Blue on Blue Page 6
One of them is finally getting our NYPD shields.
NYPD police officer shields have numbers that range from one to five digits; the lower the number, the older it is. Although the shields themselves are periodically retired and melted down when they get too scratched and banged up, the numbers are constantly being recycled. Whenever a PO retires or is promoted—detectives and sergeants and above have different-styled shields—his or her shield number (and the shield itself, if it’s still serviceable) goes back into a pool, to be more or less randomly handed out to a new police officer. Cynics in the Academy claim that a five-digit shield number is preferable to a two- or three-digit one, because the five-digit number will be harder for a citizen to remember if he wants to file a complaint against you.
But I never bought into that. I wanted a number with some history to it, and I got it—Shield Number 791. Later I found out that the number had first been worn by Patrolman William O. Jennings in 1898, shortly after Manhattan consolidated with the surrounding boroughs to become the modern New York City. Later the number had been worn by a cop who died while in service (although not in the line of duty), by another cop who was promoted to sergeant, by a cop in the 1940s whose name was followed by the racist parenthetical notation “(Colored),” and, most recently, both the number and the actual shield itself had been worn by a policewoman—or rather, a female police officer. The number made me feel connected to a lot of NYPD history—some of it good, some of it bad.
(When I become a sergeant, I will turn in that 791 shield for a sergeant’s shield. But NYPD policy allows you to reserve a shield number for a family member if it’s available, so in 2001, when my oldest son graduates from the Academy, he’ll be wearing that same shield, number 791, that I had worn a quarter century earlier.)
But perhaps the biggest day for recruits at the Academy, next to graduation itself, is the day just before the end of our training when we get our duty assignments. The instructors put up a sheet on the bulletin board with all of our names on it, each name followed by a precinct number or command designation that will determine our fates for at least the next few years.
The assignments aren’t completely random. Recruits who had served as company sergeants are usually rewarded with their choice of precincts. Or if you have a “hook,” a connection within the Department or high up in City Hall, strings could be pulled to get you the precinct you want. In fact, one of the most coveted precinct assignments, Midtown North in Manhattan, which covers the Theater District and Radio City Music Hall, is nicknamed “Fort Hook.” (To this day, the Department will officially deny that there is such a thing as the hook. The long-standing joke is: The hook does not exist; long live the hook!)
As for the rest of us, the Department generally tries to put us at least relatively close to where we live. If you live in the Upper Bronx, they usually won’t assign you to a precinct across the city on Staten Island. But the biggest demand for fresh police bodies is always in the high-crime precincts—the Seven-Three, the Four-One, the Seven-Five, and so on—and that’s where a lot of the recruits go. Some of them are eager to get into high-crime precincts on the theory that they’ll learn a lot very quickly—which they will. But others aren’t so sure.
So a recruit might look at the assignment list and say to an instructor: Sir, it says I’m going to the Seven-Three, what’s that like? If the instructor is feeling merciful he might say: Oh, it’ll be okay. And if he isn’t feeling merciful he might say something like, The Seven-Three? Too bad, kid. It was nice knowing ya.
For me it’s different. I don’t get a precinct. The words after my name on the list are “Manhattan Traffic Area.”
It isn’t a complete surprise. Unlike a lot of recruits who hadn’t gotten their driver’s licenses until they entered the Academy—most city kids didn’t have cars—I’ve been driving since I was seventeen. (At the time I had a beautiful 1969 red Oldsmobile Cutlass convertible that I’d bought with money saved from part-time and summer jobs.) Even more unusual, I have a motorcycle endorsement on my license that I’d gotten after I bought a 1970 Triumph 650cc motorcycle from my cousin. So I was one of the recruits called in when a lieutenant from Manhattan Traffic came out to the Academy to talk to us about applying for the Manhattan Traffic Area Scooter Task Force.
It sounded like fun to me—and as it turned out, it was.
So I’m happy with my assignment—almost as happy as I am a couple weeks later when eight hundred recruits assemble at the National Guard Armory on Lexington Avenue, resplendent in our new blue uniforms and white gloves, our shields shining brilliantly on our chests. My mother and father are there, proud as could be, along with thousands of other proud mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles and cousins. The mayor gives a speech, and then the police commissioner gives a speech, and then we throw our white gloves in the air and that’s it.
We are cops.
* * *
The very first words my training officer, Officer Lenny Swindell, says to me are: I guess they told you at the Academy that us older guys are all corrupt, that we’re all on the take, right? I guess they told you rookies that we’re all a bunch of hairbags and not to listen to us and pick up our bad habits, right? (“Hairbags” is the term for cynical and lazy veteran cops.)
Well, uh, not exactly, I tell him. Actually, they had warned us about exactly that, but I’m not about to admit it to Officer Swindell.
Don’t believe it, Officer Swindell says. Out here we do the job the way it’s supposed to be done, got it? I’m going to teach you how to do that.
And he did. Lenny was a great guy, and a good, honest cop, and he taught me a lot. In fact, whenever I think about what epitomizes the NYPD, I don’t necessarily think of a squad detective tracking down a killer or narcotics guys kicking down a door in a raid. I think of cops like Lenny, walking a beat in the cold rain, giving first aid to an injured pedestrian until the EMTs arrive, breaking up an argument on a sidewalk, telling a double-parked driver to move it along—the day-to-day, unglamorous police work that keeps the city running.
Keeping Manhattan running was what Manhattan Traffic was about. Sometimes I’d be on foot patrol, sometimes in bad weather they’d put a couple of us in a patrol car. A few months after I got there I went through training for the Scooter Task Force, a group of two dozen cops who rode around on Lambrettas or Cushmans, taking radio calls, responding to traffic accidents, working traffic at sports or entertainment events—and yes, writing tickets.
Believe it or not, most cops hate writing parking and traffic summonses; sometimes it’s because they’d rather be arresting real criminals, and sometimes it’s just because they’re lazy. Either way, they’ll write as few tickets as they can get away with. But in Manhattan Traffic, writing tickets is a big part of the job—and as Lenny says, If ya got a job, do the job! I wrote a lot of tickets.
No, we didn’t have quotas. Requiring cops to meet ticket quotas is specifically prohibited under state law. However, the Department is allowed to set “performance goals,” and although the sergeant or the lieutenant will never say precisely how many tickets per month he wants out of you, he will let you know if the number of tickets you are writing fails to measure up to expectations. But I never had a problem meeting my quo— I mean, achieving my performance goals.
Drivers will often try to talk their way out of tickets, and if they have a good story, convincingly told—Officer, I’m on my way to the hospital, my wife’s having a baby, here’s the phone number, you can check it out—they could get a break from me. Same thing for a grandma on Social Security driving a ten-year-old beater on her way to church. Like they taught us at the Academy, a good officer uses discretion.
On the other hand, a guy could also talk his way into a ticket. If, as often happened, a driver would curse at me—You mother-effer, why don’t you shove your ticket up your ass?—I’d be sure to write “M/F, shove ticket” on my copy of the summons so if he went to court I could tell the judge what he said. And while I did
n’t do it, some cops would bend the license of a cursing driver to signal the next cop who stopped him that the guy was a jerk. A cop might say: Yeah, the guy called me an asshole, so I bent him. Of course, that’s against Department policy—but cops are human, too.
While trying to talk your way out of a ticket is fine, trying to buy your way out is not. Usually it wasn’t an outright bribe attempt, but instead something like, Officer, can I just pay the fine right now? How much is it? Absolutely not, I’d tell them—and at that point, any chance they had of me giving them a break on the ticket went out the window.
But I remember one guy who wouldn’t take no for an answer. He’s a young guy from Colombia, and he speaks good but heavily accented English. I pull him over for blowing a red light, and when he hands me his license there’s a ten-dollar bill wrapped around it. What’s that? I say. It’s so I don’t get the ticket, he says. Take it back, I say, and I proceed to give him a stern lecture about how maybe that’s the way they do things in Bogotá, but not here in New York City—at least not with me. But when I step back to the scooter to write out the ticket, the guy gets out of his car and comes toward me, waving the ten and saying, Don’t give me a ticket, take this!
That’s it, buddy. You’re getting the ticket—and you’re under arrest. I take him to the precinct and process him for attempted bribery of a public official, a felony, and then I head back out on patrol. The funny thing is, a little later the guy’s uncle shows up at the precinct, red-faced and waving his arms, demanding to know why his nephew is in jail. The desk sergeant explains that the nephew tried to bribe a police officer—and the uncle says: So what’s the problem? He didn’t offer him enough? The desk sergeant throws him out.
The next day I had to appear at the bribery perp’s arraignment, but I was never called to testify at trial, so I assume that as usual the legal system let him off on a reduced charge, or maybe no charge at all. That kind of attitude ticked me off. A cop would suffer serious consequences for taking a bribe—dismissal from the Department, maybe even jail time—so why shouldn’t a citizen suffer serious consequences for offering one?
Still, the attempted bribery arrest worked out for me. After the Knapp Commission the Department started making a big thing out of rewarding cops who arrested people for trying to bribe them—See? Our cops don’t take bribes!—so I was called down to headquarters by the Integrity Review Board, an ad hoc group of senior commanders who reviewed integrity cases. Since the attempted bribe was only ten bucks they weren’t going to give me a promotion or a transfer to a better assignment, as they sometimes did in bigger attempted bribery cases; I guess they figured that turning down a lousy ten-dollar bribe showed a little less integrity than turning down a thousand-dollar one. But they did give me a medal for “Excellent Police Duty,” the Department’s lowest-level commendation. I accepted it—it was worth something like an eighth of a point on promotions—but I always thought it was kind of strange that the Department gave you a reward for not taking a bribe. It seemed to me that not taking bribes was the minimum standard for a police officer, and thus nothing special.
Of course, working Manhattan Traffic wasn’t as exciting as working one of the high-crime precincts—although “high-crime” was a relative term. Today a lot of people have forgotten what it was like in Manhattan and the rest of New York City in the mid-1970s, just how bad crime was back then. In 1975 there were just under 1,700 murders in the city, more than 600 of them in Manhattan alone, and more than 90,000 robberies. (By 2014 the number of murders citywide had dropped to 335, and robberies to about 16,000.) The point is that back then there were plenty of opportunities for a cop to make good collars, no matter where he worked.
I made some. Once I was on scooter patrol on the Bowery and this old guy runs up to me, crying, and says: Officer, officer, they robbed me! He tells me he just cashed his Social Security check at a check-cashing place and when he came out two guys had strong-armed him and taken his money, about forty bucks. He’d seen which way they went, so I put him in the three-wheeled scooter and as we pass a side street we see three guys standing there, two of them of normal height but the other one a really tall skinny guy, maybe six-four or -five. That’s them! the old guy says. Not the tall one, the other two!
So I radio for backup and park the scooter and the old man in a safe place. Then I walk up the side street with my gun unholstered and at my side, just in case. To the two shorter guys I say: You and you, against the wall! To the tall guy I say: You, get outta here! and he takes off. As I’m searching the two robbers one of them says: Hey, man, how come you let him (the tall guy) go? For a moment I think about telling him that the Department has a new policy, that we aren’t arresting tall people this month, and then waiting to see how long it takes for that rumor to get back to me. But then I decide that, given the limited intellectual capacity of your average perp, a rumor like that might result in a wave of crimes committed by gullible tall guys who actually think they’re immune from arrest. So what I say to the robber is: Shut up!
The backup arrives and we take the robbers to the precinct for processing. Later I heard that the two robbers disappeared after they were ROR’ed—“released–own recognizance,” meaning no bail was required. In a city with ninety thousand robberies, that’s how seriously the courts took robbing an old man of his Social Security money. Still, it was a solid felony collar, and a satisfying one. Two bad guys had been taken off the street, at least for a few hours, and the old man got his money back. That collar and others were the reason I had wanted to become a cop.
The job had its dangers. Although today it’s still dangerous to be a New York cop, in the mid-1970s it was even more so. In 1974 and ’75 fourteen NYPD cops were killed in the line of duty, all but two of them killed by gunfire; hundreds of others were injured by guns, knives, clubs, fists, car accidents, vicious dogs—you name it. (In 2013, by comparison, except for 9/11-related illness deaths, no NYPD officer died in the line of duty. Sadly, in 2014 four NYPD officers died in the line of duty, two of them shot and killed while they sat in their patrol car on a Brooklyn street.)
You never knew if a bullet might be waiting for you around the corner—literally. One night I’m on patrol with my partner, Bill, both of us riding Lambrettas. We’re eastbound on Thirty-Fourth Street approaching Lexington when Bill asks me if I want Chinese food for meal. (It didn’t matter if it was breakfast, lunch, or dinner, in the NYPD it was and is always called “meal.”) I figure, no, I’m going to spend meal back at the precinct, studying for the sergeant’s test, but I’ll meet up with Bill back at the station house. I peel off left and Bill goes straight. And then it couldn’t have been more than a couple minutes later that I hear the call over the radio from dispatch—Ten-thirteen, corner Three-Three and Two, shots fired, officer down! A 10-13 or “Signal 13” means “officer needs assistance”; it’s the one call that will make every cop in the area drop whatever he’s doing and race to the scene, which is exactly what I do. When I get to Thirty-Third Street and Second Avenue Bill’s sitting on the ground, bleeding from a gunshot wound in the shoulder.
It turns out that after I peeled off, Bill drove on a couple of blocks and then stopped at a red light by a drugstore on the corner. An armed robber walks out of the drugstore after holding up the clerk, sees Bill, thinks he’s responding to a robbery call from the drugstore, and pegs a shot at him, hitting him in the shoulder and knocking him off his scooter. An off-duty NYPD cop who happens to be passing by sees what happens and immediately chases down and collars the shooter. Fortunately, the shooter had a small-caliber handgun, a .22, and the bullet missed any major arteries; Bill was shaken up, but he was okay.
Like I said, there could be a bullet waiting for you around any corner.
All in all, then, being a cop was everything I’d hoped it would be: interesting, rewarding, exciting, and dangerous enough to keep you focused. I’d been able to finish the last couple of courses at Long Island University–Brooklyn to get my bachelor’s degree
, and had started on my master’s degree in criminal justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Midtown Manhattan, taking two night classes a week. Things were looking pretty good.
And then, suddenly, in the space of a half hour, I’m not a cop anymore.
* * *
It’s 11:30 p.m.—2330 in cop time—on June 30, 1975, and I’m standing in the muster room at the 73rd Precinct in Brownsville, the Seven-Three, getting ready for the midnight-to-eight shift. It’s hot, humidity about 80 percent, muggy in the way New York summer nights are, especially in a crumbling, dilapidated, un-air-conditioned building like the Seven-Three precinct house. We haven’t even hit the streets yet, and we’re sweating already.
Then the sergeant walks in and starts calling out names. Alvarez! Burroughs! Campisi! Donahue!—and so on, about a dozen names in all, all of us with one or two or three years on the job. He hands each of us a piece of paper that has just been spit out of the Teletype machine, and except for names and shield numbers, they all say the same thing: As of 12:01 on July 1, thirty minutes from now, the start of the fiscal year, our services will no longer be required by the New York City Police Department. We’re laid off.
Shock, fury, despair; it’s like a nightmare. The sergeant tells us to line up and turn in our shields—and since we aren’t cops anymore, we also have to turn in our service revolvers and off-duty guns—bullets, too—because even though we had paid for our guns with our own money, as civilians it’s illegal in New York for us to have handguns. The desk sergeant, a real hairbag, is tossing our shields and guns into boxes like they’re trash, and barking out orders for us to count our bullets before we turn them in. One cop takes a handful of bullets and throws them in the sergeant’s lap, telling him: Count them yourself, asshole! If I’m not a cop anymore, I don’t have to take orders from you! There’s pushing, shoving, shouting; it’s a near mutiny breaking out in the Seven-Three muster room.