Paul Bacon (3 page)

I walked down the street to get a slice of pizza, then hurried back to the auditorium to find the right person to ask a pressing
question. Inside, I searched out the mellowest-looking instructor in the room. The woman was standing in front of the stage,
leaning against the platform with a bent knee, looking like the exact opposite of Officer Skinhead.

“I was just wondering, ma’am,” I asked her, “is the NYPD like the military, where, if you don’t serve a set number of years,
you get thrown in jail?”

The woman laughed so loud that she honked. “No, honey,” she said, still laughing. “You can leave whenever you like.”

This was promising. “So, do you
like
the job? I mean, are you glad you became a cop?”

“You want the short answer or the long answer?”

“Short answer’s fine.”

“Yes,” she said. “Any other questions?”

I thanked her and returned to my seat feeling much more confident. I wasn’t taking such a leap after all. It barely qualified
as a commitment. When everyone filed back into the room and the swearing-in began, I took my patrolman’s oath with one hand
on my heart and the other behind my back, fingers crossed.

CHAPTER 5

T
HE FOLLOWING DAY, I found out there really was commitment involved in joining the police department. The worst kind, too—financial.
Before I got a dime from the city, I’d have to shell out nearly
seven hundred dollars
for my own equipment and uniform. I’d already given them fifty bucks to register my fingerprints with the FBI. And now they
wanted more than ten times that amount for the basic stuff we’d need to do the job? It was like paying for a staple, or renting
out the office photocopier by the page. I bet firemen don’t have to pay for water. Even beyond the principle, seven hundred
dollars was a lot to cough up all at once. For some new recruits, this meant going into debt just to begin drawing a salary.

Hardly surprising, then, to learn that the City of New York—the agency that brought you alternate-side parking—happened to
have its own usurious lending institution and company store. We were promised big discounts as part of Mayor Mike’s extended
family, but with the national prime rate hovering just above a millionth of a percent, the city’s employee credit rate put
the mob to shame. The equipment was no bargain, either. Five dollars for a pair of pin backings, a hundred fifty for a raincoat—these
were beach prices.

I was reading the list of required items while waiting outside One Police Plaza, the appropriately cube-shaped heart of the
NYPD. It was midday in July, and I was standing in a long line in the hot sun in a business suit for the fifth day in a row.
I was sweating like a pig waiting to be gouged when a voice behind me said, “Holy fuck! Forty bucks for a plastic baton?”

This was Bill Peters, a fellow recruit I’d met earlier that morning. Bill was a baby-faced man in his thirties, with a doughy
complexion and very little hair on his head. He seemed like kind of a spaz, and I was already learning to take most of what
he said with a grain of salt. We weren’t supposed to talk in line, so I kept my shoulders squared to the guy in front of me
and pretended Bill wasn’t there.

Not to be ignored, Bill nudged me in the back with his rolled-up price list and said, “Hey, you see this shit? Forty bucks
for . . .”

“Yes,
yes
!” I turned my head to whisper as loudly as I could. Three other people had angrily told Bill to shut up, but I couldn’t chastise
him. He reminded me too much of myself somehow.

Plus, he had me wondering: “They can’t really be made of plastic. Can they?”

“Oh, yeah,” Bill replied. “It’s a mix of plastic and wood shavings, basically a Wiffle bat filled with sawdust. They’re designed
by the city’s liability lawyers. Great for massages. Perps come back for more,” he said, then cackled at himself.

Later that afternoon, I returned home seven hundred dollars poorer but with nearly as many pounds of police equipment to show
for it. I unloaded my bags and spread the items around my tiny studio apartment to take inventory. Within minutes, I had covered
every horizontal surface with the tools of my new trade, including five sets of wrinkle-free uniforms, as well as various
pins, patches, straps, snaps, bags, glasses, jackets, caps, vests, holsters, and belts. Plus there was a gun-cleaning kit
and a host of beating and restraining devices—including, most strikingly, a shiny pair of handcuffs.

They seemed intimidating even inside their plastic bag. I held the pack between thumb and forefinger and shook them out onto
my bed as if I were discarding a dead rodent. It took a few minutes before I got the courage to pick them up. They looked
alive, like a pair of crab claws that might latch onto my throat if I made a wrong move.

Fearing where my curiosity might lead, I sifted through my piles of new equipment for the handcuff key. It was unbelievably
small. About a quarter the size of an average house key, it looked very hard to manipulate and very easy to lose. I didn’t
dare put it into my pocket. It could lodge in a hem, and I’d never see it again. I cleared a large space on top of my dresser
and set the key right in the middle.

Thus assured, I put one of the manacles on my wrist and ratcheted it down to a snug fit. This became intolerable after about
two seconds, and I reached over for the key with a racing pulse. In one sweeping motion, I picked up the small key from its
tidy place on my dresser and slipped it into the equally small hole on the cuff. Breathing a sigh of relief, I turned the
key. Nothing. Silly me: I must have put the key in upside down. I took it out, put it back in the right way, and turned—nothing
again. I was starting to panic. Sideways? There were only two ways a key could go. Ah—I tried it the first way, going the
other direction. Still nothing. Then the other way, other direction. My hands were sweating, and I had to fight the urge to
shake my arm spastically until the thing just flew off. Still, the handcuff wouldn’t open. It was devilishly attached to my
arm.

What on earth was I going to do? I could try to get help at my local hardware store, but all I could picture was the cranky
old guy behind the counter giving me a skeptical look, then disappearing into the back office to report a fugitive. A patrol
car would be dispatched immediately. After getting caught sleeping during orientation, I didn’t think I could afford another
embarrassing mistake so early in the recruit semester.

I tore into my neatly stacked piles of new equipment to find the handcuff instructions, turning my room upside down. Finally
I came to the sad conclusion that handcuffs did not come with instructions. You were either a cop and you received official
training, or you were someone else whom the manufacturer didn’t want to encourage.

Before I gave up and called the police myself, I went online and typed in: “How to unlock handcuffs.” As I should have known,
a ton of information was available on the Web, with a reported 285,000 results to my query. It did take a while to find exactly
what I was looking for. To begin with, the handcuff kept catching on the edge of my desk, making it hard to move my computer
mouse accurately. Also, most of the information was targeted at crafty criminals, not clumsy cops. Long before I found instructions
on how to unlock my handcuffs with their own key, I found out how to open them with a bobby pin, a pencil lead, a fingernail
paring, a piece of belly-button lint. (They didn’t work.)

Finally I found that my handcuffs were the “double-locking” variety: The key had to be turned 360 degrees in
both
directions. I quickly freed myself, with tremendous relief, since I had to report to the police academy the following day.
I laughed as I shoved the manacles in a drawer. No way would I make a rookie mistake like that again.

CHAPTER 6

T
HE NEXT MORNING, I was sitting in a bagel shop across from the Police Academy on East Twentieth Street, feeling perfectly
situated for the day to come. I was decked out in my 100 percent polyester recruit uniform—a short-sleeved, button-down gray
blouse and dark-blue pants with dangerously sharp creases. And I had an hour to kill before my first class, because I’d gotten
an early start. In this city, any number of calamities, from a transit strike to a bomb threat, could throw a wrench into
one’s commute. Now, with the academy in view, only a nuclear detonation directly above my head could have kept me from walking
through the doors on time. I slowly sipped from a cup of coffee, looking at the building and wondering what to expect.

From the outside, the NYPD’s primary training facility didn’t look like an academy in the military tradition, with broad staircases
and stately white columns. It was more conservative than that. The building looked like a corporate headquarters from the
early 1960s—a drab, unadorned steel-and-glass box that could have been designed by an accountant with a nasty head cold. While
it may not have looked like the proving grounds for the world’s most legendary police force, its unwelcoming façade matched
my image of the department so far. Since I’d started the application process, every document I’d read was set in all capital
letters, and everything I’d been told was presented in the form of a threat. If the department was less than cordial in its
communications, I could understand why. It had only six months to teach two thousand recruits everything they needed to know
about becoming cops.

There were twelve different disciplines in which to qualify. On top of the core academic subjects—Police Science, Behavioral
Science, and Law—I’d also learn how to act as a professional witness in a separate unit called Excellence in Testimony. I’d
be learning how to use a gun at the Firearms and Tactics Range in the Bronx, and learning how to chase people in a police
car at the redundantly named Driver Training Education Facility in Brooklyn. Somewhere inside the main academy building was
hidden a full-size gymnasium, where I’d be doing daily calisthenics as well as learning how to defend myself with every weapon
at my disposal other than my gun. I’d become conversant in CPR and first aid, as well as narcotics recognition, insurance
fraud, and counterterrorism tactics. The idea of getting paid to study all these things was a big enticement to put my anxiety
aside and go with the flow. As the officer at orientation had told me, I could quit anytime I wanted. The handcuffs were mine
to keep.

Ten minutes before class time, I left the bagel shop and crossed the street. The first thing that greeted me in the small
academy lobby was an oversized department logo and the phrase ENTER TO LEARN, GO FORTH TO SERVE. If that sounds corny, it
didn’t at the time. After all the preparation and expense, I was thrilled to finally be walking into this hallowed place.
What ever it looked like, I was now a part of it. I belonged to the NYPD, and by association I belonged to the great city
that spawned it. I was no longer just a New Yorker, I
was
New York.

And while I might have scoffed at the idea of “going forth” to do anything, my wry sense of humor was another thing I wound
up leaving at the door. My nonconformist attitude was replaced by a constant state of fear when I got my first real look at
our curriculum. There seemed to be a million new bits of information to process every single day, all of it testable material
determining whether I received a posting or a pink slip at the end of the semester.

The first class I attended was Police Science, which would have been more accurately named Police Procedures and Paperwork.
Its main reference, the NYPD Patrol Guide, comprised six hundred letter-sized, double-sided, single-spaced pages. Apparently
too large to bind, our professional bible was distributed in two volumes of loose photocopies lashed together with pot roast
strings.

Our Police Science instructor was Officer Joey Weil, a strangely flamboyant forty something cop from Staten Island with a
bushy pompadour and a broken front tooth. He beamed with joy as the thirty recruits in my company walked inside the classroom
one by one and heaved their personal copies of the Patrol Guide off the table. When the last person in line had carried the
mass of pulp to his newly assigned desk, the instructor took his seat at the front of the room to hold court. He got out half
a sentence before someone interrupted him.

“Excuse me, sir?” It was Clarabel Suarez, the beautiful young woman I’d met at orientation.

“Excuse me, sirrrr? Sirrr? Sirrrrr?” Officer Weil mimicked Clarabel in an annoying screech that sounded nothing like her voice.

A few recruits chuckled at his mockery, while the rest of us stared at the instructor, wondering what Staten Island had done
to him to make him like this.

Clarabel looked around the room angrily and said, “Shut up! We’re supposed to call him ‘sir.’ Look in your stupid recruit
pamphlets, if you can read.”

Officer Weil rolled his eyes, pursed his lips, and said, “What’s your question?”

Clarabel asked, “How much of this do we have to learn before graduation?”

“Everything,” said Officer Weil. A collective gasp came from my classmates.

“Everything?” said Clarabel.

“It’s all equally important,” said the instructor.

“Whoa, whoa, sir,” blurted Bobby Franks, a tall, muscular recruit with a sidewall haircut. Franks already looked like a state
trooper, but he seemed overwhelmed by the academy. Seated in the back row, he had untied one of his pot roast strings and
was flipping through the pages in horror.

“Whoa-oh-oh, sir-r-r, sir-r-r,” Officer Weil said in a deep voice, now eerily channeling Mr. Ed.

Franks asked him, “You mean we have to know
basically
what’s in here, right? A working knowledge?”

“I mean you have to memorize it from cover to cover.”

“How can a human being do that?”

“I did it when I was a recruit,” said Officer Weil. “And it stuck like glue.”

“So you’re saying you still know how to . . .” Franks said, reading the harrowing headline before him, “Process Requests for
Police Department Documents Received from Assistant District Attorneys and Assistant Corporation Counsels?”

“Absolutely,” said Officer Weil.

“How do you remember it all?” said Franks.

“It’s easy,” said Officer Weil. “Just use acronyms.”

Officer Weil went on to explain that every topic in the Patrol Guide could be broken down into lists: lists of procedures,
lists of documents, types of evidence, types of individuals, and so on. If we took the first letter of each item in a given
list and made a word out of it, he said, we could remember what was in the list when we were tested on the material. I’d used
acronyms many times in high school—I could have never passed biology or Western civ without them—but Officer Weil acted as
if he’d invented the study method himself. And while he seemed to think his own acronyms were ingenious, I thought they were
completely forgettable, such as MR. AC GRAPES (each letter representing a stolen item constituting grand larceny). Other meaningless
phrases he offered as surefire memory enhancers were DOT IF CASED (types of vehicles not qualified for rotation towing), SNUF
B (forms of currency not to be stamped as arrest evidence), and BRIDAL MOUSE (types of ambulance calls requiring immediate
notifications to next of kin).

Plus, his acronyms scarcely covered a fraction of what we had to learn. So I went home that night and started making up an
entire vocabulary of my own. I thought this would be easy, but then I found why Officer Weil clung to his grapes and bridal
mice. Naturally occurring acronyms weren’t the most poetic of phrases, and the chances of creating one that reminded you what
it was about were very slim. I bucked the odds anyway. The only way to ensure a passing grade, I thought, was to shoot for
a perfect score.

Yet this was a habit of long standing for me; I’d been obsessing over my grades since elementary school. All the men in my
father’s family were that way: unable to stop working or to be satisfied with the results. My mother called it “productivity
angst,” or “PA.” My mother was a pattern seer of the first stripe, so I made sure not to point out that PA also stood for
Police Academy
. I also failed to mention that I was now staying up late every night making flash cards of my spanking new acronyms.

One early favorite was USE FJORD, a handy reminder of which types of juveniles were not eligible for release on personal recognizance.
My mnemonic for that one was, of course,
An impassable fjord.
The letters stood for:

U = Unidentified or Unconscious

S = Supervision (as in none, i. e., no competent adult present)

E = Endangered child

F = Family court is in session

J = Juvenile offender (see MRS. BRA CAM)

O = Outstanding warrant

R = Return date (skipped out on previous court appearance)

D = Danger to community

And who could resist FIRM PEE, for criminal possession of a weapon in the fourth degree? It even rhymed. To distinguish it
from first, second, and third degrees, I decided that a stream of pee, if wielded against someone, would probably be, at worst,
a
less-than-lethal
weapon.
The letters did the rest:

F = Foreigner + possession of a dangerous instrument

I = Intent to commit a crime + possession of RAID (razor, armor-piercing bullets, imitation gun, dangerous instrument)

R = Refuse to relinquish to police officer a rifle/shotgun that one is unfit to possess (see flashcard #157 for defn. of “unfit”)

M= Mere possession of a deadly weapon

P = Previous felony conviction + possession of a firearm

E = Educational premise (present at) + possession a firearm

E = Exploding-tip bullets, mere possession

The granddaddy was CAMP PAPA MUD. I needed three words to cover all the different types of workers and vehicles authorized
to cross police lines at a fire scene. Likewise, the mnemonic for this one was practically a novella:
Fire
=
The family CAMPing trip, when PAPA
got MUD on himself.

Persons
=
CAMP

C = Cards: persons w/ working press cards & fire-line cards signed by Fire Commissioner

A = Agencies: members of governmental agencies in performance of duty

M = Mayor: hizzoner himself

P = Public: employees of public service corporations in performance of duties

Vehicles
=
PAPA MUD

P = Public service corporation vehicles

A = Agencies (of city) vehicles

P = Prison (Corrections Dept. vans), only if transporting prisoners

A = Ambulances

M= Mayor’s car, w/ or w/o mayor

U = U.S. Mail vehicles

D = Department: police and fire

Once I could get past the acronyms and see the bigger picture, I found our curriculum fascinating—even uplifting. Contrary
to most of the Spike Lee movies I’d seen, I found the NYPD to be politically correct to the point of obsession. I mean this
as a compliment. If anyone should have to be PC, it’s the police. I was happy to see that sensitivity was a cardinal virtue
of the department, at least on paper. The academy spent more time teaching us how to spot sexual harassment in the workplace
than it spent teaching us how to track down criminals. We minored in Equal Employment Opportunity Law, and our first class
presentation was an oral report on the history of some ethnic group other than our own. This was part of a course on racial
and social awareness called Behavioral Science, aka Silly Science. My classmates acted as if it was the biggest waste of time
of all, but I was thrilled by the syllabus, made of hundreds of articles from university textbooks, obscure periodicals, and
nonprofit groups working for the rights of people of every conceivable orientation and ancestry, and of all known physical
and mental disabilities.

The instructor for this course was Officer Whiteman, who happened to be a black woman. I did not envy her last name. None
of my classmates dared make a joke, though. She was our superior officer.

On our first day in Behavioral Science, Officer Whiteman passed around a list of ethnicities that we could research for our
oral reports. Most of the major groups who’d lived in or immigrated to New York were on the list: Native Americans, Dutch,
West Africans, Italians, Chinese, Irish, Jews, Puerto Ricans, Pakistanis, Russians, et al. There were more ethnicities to
write about than there were people in our class, but when the list reached Clarabel, she raised her hand and said, “Ma’am?
I notice that Wiccans aren’t on here.”

“I’ve never heard of Wiccans,” said Officer Whiteman. “Where did they come from?”

“No one really knows,” said Clarabel.

“Well, this isn’t an anthropology class,” said the instructor. “Why don’t you pick one of the other groups?”

“But I want to write about Wiccans,” said Clarabel. “I should be able to, right? Isn’t the whole point to explore culture?”

“Yes, of course,” said Officer Whiteman. “
Who
are Wiccans exactly?”

“They’re witches,” said a recruit sitting behind Clarabel.

Clarabel turned around and snapped at him, “Don’t talk about crap you don’t know, all right?”

“Suarez, please,” said Whiteman. “We can’t speak like that in uniform.”

“Sorry,” said Clarabel. “But Wiccans aren’t just witches. They’re duotheists. Their god is part man, part woman.”

“You gotta be kidding,” said another recruit, causing a round of laughter from the group.

“Quiet down, everyone,” said Officer Whiteman. “Are you sure you want to study Wiccans for this class?” she asked Clarabel.
“You seem to know a lot about them already.”

“That’s because I
am
one,” said Clarabel, folding her arms with a self-satisfied look.

“Of course you are,” sniped a classmate.