Paul Bacon (8 page)

PART TWO

COLLAR FEVER

CHAPTER 13

T
HE DAY AFTER GRADUATION, I was sitting on an uptown C train with a garment bag draped across my legs. A duffel bag sat between
my feet, which I could not stop tapping on the floor. No longer a recruit, I could commute to work in my civilian clothes,
but I was feeling more self-conscious than ever. Above my head, an electronic station map charted my path into the unknown.
As the numbers went higher—Seventy-second Street, Eighty-sixth Street, Ninety-sixth Street—so did my pulse. At 110th Street,
all the other white people got off the train, and I swallowed hard. I was in Harlem now. I looked around at the remaining
passengers, all of them African-Americans, and forced a smile. An elder ly woman sitting on the other side of the car smiled
back. Of course the old people are nice, I told myself.

I got off the subway at 135th Street and walked briskly to the Three-two station house. I watched the passing cars closely
for signs of an ambush. A silver sedan with tinted windows drove by me, then slowed down for no apparent reason. Its shiny
rims kept spinning even as the wheels came to a stop. Custom-made rims were common where I’d grown up in California, but in
New York City they were gangster accessories. I imagined a machine gun pointed at me on the other side of the dark glass.
Was I being paranoid? Maybe. Would it kill me to pick up the pace? No. I tried to jog away from the blingmobile. With my hands
full of gear, the best I could do was gallop. I turned down a side street while looking over my shoulder and bumped into a
man about my age who was coming the other way.

We both fell to the sidewalk, and I apologized profusely as I helped him back to his feet. He didn’t say a word as he brushed
himself off, so I gathered up my bags and walked away. Then, he yelled, “Yo, officer!” How presumptuous, I thought. Just because
I’m white, that means I’m a cop? I turned around and saw him waving a small, shiny object over his head. “You dropped your
badge!” he shouted.

Two blocks from the precinct, I started to realize that Harlem wasn’t so scary, at least not this part. It didn’t look all
that different from my neighborhood. There were buildings and people and cars, and everybody was rushing around, looking too
busy to make any trouble. I settled into the familiar groove and started paying attention to important details. I saw a pizza
joint, a grocery store, and a restaurant that made soul food. I didn’t know what soul food was, but it sounded satisfying.
I decided I’d try some—later. I wanted to get to the precinct and claim a locker before the other rookies showed up.

I found myself nearly alone when I entered the Three-two men’s locker room. In the many rows of tall gray lockers, I saw only
one other cop. A mustachioed man in his early forties, he looked like a veteran on the job. He sat on a bench wearing only
uniform pants, applying a generous coat of underarm deodorant with a blank look on his face. He seemed lost in thought, so
I walked past his row without introducing myself.

I ambled up and down the corridors just looking at lockers. Covered in bumper stickers and pictures and trinkets, they were
a trove of information about my new colleagues, much of it conflicting. One officer’s locker was decorated with a dancing
line of Grateful Dead bears and an American flag sticker with the words, 9-11: NEVER FORGET. Another person’s locker featured
a U.S. Marine Corps emblem next to a string of ASPCA stickers with pictures of a puppy, a kitten, and a bunny. Below both
of these was a sticker that said, FUCK AUTHORITY. I saw a Monty Python film festival advertisement beside a flier for an all-female
hip-hop group that said, WORD ON THE STREET IS THE NEW ALLURE ALBUM IS BANGIN’ . . . NO QUESTION. The last locker in the row
had only one sticker, which read, YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT. so shut up!

I eventually made my way back to Deodorant Man, who was now in full uniform, combing his mustache in front of a mirror in
his locker. He caught my eye in the mirror and said, “You just come out?”

“Can you tell?” I joked.

“Good. A sense of humor. You’ll need it,” he said, turning around and reaching out his hand. “Congratulations, by the way.
My name’s Perry.”

“Do you work the four-to-twelve tour?” I asked. Maybe he’d be my partner someday.

He laughed as though I’d asked him if he was the attorney general. “I wish,” he said. “No, I’ve been a bad boy, so I’m on
the midnights now. I’m just here to finish up a call-uh.”

“A what?” I said.

“A
call-uh,
” he repeated, pulling at his shirt collar and sticking out his tongue like he was being hauled away by the neck. “An arrest!
Jesus, what are they teaching at the academy these days?”

“I guess it’s pretty PC now,” I said. Maybe I’d missed out on something.

“I guess,” he said.

I noticed a splash of sunlight on the wall behind him, so I carried my stuff over for a look. At the end of the row, three
available lockers faced a small plate-glass window overlooking the street. This was prime real estate. The area was bright,
with plenty of room to stretch out, so I wouldn’t have people tripping over me while I got dressed. I looked at my watch and
saw it was almost time for roll call. My new rookie coworkers would be showing up in droves any minute, so I decided my search
was over. I slapped a combination lock on the door handle and started to unpack.

“You don’t want one of those,” Officer Perry told me.

“Why not?” I said.

“The window,” he said. “You wanna get shot? Don’t forget where you are now.”

* * *

Our first roll call would be historic. Thirty rookies were coming into the precinct at one time, more than twice the usual
number, and five newly made bosses were filling leadership slots that had never existed before. The walls of the Three-two
muster room were covered in colorful charts and maps, meeting books were piled on tables, and a box of fresh summonses stood
by the door.

Stepping inside, I was initially drawn to the maps and walked right past the summonses. A lieutenant waiting at the door stopped
me with a stack of parking tickets in each of his hands. “Yeah, this is it,” he said, giving me twenty blank summonses. “Welcome
to the Three-two.”

I slid them into my jacket pocket and walked into the room, searching for familiar faces in the crowd. Bill Peters was supposed
to be in my squad, but I didn’t see him.

A few minutes later, a female sergeant walked inside and closed the door behind her. “Attention at roll call!” she shouted.

I watched my coworkers falling into formation around me. Fresh out of training, they snapped into five evenly spaced ranks
with impressive speed. Our quiet efficiency seemed to please the sergeant. She smiled as she walked up to the podium and started
to say, “Not bad,” before the door started to open again with a slow, queasy creak.

Forty-odd pairs of eyes turned to the door as Bill Peters emerged from behind it with a mortified expression.

“Come in,” the sergeant said impatiently.

Bill scurried across the room and wedged himself in between the two cops closest to the door, causing a ripple as the formation
had to re-form around him.

“Any time now,” said the sergeant, a tall, broad-shouldered woman with a blonde ponytail. The gold emblem on her chest was
so new it still looked wet, but she had an old-school revolver at her side and two blue hash marks on her sleeve, indicating
at least ten years of service.

When everyone had settled into their new places, the sergeant said, “All right, at ease. We got a lot of ground to cover,
so let’s get started. My name is Sergeant Langdon, and I’m the C-squad patrol supervisor. I don’t know if you’ve been told,
but we’re all part of a pretty big first-time deal here. It’s called Operation Impact, and it’s happening all over the city
in certain high-crime precincts. We’re gonna get a lot of attention from the department and from the media, so everyone’s
gonna be on point, all the time. Is that understood?”

“Yes, ma’am,” we responded in unison.

“Starting to night, you’ll be doing solo foot posts in what we call the Impact Zone. It’s a twenty-two-block area in the center
of the precinct—the worst part, as you can see on the maps around the room. Your job is to maintain a regular presence in
the Impact Zone, not answer radio runs or goof off with your buddies. Stay on your posts unless someone puts over a ten-eighty-five,
in which case, run like hell to give backup. This is a busy command, and crowd control is a major issue. Any questions?”

Someone in front raised a hand to ask, “When is our field training?”

“Yeah, about that,” the sergeant said, turning to a man in a brown silk suit standing near the door. “Captain Danders, would
you like to take the first question?”

Our executive officer was a lanky, clean-shaven man with a flattop and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. Switch his tailored
suit for high-waters and suspenders, and he could easily have been confused with Urkel from
Family Matters
. His nerdy gaze was softened by an elegant bearing once he started walking across the room. He glided soundlessly across
the floor on wing-tip shoes, then stepped behind the podium with a beaming salesman’s smile.

Clapping his hands together once, he began, “Thank you for your question. I understand that some of you are expecting a period
of hand-holding and babysitting that is often referred to as field training. We’re not going to do that. You’re part of a
special operation, and you’re going to get special treatment. Any other questions?”

None of us raised our hands, but two cops in front of me stole a secretive glance at each other, both looking confused. What
was special treatment, exactly?

“Outstanding,” said the captain, giving himself another clap. “Before I give it back to your sergeant, will everyone please
pull out the parking tickets that Lieutenant Ortiz gave you? There’s been a mix-up with the old parkers, and I want to make
sure everyone has the ones that just came out. So look down the list of offenses to double-parking, and make sure it says
a hundred and fifteen dollars, not a hundred five.”

“A hundred and fifteen?” one of my coworkers blurted out.

An awkward silence followed, until the other bosses standing at the front of the room started cracking little guilty smiles.
One of them laughed, “I’m glad I’m not writing parkers anymore.”

We turned out from roll call at five P.M., hitting the street like a gang of heavily armed hoodlums in the waning twilight.
I purposely lagged behind the others. They talked too loud and took up too much space on the sidewalk for my liking. I was
actually relieved that I’d be working alone; I didn’t fear for my safety as much as I feared offending my constituents. By
myself, at least I could control the impression I made.

Ten minutes after leaving the station house, we reached the Impact Zone. My post was on the closest edge of the territory,
so I was the first to peel off from the group. Nobody seemed to notice except Bill.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he yelled after me. I smiled back at him and shrugged—like he was right, and that I was about
to meet a terrible fate. The truth was that I wanted to say the same thing to him. As he and the other rookies swaggered up
the avenue like they owned the place, I worried about the mayhem they were about to unleash.

From the moment I stepped foot on my post at 137th and Frederick Douglass, I felt a rush of freedom and opportunity. While
I was confined to a one-block area, it was
my
one-block area, and I didn’t mind that it looked like the set of a Charles Bronson movie. Harlem had supposedly gentrified
in recent years, but you wouldn’t see it here. The most glamorous spot on my post was a liquor store, the most frequent sight,
a pile of chicken bones. Old people drinking out of paper bags sat on milk crates in front of buildings with no windows. Young
people drinking out of paper bags sat on the hoods of cars with no wheels. Empty garbage cans lay on their sides amid piles
of garbage. The only sign that anyone cared about the neighborhood was a gaping pothole in the street that had been shored
up with an old mattress.

According to the NYPD, the main goal of Operation Impact was to bring down big crimes like rape and robbery by cracking down
on small crimes like littering and public urination. The idea was that I could help turn things around here by just writing
summonses. (The previous mayor, Rudy Giuliani, had employed this tactic with great success in the past, albeit in parts of
the city that were not so far gone as this.) But what ailed my post seemed far beyond the scope of police intervention. It
didn’t need a crackdown on minor violations. It needed an army of social workers with a wrecking ball.

So I decided that this righteous ticket-giving was the wrong approach. Rather than poking around for trouble, I would deter
it by giving off wholesome law-and-order vibrations. I walked around my block a few times, staying under streetlights to broadcast
my identity.

My post was a no-man’s-land, a deserted stretch of frozen sidewalk and boarded-up brownstones. It got a little lonely after
dark, so I headed across the street to the city playground, which was full of kids. As soon as I reached the gate, I was swarmed
by a dozen wide-eyed children with outstretched hands—reaching, alarmingly, toward my cargo of weapons and restraining devices.
This didn’t seem to frighten the toddlers; what I saw as a walking dispensary of doom, they seemed to see as a delivery system
for shiny, exotic-looking toys. I stepped out of the park for their safety and mine, leaving behind all but a few truly devoted
stragglers whom I thought I could manage. Then a high-pitched voice asked me, “Is that real?”

I looked down to see a four-year-old boy reaching up to my holstered gun with a tiny, probing finger. I slowly knelt down
to meet him at his eye level and asked him his name. The boy did not respond; his eyes merely widened as the gun drew nearer
to his face. He pressed his palm on my holster and began caressing it with soft, reverent strokes, like he was petting a sleeping
dragon. When I turned to nudge the weapon out of reach, the boy seemed to realize for the first time that it was attached
to a person. He gazed up at my face and, after a few seconds of staring at my patrolman’s cap, he said, “Cap’n Crunch?”