Paul Bacon (9 page)

Still squatting, I stared into his eyes, wondering what to say.

The boy’s older sister appeared shortly after. A towering twelve-year-old with antenna-like pigtails and a withering pout,
she looked like the real law in these parts. “He thinks you look like Cap’n Crunch,” she taunted. As soon as she got within
reach of the boy, she yanked him back by his shoulder, making him cry.

“Ooo. That’s okay,” I said, hanging on the little man’s pained expression. “I don’t mind.”

“No, he’s messin’ with you,” the girl said. “He thinks if you’re as nice as Cap’n Crunch, you won’t close the playground.
But I told him not to front the popo anyways, because you weren’t fixin’ to shut it down, were you?”

A sign on the gate said the park was supposed to be closed from dusk to dawn. This seemed hard to enforce in the middle of
winter, when the days were brutally short. Plus, the playground was well kept, well lit, and full of life—the only apparent
source of positive energy in the neighborhood.

I told the girl, “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

She stared at me with her hands on her hips. “Are you closin’ the playground or not?”

“Not,” I said, and the girl ran back inside the gates.

“Thank you, Cap’n Crunch,” chirped the boy with tear-stained cheeks.

“You got it,” I said with a wink. “Play safe now.”

Watching him toddle away, I felt like a king. I didn’t have to write summonses to do this place some good. I could just dispense
justice as I saw fit. If I wanted the park to stay open, it stayed open. I felt as if I’d already done a day’s work, but then
I heard a quick siren blast over my shoulder. I turned around and saw Captain Danders sitting behind the wheel of an unmarked
green Chevy Impala. I ran up to his car and put up a salute.

“What the hell are you doing?” said the captain.

“I was just, uh, safeguarding the . . .”

“Bullshit,” he said, then pointed across the street. “You see those mopes pumpin’ at the bogey over there?”

I looked where he was pointing and saw four young men standing near the entrance to a convenience store. I said, “I believe
so, sir.”

“If they haven’t bounced in five minutes, I’m giving you a rip, you understand? I’ll hit you back later.”

I appreciated the heads-up. But what was he talking about? After the captain drove away, I looked at the young men for some
kind of context. They were all wearing puffy ski jackets that came down to their knees and made them look like they were smuggling
balloons. They seemed like they’d have no problem “bouncing,” if that’s what the captain meant, though I wasn’t sure what
that would accomplish, or how I would make them do it.

He might have wanted me to make them leave. I wondered how. I couldn’t legally eject them from a public sidewalk if they weren’t
causing trouble. They were quiet enough—no shouting, no blasting radios—so I had to gather evidence.

They acted oblivious as I watched them from across the street. It didn’t take long for one of them to do a hand-to-hand transaction
with a nervous-looking passerby, and I figured they were dealing drugs. So brazen, I thought, right in front of me! If they
would peddle drugs in plain view of a police officer, what else were they capable of?

Now I understood what the captain was talking about. Well, most of it. The “rip” must have been some kind of punishment for
not doing my job, which obviously was to keep drug dealers off my post. I hoped I didn’t have to arrest anyone in the process.
I had probable cause to search based on the hand-to-hand, but I assumed they were armed and dangerous, given their line of
work. I was outnumbered, so I decided to just approach them, tactfully state my case, and let them go with a warning.

I walked up to them slowly while planning what to say: “Excuse me, young men? I noticed your group exhibiting suspicious behavior,
but I might have been mistaken. Perhaps you’d like to move along while I put in my contact lenses.”

I was still about fifty feet from their spot when they all turned around and started walking the other way. I didn’t have
to say anything, and the crowd of scary-looking teenagers left without a word of protest or a hard look in my direction.

Corner-taking was immediate gratification, a shot of courage straight into the vein. As if I needed any more of an ego boost
at this point, a man in his thirties walked up and thanked God that I was there. “If you weren’t holding down this corner,”
he said, double-gripping my hand, “the hoods would be.” He pointed across the street at the building where he grew up and
told me he’d spent his life in fear of taking a stray bullet. “One of these jokers gets a little smart, and the air fills
with gunfire.”

I’d felt presumptuous about being a white authority figure in Harlem, but now all that mattered was that this one man felt
safer because I was there. After he left, I looked at the slab of concrete beneath me with new eyes. Littered with paper bags,
beer cans, and dog turds, it looked beautiful somehow. Everything that I had done, everyone I had known, and everywhere I
had ever been had somehow led me to this place where I was actually making a difference. If it wouldn’t have looked so stupid,
I would have picked up some of that trash on the sidewalk and brought it home as a souvenir.

CHAPTER 14

N
OT EVERYONE IN MY COMMAND was feeling the love. After the first week of Operation Impact, some rookies complained about being
targeted with objects from rooftops, an occupational hazard known as air mail. People just waited for us to walk by, and they’d
drop anything they could fit out a window or lift over a ledge. Glass bottles were a common form of air mail, as were small
household appliances and used diapers. The Three-two was already an air mailer’s paradise, with thousands of high-rise public-housing
units, and our sudden, encroaching presence took it to a new level. No one had gotten hit yet, but the increasing number of
near misses suggested it was only a matter of time.

I kept a sharp eye in this hostile 3-D environment, and I never ticketed a parked car if I thought the driver would catch
me in the act. Issuing someone a fine was like handing them a license to come unglued in public. When they started to get
loud, it was time to start watching the rooflines. Heated exchanges over tickets had a way of attracting air mail, serving
as a battle cry to anyone with a little elevation and an ax to grind with the police.

I wasn’t thrilled about writing tickets in the first place. Now, faced with the risk of being hit with a soggy diaper every
time I flagged somebody’s expired registration, I stopped writing them altogether. I just walked my post instead. After two
weeks, my slumping numbers caught Sergeant Langdon’s attention, and she called me up to her podium after roll call.

“What’s with the goose eggs?” she asked me, referring to the many zeroes in my nightly activity reports. “You a conscientious
objector or something?”

I told her, “I don’t feel safe writing tickets in the Impact Zone.”

“
You
don’t feel safe? Every night I see you on post, you act like you’re walking around your own neighborhood. It looks like you’re
having
fun
out there.”

“Because I’m not writing tickets.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“Air mail,” I said. “Isn’t everyone?”

“I hope so, but everyone isn’t bringing me goose eggs,” she said, raising her eyebrows. “I can’t order you to bring up your
numbers, so you gotta figure it out yourself. If you need a hint, Captain Danders loves double-parkers.”

I’d run out of excuses, so I went to my post that night aiming to write up a double-parked car. Finding one wouldn’t be a
problem, of course, since they were everywhere—it was the follow-through that I dreaded. People who double-parked were rarely
far from their vehicles.

Making things harder, some of the information required for the summons was only provided on a computer-generated sticker inside
a vehicle’s windshield. The lettering on the registration stickers was small and often faded, requiring a flashlight to read
after dark. I only had two hands, and holding a flashlight, a summons book, and a pen took three hands, leaving me with less
than no hands to reach for my gun or my radio if I had an urgent need to do so.

With not much daylight left, I took the first opportunity I came across. At 143rd Street and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard,
an unoccupied Pontiac Fiero was double-parked in front of a delicatessen. I assumed the driver was inside the deli, so I stayed
away from the store’s windows while I got started with the ticket. I hid behind a cement staircase to jot down the easy stuff:
color, make, place of occurrence, et cetera. In less than a minute, I’d signed my name and shield number and was ready to
go in for the final bits of information on the sticker. I casually walked by the deli counter as if I was just passing by.
Once I was safely out of view, I took a hard left turn and stopped between two legally parked cars for cover while I waited
for a break in traffic.

I was just a few feet away when an old woman in a trench coat and rubber galoshes walked up and asked me in a sweet voice,
“Excuse me, officer. Are you lost?”

“No, but thank you, ma’am,” I said, waving her off as politely as I could before she blew my cover. “You can move along now.
Thank you.”

“Well, you look very new. If you have any questions, I live right up there,” she said, pointing at an apartment building across
the street.

“That’s so nice, ma’am,” I said. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind . . .”

“On the third floor,” she continued. “I live with my son. Actually, he lives upstairs now. He moved into his own place when
he married his wife. She’s a schoolteacher, which is funny, because when he was in the first grade . . .”

There was no stopping the woman, so I turned around while she was still talking and watched the traffic light down the block.
When it turned red, I waited for the remaining cars to pass by, then I dashed out into the boulevard to find the registration
sticker on the driver’s side of the windshield. I wrote down the required information, then separated the triplicate versions
of the ticket and slid a copy into the accompanying envelope. One side of the mail-in envelope was fluorescent orange, so
I turned it over to the less conspicuous white side before I slid it under the windshield wiper.

I was hustling back to the sidewalk thinking I had it made when a heavyset man in a leather jacket emerged from the deli carrying
a plastic food container. When his eyes wandered from me to his car and back to me, I got a lump in my throat.

“Oh, no, I’m sorry, officer,” he said in an unusually penitent voice. Most people were up in arms the moment they saw me next
to their cars. The man hustled past me, reached across his windshield, and took the ticket.

“I was only in there a few minutes,” he said with a smile, handing me the summons like it was a valet check.

I left my hands at my side and said, “Sorry, sir. I already wrote it. Nothing I can do.”

“But I was just getting a salad,” he said.

I felt obliged to explain the situation in more detail. If he understood why he was getting a ticket, I thought, maybe he
wouldn’t double-park again. “I’m afraid it doesn’t matter how long you were inside the establishment. Your car is blocking
a traffic lane, which is dangerous to other motorists, especially at rush hour.”

“But I can move it now,” he said, once again offering me the ticket back.

When I didn’t take it, he huffed, then pulled the summons out of the envelope and read it. “No, wait,” he said, pointing at
the list of offenses. “This isn’t right. The fine is supposed to be a hundred and five dollars.”

“It’s gone up,” I said.

“It just
went
up,” he said.

“Like I said, I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do.”

“Nothing you can do, huh? What kind of man are you?”

This seemed rhetorical. It was probably the wrong time to explain to him that I was the sensitive kind of man and merely hoping
to make the streets safer and better for him, one deli at a time. Well, I could try. “Sir, double-parking is a serious violation.
It’s the number-one cause of vehicular . . .”

“No, you’re just squeezing it out of me, everything I have. You don’t want us to get ahead.”

“No, I’m just telling you why the fine is so . . .”

The man placed the salad on the hood of his car, then turned around and put up his fists. “Drop that gun belt, you fuckin’
pussy, and I’ll show you who’s a fuckin’ man.”

Obviously he’d crossed a line here. I could have written him a summons for disorderly conduct at the very least, but I knew
that most likely would just invite him to teach me the meaning of the word
disorderly.
I’d need to see his ID to write the summons, and if he’d refused to show it to me, I’d need to lock him up or risk looking
as if I had issued an empty threat.

The veins in the man’s neck and temples were throbbing, so I didn’t think he’d go down easy. He also had a pen in his front
jacket pocket. I envisioned it being shoved into one of my eyes. But he was insulting my manhood, my profession, my very humanity.
Meanwhile, a growing number of onlookers was taking his side, forming a chorus of hecklers that attracted an even larger crowd.
In my ner v-ous ness, I scanned the nearest roofline and thought I saw someone’s silhouette standing above me, holding a brick.

The motorist was trying to break me down, and he was doing a good job. I could feel myself shaking, and I knew this would
only embolden him. Finally I turned and started walking away.

“You’re damn right!” he shouted.

As Sergeant Langdon had predicted, Operation Impact was getting a lot of attention from the media. Initially it was lauded
as an innovative way to take back the streets. We were generating the first big headlines about the department since 9/11,
when an unprece dented twenty-three police officers were killed in one day. Sympathy for cops was still in vogue, with civilians
all over the city wearing NYPD caps and T-shirts. The early media coverage of Operation Impact reflected the positive mood
in glowing feature articles and interviews with members of my rookie class.

Then we started actually doing our jobs. A month later, a wave of angry media attention came in, blasting the NYPD for its
“silly summonses.” As it happened, a transit cop had written up someone for “Unauthorized Use of a Milk Crate” on a slow news
day, and the story made it all the way to CNN. About this time, one of the local tabloids began running a daily feature in
which people were photographed holding their freshly minted tickets and staring at the camera with crusty looks of indignation.

While I had initially felt sorry for the pregnant woman who’d been charged with “Blocking Pedestrian Traffic” for sitting
on a subway staircase, I now felt as much sympathy for the cop who’d written the summons. I could see both sides of the issue,
and I didn’t like either perspective. The way that man had exploded in my face when I wrote him a ticket, it was as much a
penalty for me as it was for him. Plus, it didn’t seem wise to anger people in the same place I spent forty hours a week dressed
like a target. I knew it was illegal for the job to push quotas on us; setting predetermined police-activity levels was unconstitutional.
I had logic and the law on my side, so I decided to write a bare minimum of summonses from now on—just enough to prove that
I had showed up for work.

I tried to explain this thinking to Bill while we were walking back to the station house one night, but it only added fuel
to his argument that I was not cut out to be a cop.

“Like I said,” he concluded while we were rounding the last corner before reaching the precinct, “You’re a liberal, a danger
to yourself and others.”

A hundred yards from the station house, he pointed to an ambulance parked out front. “Look at this,” he said with disgust.
“Probably another skell who’s gonna get a free trip to the hospital and a nice warm bed for the night because of liberal laws
made by bleeding hearts like you.”

When we reached the ambulance, we learned that it had been called not for a prisoner, but for one of our colleagues, a rookie
named John Holloway, the most active ticket writer in our squad.

Holloway was sitting on the back bumper of the ambulance while a paramedic dabbed blood from the crown of his head. Despite
what looked like a serious wound, Holloway did not appear to be in shock. A lit cigarette jammed in the corner of his mouth,
he just seemed pissed off.

Bill said, “Holy shit, Holloway. You get in a shoot-out?”

“Nah, just air mail,” Holloway said, then recoiled when the paramedic touched on a sore spot. “Ow! Be careful,” he shouted,
his cigarette dropping out of his mouth and onto the street. As Holloway bent to pick it up, I caught the paramedic shaking
his head with a look of exasperation.

“What happened?” Bill asked.

Holloway explained, “I was writing a double-parker in front of the projects on Powell, and one of those assholes tried to
drop something on my head.”

“Looks like they succeeded,” Bill said, cackling at himself.

“What’d they throw?” I asked.

“A
clock radio
,” said Holloway.

“That could have killed you,” I said. “I’m glad you’re okay.”

“Well, I’m not,” Holloway grumbled. “Captain says I’m not even getting a line-of-duty injury for this shit,” he said, nearly
as upset about having to come to work tomorrow as he was about his near-death experience.

Walking up the steps into the station house, Bill said to me, “Fuck-ing savages. A clock radio.”

“A wake-up call,” I suggested.

“Appeaser,” said Bill.

Inside, we were late for return roll call, an end-of-tour procedure inflicted on rookies for the official reason of a head
count. The real reason for taking us off the streets thirty minutes early, leaving the neighborhood to fend for itself, was
to count something else.

“How many summonses you get, Bacon?” said our patrol sergeant, standing at a podium in front of a squad of tired-looking rookies.

Hustling to the back of the formation, I said, “One, sarge.”

My catch for the night, a single ticket for an expired registration sticker, was pretty pathetic. But I wasn’t alone. Apparently
our numbers as a group had started to plateau. This meant one of two things: We were either doing our job so well that we
were deterring violators, or we weren’t looking hard enough. When Captain Danders appeared at our muster-room door that night,
I guessed he wanted to personally inform us which way he saw it.

“Attention!” the sergeant shouted, causing the roomful of weary foot soldiers to stiffen.

The captain slid into the room, working the crowd. “How’s everybody?” he said, pointing at different faces. “How you doin’?
All right. Oh, hey, wassup?”

He stepped up to the podium, gave himself the requisite single clap and said, “Okay, the good news is crime is down in the
Impact Zone on the four-to-midnight tour, including robberies, so y’all are doing a excellent job. An
ex
cellent job. The bad news is that your summonses are also down. But don’t get me wrong, because we don’t have summons quotas.
I have never said that, ever. Have I, sergeant?”

“No, sir,” the sergeant replied.