boys than in knocking down pins. One shift in February 1971 stands out in my memory. A group of young girls came in to go bowling, among them a beautiful girl named Arlene. Seven years later Arlene and I got married, and while you never know about youthful marriages, I think this one is going to work out. We’ve been married for almost forty years now.
And then, finally, in October 1973, a couple of weeks after my twenty-first birthday, I got the call.
Hey, kid, the voice on the other end of the line says, you still want to be a cop?
Yes!
Good, the voice on the phone says. Report to the Academy at nine a.m. Monday morning. Click!
I was still about ten credits short of graduating from LIU, but that was no problem. The university would give me some academic credits for getting through the Academy, and I could take PE or something to accumulate the rest. Becoming a police officer was also going to cost me some significant money. The only thing the Department gave you was your shield; everything else—summer and winter uniforms, hat, belt, handcuffs, nightstick, even your gun—you had to pay for yourself, at a total cost of about a thousand dollars. And those were 1973 dollars.
But none of that mattered. The important thing was that my childhood dream was coming true.
Finally I was going to get out there and catch bad guys with Officer Mike.
* * *
It’
s my sixth week at the Academy, test day, and I’m hunched over a battered desk in a classroom, trying to remember the ten court-approved exceptions to the search warrant requirement. I know I know this, I just have to think for a minute—and then it comes to me.
SPACESHIPS!
That’s right, the ten court-approved exceptions that allow a police officer to conduct a search without a warrant are: Search incidental to lawful arrest; illegal items in Plain view; the Auto exception that allows searches of vehicles that may move contraband away from the scene; Consent of the person or owner of the property to be searched; Emergency; Stop, question, and possibly frisk if there’s reasonable belief a person has a weapon; Hot pursuit; Inventory of property in a vehicle or structure that must be secured; Public place such as a park trash can or a storm drain; and of course, Special circumstances, which means you use your best judgment and take your chances.
Or how about this one: What constitutes grand larceny? Easy. Under New York law in 1973, grand larceny is C-GRAPES—that is, Credit card, theft of; Gun, theft of; theft of government Records; theft of Amount over $1,000; theft of any amount from a Person; Extortion; and finally, theft of Secret scientific material. C-GRAPES!
The acronyms just keep coming. The seven circumstances under which a police officer must file separate complaint reports for an incident involving two or more victims is A-SHARK. The six conditions that require an immediate search for a missing person is, predictably, MISSING. The six basic elements that must be contained in every incident report is NEOTWY. And on and on. Any illusions we recruits might have had that our days in the Academy would be primarily devoted to cool stuff like shooting and learning how to put handcuffs on bad guys is quickly dispelled when we’re first issued our personal copies of the Patrol Guide, a four-inch-thick, single-spaced, double-sided loose-leaf binder containing thousands upon thousands of rules, regulations, and procedures. Looking at the Patrol Guide, one of the recruits asks the instructor: Sir, how much of this will we be expected to know? And the instructor says: All of it.
He’s dead serious. The Academy motto is “Enter to Learn, Go Forth to Serve,” but it’s pretty clear there’s a lot of learning to be done before there’s going to be any going forth.
At the time, the Academy was housed in an eight-story building on East Twentieth Street in Gramercy Park that from the outside looked more like a corporate headquarters than a training ground for new cops. (The NYPD has since built a new Academy in Queens.) On our first day, dressed in light blue shirts and blue knit pants we bought at Macy’s, we take the oath as PPOs—probationary police officers—swearing to uphold and defend the constitutions of the United States and the State of New York, this in return for a salary of $229 a week, before deductions. (Previous generations of male recruits were called “patrolmen,” and female recruits “policewomen,” but earlier in 1973 the titles were changed to the non-gender-specific “police officer.”) Although technically we now have the same authorities and powers that regular cops have, it’s only technically. We aren’t given NYPD shields, and certainly not our guns, and our recruit uniforms bear no insignia that might identify us as police officers in the making. The last thing the Department wants is for some citizen on the street to mistake us for real cops and ask us to intervene in some dispute; the liability potential could be enormous.
It’s been said that the Academy is a cross between boot camp and kindergarten. I don’t know about the kindergarten part—I never heard of four-year-olds having to memorize SPACESHIPS—but the boot camp part is accurate, especially for the first couple of months. Stand at attention, brace against the wall, wipe that silly smile off your face—the Academy instructors are on us all day long.
Every day at muster time we assemble by companies on the roof for inspection, each company comprising about thirty recruits, with a dozen companies in the class. (The twenty-five men and five women in my company, Company 61, are all from Brooklyn, while other companies are composed of recruits from Queens, Staten Island, and so on; it makes it easier for carpooling and outside training.) The company sergeant, usually a recruit with military training, calls us to order—Company, ATTEN-HUT! Dress right, DRESS! and so on—and then an instructor slowly walks through the ranks, handing out the demerits known as “gigs.” Shoes not shined—gig! Out of uniform—gig! Sideburns too long—gig! Too many gigs and you get a command discipline, the first step to being shown the door.
There’s this one instructor, Officer Fahy, who is maniacal on the subject of recruits being close shaven. He likes to take out a business card and rub it across your cheek and if it makes a scraping sound—gig! On the first day Officer Fahy takes me aside and warns me that the mustache I’m so proud of is going to be trouble, that the regulations on mustaches are particularly strict and detailed, and that I will almost certainly suffer gigs as a result; he makes it sound like I have a time bomb on my upper lip. Save yourself some trouble, kid, he says, lose the mustache. That very night I shave it off. That’s how much I want to be a cop.
Training is divided into four basic disciplines: Law, which covers state and city criminal and civil codes; Police Science, which is basically the procedures and regulations in the Patrol Guide; Social Science, which covers race relations, psychology, how to deal with EDPs, and so on; and the Physical School, also known as “Gym,” which in addition to physical fitness covers first aid, water rescues, firearms training, baton tactics, takedown methods, and basic self-defense. Today they teach recruits a form of martial arts, but back then it was boxing. The boxing instructor was an Academy legend, an officer we called “Mr. Clean”—never to his face, of course—because he looked just like the guy in the household cleaner ads: shaved head, muscles bulging out of his shirt, everything but the earring. Mr. Clean couldn’t turn us into a bunch of Sonny Listons, but he taught us a few tricks.
For me the physical demands of the Academy are a breeze; sometimes I’d get home from a long day in class and run a mile or two on my own, just to stay sharp. But others find the running, push-ups, sit-ups, and climbing over eight-foot-high walls a little tougher, especially guys who struggle with their weight. In typical Academy fashion, these unfortunates are given an acronym, SUMOs, like the massively obese Japanese wrestlers, which stands for Students Under Maximum Observation. The instructors are merciless on them.
One thing almost everyone enjoys is firearms training. I had fired a rifle before, but like most kids in New York, which has strict laws regulating handgun ownership, I had never fired a handgun. We were allowed to choose either a Smith & Wesson or Colt .38-caliber six-shot revolver with a four-inch barrel. I chose the Smith & Wesson—it cost me a hundred dollars—and I carried it for more than twenty years, until like most other NYPD cops I switched to a 9-millimeter semiautomatic. (NYPD cops are required to be armed while off-duty as well as on, so for my off-duty gun I bought an S&W .38 with a shorter, two-inch barrel.)
Our shooting training mostly takes place at the NYPD’s Rodman’s Neck Shooting Range, a sprawling outdoor facility in a far-flung and isolated section of the Bronx. We spend two weeks there, starting with the basic mechanics of shooting stationary targets at ranges of seven, fifteen, and twenty-five yards; pretty soon I’m scoring 100 percent. Later we move on to more complex elements of tactical shooting—cover and concealment, combat tactics, shoot/don’t-shoot scenarios.
One bit of training advice that made an impression on me was that if we were confronting a perpetrator with a handgun, when taking a combat stance we should shift a half step to the left, the theory being that an untrained right-handed shooter will usually pull the gun slightly to his left, sending the bullet safely past you on your right. Of course, if the perpetrator happens to be among the 10 percent of Americans who are left-handed, this would mean we’d be stepping directly into the bullet’s path—in which case, the instructors cheerfully assured us, the Department will give us a really nice funeral.
In general I thought the academic and physical training we got was ab
out as good as it could be when you only had six months to absorb so much material. Most of the instructors were excellent, cops who really knew their stuff and felt passionate about making sure we knew it, too. But strangely enough, given the fact that it had only been a couple of years since the Knapp Commission held its public hearings, the one subject that I thought got relatively short shrift was police corruption.
It wasn’t that the Academy ignored the subject. Instructors often lectured us on integrity, our duty as police officers to be honest, the laws concerning bribery and extortion as they applied to police. A guy from the Internal Affairs Division comes out and warns us that if we take even so much as a free cup of coffee, we’ll be on a slippery slope toward worse corruption and eventual dismissal and disgrace. He tells us that when we get out to the precincts we shouldn’t listen to the old guys who’ll tell us that it’s okay to accept a “tip” from a tow-truck driver or a free bottle of Scotch from a store owner at Christmastime. He shows us an old black-and-white training film called I Used to Be a Cop, about a former police officer who got caught taking a bribe and how it cost him not only his freedom and his job but the loss of his wife, his family, his self-respect; the “star” of the film was reportedly an actual corrupt former cop who had agreed to appear in the movie as part of a plea deal.
So yes, they talk to us about corruption. But even with the IAD guy, it doesn’t seem as if their hearts are really in it. It seems as if the instructors are embarrassed, that corruption in the NYPD is an impolite subject, like venereal disease, and while they have to warn us about it, the less said the better. Certainly we recruits don’t talk much about corruption. We have other, more exciting things to think about.