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  It’s the same story in precinct muster rooms across the city. Just like that, more than fifty-five hundred men and women who were cops at 11:30 p.m. are not cops at one minute past midnight. Nothing personal about it, the city tells us. The city can’t afford to pay us anymore, and they’re laying people off in other departments, too. As required by the PBA contract, the rule is “last in, first out,” so it doesn’t mean we are—were—bad cops, they tell us. We’ll take you back if the city ever starts hiring cops again.

  Maybe we should have seen it coming. For several years the city of New York has been on a downward slide, financially and otherwise. The population is shrinking, businesses are moving out and taking their taxes with them, partly because of rising crime and assorted other social ills. Hookers and muggers fill Times Square, it’s worth your life to go into Central Park after dark, transient camps flourish in the subways, garbage piles up on the streets. It seems like New York is turning into a Third World city—a bankrupt Third World city.

  Meanwhile, with crime growing, the NYPD is shrinking. The Academy stopped taking in new recruits in 1974, and as older cops retire or resign there’s nobody to replace them. With no fresh bodies coming out of the Academy, the Department starts stripping away cops from other commands and sending them to the high-crime precincts—the Seven-Five, the Four-One, the Seven-Three.

  Manhattan Traffic Area is one of those commands. On a Friday afternoon in early 1974, one hundred of Manhattan Traffic’s one hundred fifty cops are told to report to various high-crime precincts on Monday. I’m one of them. My orders are to report to the Seven-Three in Brownsville—Fort Z.

  Actually I’m not too unhappy about it. I’d enjoyed working in Manhattan Traffic, and it had made it easy to work on my master’s degree at John Jay. But I’m still living at my parents’ apartment in Bushwick, just five minutes away from Brownsville, which makes for an easy commute, and I figure working a high-crime precinct will be a good learning experience. And for the most part it is.

  That spring there are persistent rumors about layoffs in the NYPD; thousands of us are officially informed that we face termination at the end of the fiscal year. But nobody really believes it; everybody figures that the new mayor, Abe Beame, is bluffing, talking about layoffs to gain concessions from the police unions and to goad the federal government into bailing out the city. The NYPD had reduced the numbers in its ranks before, but it had always been through attrition; in the history of the NYPD, even during the Great Depression, there have never been layoffs. The old-timers all say: Don’t worry about it, kid. It’s all political bullshit. They ain’t gonna lay off cops.

  But now, on the last day of June 1975, they do.

  About half of the fifty-five hundred laid-off cops, the ones with the most seniority, are rehired by the city after a few days. The rest of us are put on a preferred rehire list, and repeatedly told by the PBA and almost everyone else that it won’t be long, that any day now we’ll be back on the job.

  Any day now. I’ll hear that same story for the next twenty months.

  I tried to keep it in perspective, to keep in mind a lesson that one of my Academy instructors, Officer Fahy, the one who’d advised me to shave my mustache, had taught us. We’re sitting in law class one day, early on in our training, and Officer Fahy says to us: What is the one four-letter word that should never, ever be associated with your service in the NYPD? I’ll give you a hint, he says, it starts with an F.

  Profanity was seriously discouraged among recruits back then, so we’re all looking down at our shoes; none of us wants to say the F word out loud. So finally Officer Fahy turns to the chalkboard and writes out, in big block letters, F-A-I-R.

  Fair! he says. That’s the four-letter word you should never associate with your work in the NYPD. Life isn’t fair, the Department isn’t fair, the job of police officer isn’t fair—and the sooner you accept that, the better off you’ll be.

  It was a good philosophy. But it’s hard to look at it that way when after a lifetime of wanting to be a cop, and working so hard to make it happen, I’m unceremoniously stripped of my shield and gun and told to hit the road.

  (The layoffs would haunt the NYPD for years to come. Later, after Ed Koch was elected mayor in 1977 on a pro-cop, law-and-order platform, the NYPD rushed to refill its depleted ranks, often lowering standards and cutting corners to take in thousands of recruits at a time. Some of those recruits should never have been cops, and they would later cause a lot of problems for the Department in general, and Internal Affairs in particular.)

  I don’t have it as bad as some of the other laid-off cops. In June 1975, I’m single, no kids, no mortgage, living in my parents’ apartment. Still, I have to do something. I thought about applying to another police department, maybe in Nassau or Suffolk County, but somehow I just couldn’t see myself working in the suburbs. I don’t just want to be a cop, I want to be an NYPD cop, New York’s Finest. And besides, with twenty-seven hundred fully trained ex-cops suddenly dumped onto the market, police jobs are hard to get.

  I finally take a job as a security guard with a Brooklyn tobacco and confectionary wholesaling company, J. Rosenberg & Sons, escorting delivery trucks around the city to keep them from being hijacked, which was a big problem back then. One of the Rosenberg sons, Stanley, a really good guy, told me that he would pay me more than I had been making as a cop—and he did. The Department had paid me $229 a week; Stanley pays me $230. Since guarding trucks is a high-risk job, I manage to get a civilian handgun permit and carry my off-duty revolver with me on the job. But it isn’t like being a cop.

  Finally, in May 1977, after more than a year and a half of “any day now” from the Department and the PBA, I’m rehired by the NYPD. After a week of “retraining” at the Academy, they send me back to the Seven-Three.

  It’s the same old Brownsville as when I left—piss-bags raining from the rooftops, misery and despair, crime and drug addiction. It’s the same . . . except now it’s worse.

  In 1977 it seems like City Hall and the New York City Police Department have just thrown up their hands and given up, not only in Brownsville but across the city. There are fifteen hundred murders in the city that year, double the number from a decade earlier, with rising rape, robbery, and assault stats to match. No one is enforcing what would later be called “quality-of-life” crimes—public drinking, loud music, aggressive panhandling, pissing on the sidewalk, and so on, all those small crimes that can and did make life in the city almost unbearable. Attacking those small crimes would later become a big part of the Department’s successful effort to turn the city around in the mid-1990s, but in 1977 the politicians in City Hall don’t want us to enforce those laws, especially in the minority neighborhoods, because they might seem like harassment—and with the long, hot summer coming, it could spark a riot.

  And as for drug enforcement, forget about it. As a uniformed NYPD police officer, I’m not allowed to arrest a drug dealer, even if I catch him in the act. This goes back to the Knapp Commission in 1972, which decided that since drug arrests were a corruption hazard, with too many uniformed cops shaking down drug dealers, from then on only narcotics cops could make drug arrests. The idea was that since detectives have closer supervision than uniformed cops—in the NYPD, one sergeant had ten uniformed cops under him, while a narcotics team had a sergeant and just four or five plainclothes cops—that would reduce drug-related corruption.

  Well, maybe so. But what it means for me as a uniformed cop in the Seven-Three is that the drug dealers barely look up when I drive by in a patrol car. I can bounce them off the corner, but I can’t arrest them—and they know it. Sure, I can fill out an “intel card,” noting I have observed a known drug dealer named Pee Wee pitching heroin at the corner of Livonia and Stone, and eventually it will get passed up to the cops from the Narcotics Division. Maybe they’ll get around to working a buy-and-bust on Pee Wee, and maybe they won’t.

  In fact, sometimes we even have to ride shotgun for the drug trad
e. The city had set up a methadone program in Brooklyn North—the theory appeared to be that if you gave heroin addicts methadone, they wouldn’t have to rob and steal so much to buy heroin—and since methadone has street value, one of our regular jobs is to follow the methadone delivery truck as it makes its rounds to the clinics to make sure it doesn’t get hijacked and the methadone sold on the street. (In fact, a lot of addicts in the methadone program will hold their doses in their mouths without swallowing, then sell it on the street—it’s called, for obvious reasons, “spitback”—and use the money to buy real heroin.) It seems kind of strange to me that here we are, cops, and we’re riding shotgun on drug deliveries for dope addicts. As we’ll see, we aren’t the only NYPD cops who ever rode shotgun for drug shipments—except that we were doing it legally.

  Like I said. In 1977 the drug dealers and the addicts have won.

  As always, it’s the kids who suffer most. I remember once I caught a job to accompany a woman who had a court order to reclaim custody of her one-year-old son from his grandparents. I meet the woman outside the apartment building, and it’s obvious she’s a user. She has the dull eyes, the infected tracks, the wasting-away body—the whole picture. And I’m thinking, wow, if the court is giving this drug addict custody of the kid, what must the grandparents be like?

  So I leave the mom in the hallway and I knock on the door and the grandparents let me in. The apartment building is typical for Brownsville—peeling plaster, the smell of piss in the hallways, graffiti on the walls—but this particular apartment is immaculate, the grandparents well-spoken and polite; they’re poor people, but they’re good people. The grandparents know why I’m there, and they’re crying and begging me not to take the little boy—Please, Officer, don’t give her that child, she’s our daughter but she’s a heroin addict, she can’t take care of him, please, please. And I’m thinking, there’s gotta be a mistake here. What social services system would take a baby away from these people and give him to a skell? The judge who signed the order must not fully understand the situation.

  So I radio my patrol sergeant to find out what to do. He shows up and takes one look at the court order and looks at me like I’m stupid, or crazy, or both. What, you can’t read? he says. A court order is exactly what it says—an order! So give her the kid! And I have to tell the weeping grandparents that I’m sorry, but I have no choice, I have to take the little boy—and I did.

  It breaks my heart—and it’s not the first or the last time that my heart gets broken over a kid in Brownsville. But there’s a word you should never associate with your job as a police officer.

  It starts with an F.

  Brownsville is bad, all right; so bad, in fact, that it seems impossible that it could get any worse.

  And then the lights go out.

  It’s July 13, 1977, just after 8:30 p.m., and since I’m working midnights this week I’m at home in Bushwick. The city is still in financial crisis, we’re in the middle of a brutal heat wave, the Son of Sam serial killer is out there shooting people with a .44-caliber revolver—and suddenly the power fails and the lights go out all over the city. In Brooklyn and the Bronx, the looting begins almost immediately.

  So they call us all in, every cop in the Seven-Three, and we head out into the streets with our riot helmets and nightsticks and guns. On Pitkin Avenue, the commercial district, virtually every store has the security gates pried off, the windows broken, people running out with TVs and stereos and pieces of furniture balanced on their heads. Everywhere you look there’s a felony being committed; some looters are standing outside stores, stealing stuff out of the hands of other looters, who then turn around and go back in the store to loot some more. Groups of cops wade into the stores and chase people out; other cops stand at the doors with their nightsticks raised, telling people coming out to drop the stuff, and if they don’t—whack!—they get a nightstick on the arm. And this is all in the dark, no streetlights; the only light comes from the arson fires that have started breaking out.

  Within minutes I collar three guys—two adults and a juvenile—who are lugging a couch out the broken front window of a furniture store and I take them to the precinct. We’re arresting so many people that we can’t spend time processing them into the system or even take down their names; we have to get back on the street. So instead, the desk sergeant takes a Polaroid of each perp with the cop who arrested him and writes the cop’s name on the back; later we’ll have to match the photos with the perps and process them then. Meanwhile, the holding cells are jammed with perps like Vienna sausages in a can; eventually we’ll have to start putting the overflow in an old wooden garage out back. So I pose for my Polaroid with each of the furniture store perps—Smile!—and then I cram the two adult thieves into a cell and put the kid in the “juvenile room” and head back out into the chaos.

  There’s no stopping it. The power finally comes back on at about 10:30 p.m. the next night, but it’s too late. By the time it’s over, virtually every store on Pitkin is an empty blackened shell, broken glass covers the streets, haggard cops and firemen are walking around exhausted and dazed; I wind up working fifty-four hours straight, making arrests, standing guard on buildings, processing prisoners. Citywide, but mostly in Brooklyn and the Bronx, more than 4,500 looters are arrested, 500 cops injured, almost 2,000 businesses looted, 1,000 buildings set afire.

  Remember I said earlier that Brownsville was an urban catastrophe? After the blackout, it’s beyond catastrophe; it looks like Berlin at the end of World War II.

  There’s one interesting epilogue to this. Those furniture store looters I collared early on? Sometime later that night I’m passing by one of the packed holding cells and one of them, a guy in his mid-thirties, is wailing and crying from the back of the cell. Officer, officer, he says to me, please, I gotta go to the bathroom! Well, I’m pretty busy—Brooklyn is burning down around us—so I tell him he has to wait, but he keeps pleading, Please, help me, I really gotta go!

  All right. So I pry him out of the cell and take him to the bathroom, and on the way back he stops and looks at the water fountain, and he says to me: Officer, I’m really thirsty. Can I please have a drink? Perps aren’t allowed to use the water fountain, which may sound a little harsh, but hey, if you saw some of the skells who passed through the Seven-Three precinct, you wouldn’t want them drooling over your water fountain, either.

  But this guy seems all right, for a perp, probably not a career criminal but, like a lot of the looters we arrested, just a guy who got caught up in the moment and the lure of free stuff. And he’s going to be in that holding cell for a long time. So I tell him okay, and he takes a long drink and then I cram him back into the cell.

  And then I don’t give it another thought until years later, when my wife and I are on vacation in the US Virgin Islands. We’re having dinner in a restaurant, and I notice that the waiter keeps looking at me in kind of a strange way. And finally he says to me—I remember you, you’re from New York; you’re the cop who arrested me on Pitkin Avenue back in ’77. You were kind to me, you let me have a drink of water, I’ve never forgotten it, and I want to thank you for it.

  So I look at the guy, and yeah, it comes back to me now. He’s the guy who stole the couch during the blackout. And he’s probably being sincere about wanting to thank me, he probably really is grateful. But you never know. Maybe some other cops weren’t so nice to him that night, and he’s looking for some payback, even if it’s only spitting in the food. After all, a cop is a cop is a cop.

  So what I say to him is: Friend, you’ve made a mistake. I’m from Pittsburgh; I’ve never even been to New York. Sorry. He didn’t seem to believe me, but that was my story, and I stuck to it.

  That may sound overly suspicious, even paranoid. But it illustrates something about cops that people should know: In a social situation with civilians—a party, a PTA meeting, at a restaurant in the Virgin Islands, wherever—most cops won’t tell anybody that they’re cops. And I won’t, either. If someb
ody asks what I do, I say I work for the city. And if they press, I just say that I push papers around a desk—and then I move away from them as soon as possible.

  It’s not that we’re not proud of being cops. We are. But if you tell people at a party that you’re a cop, there’s always going to be at least one guy who’ll buttonhole you and start chewing your leg about some bad experience he had: I didn’t run that red light but the cop gave me a ticket anyway, I was only double-parked for thirty seconds and that cop had my car towed, that cop was rude to me just because I called him an asshole. Whatever the beef, it’s going to be a half hour out of your life. And if they don’t have a beef, sometimes they’ll just ask you dumb questions: Did’ja ever shoot anybody? How long does it usually take to beat a confession out of a guy? Did’ja ever take a bribe? And on and on.

  Most civilians seem to think that cops as a group are insular, clannish, that we hold ourselves apart from everybody else. To some extent that’s true, and necessary. It’s hard for anyone who hasn’t been a cop to understand what the job is like, and it’s harder still for us to try to explain or justify it.

  So if you’re a stranger at a party, or a perp I arrested four years ago, I’m not an NYPD cop. I just push papers around for the city.

  The city of Pittsburgh.

  * * *

  There are two ways to advance in the NYPD. You can go the supervisory route—sergeant, lieutenant, captain, and so on—or you can try for a detective’s gold shield.

  Carrying the detective’s gold shield is probably the most coveted job in the NYPD, one that many, maybe even most, ambitious young cops dream about. You get better pay than in patrol, you’re working serious crimes, you’re never walking a foot post in freezing weather, no one is hounding you to write more tickets. To become an NYPD detective first grade, the highest detective rank—in a Department with thirty to thirty-five thousand cops, there are only about two hundred first grade detectives—is the pinnacle of a police career. They’re the guys they make movies and TV shows about.