We Are the Cops (4 page)

Where I worked it was such a horrible place it was actually called ‘The Tomb of Gloom’. The Tomb of Gloom was actually the name of the precinct and it was a horrible, depressed place. The people who lived in the command area had no money but they all had guns and they all had drugs and that’s how the place survived.

The one thing the older cops taught you was that you don’t take any shit on the street, because if you let somebody take advantage of you, the next guy that comes along, they’re going to try and take advantage of them even harder. If you told a group of kids to move off a street corner and they didn’t move off the street corner, then you made them move off that street corner with as much force as necessary. If it meant you whacked them over the head to get them to move, you whacked them over the head to get them to move. If they still didn’t move, then five more cops showed up, beat the balls off of them and locked them up. Then they never gave you a problem again.

You wouldn’t do that now. If you did that now you would probably go to prison.

Guys’ on the midnight shift were fooling around and accidentally fired a gun and shot a bullet through the Chief’s wall. Luckily, one of the guys had family who owned the local hardware store. So they broke into the Chief’s office and got the bullet out of the wall. Then they had to get sheet rock, sand over the bullet hole in the wall, get paint, paint the wall real quick and then lock the office before anyone noticed. They spent half the shift doing it.

There were four or five bullet holes in that station from accidental discharges over the years.

I almost shot a small kid. We were going to a ‘gun run’, to a four or five-storey walk up, something like that.

A job came over the radio, we were assigned, there was a man with a gun in a building and we get there and we go into the building and I’m the first guy on the stairs, going up the building. I hear some people above us, hear somebody running down the stairs and it was a twelve-year-old kid with a freaking toy gun in his hand. I came so close to shooting this kid.

They changed the law. Now fake guns are orange or there has to be a certain amount of orange on the gun. But back then they looked real. I could have easily have shot the kid – killed him and probably gotten away with it. He came within arm’s length of me and I just grabbed him. And it was a toy gun.

But this was in Harlem and your gun was always out in Harlem. You go to a gun run in Harlem and there’s a building and you’re walking up the stairs, yeah, your gun’s in your hand.

I had this fight with this one guy where, if I could have got to my gun, I would have shot him.

It was a domestic violence call. We came out and there was a girl in the front yard and she said that her boyfriend – who she was having trouble with – was inside. So I go inside to see if he’s in there and as I was looking through the place, he comes charging out of a room and attacks me and we started fighting from there.

He was empty handed but he was high on PCP, very strong – he was a skinny little kid but he was just throwing me around the room. I mean, we had broken through a door, we had broken holes in the wall, we’d broken a waterbed – he was just throwing me around like a rag doll. It’s getting to where I am physically tired; I’m losing this fight. I train in combat, I’m second degree black belt in martial arts and I used to teach martial arts for years, so I’m able to handle myself but like I say, he was kicking my butt.

So I finally got to where I’m going to have to shoot him because I just couldn’t go any further. But we broke the waterbed and he was half on the bed and half on the floor and I was able to get him trapped down, inside the folds of the waterbed. He couldn’t get out – he was stuck inside the weight of the bed. That was the only way that I was able to get him under control or I would have ended up shooting him.

The funny thing is, I had three officers who were outside and this guy’s girlfriend was kinda cute. All three of those officers was there flirting with her whilst I’m getting killed inside. They figured that if I needed them, I would get on the radio. But I couldn’t get on the radio because I wasn’t able to actually get to my radio. So yeah, that was kinda funny.

I’ll tell you a great story. We get called out to an ‘Assault One’, where the guy was barely alive in an SRO – Single Room Occupancy. My partner and I got out there and there’s blood everywhere. The guy was bludgeoned and there was blood all over this place and so we started treating it like a homicide crime scene, the
whole nine yards.

We’re working on it for a while and one of the uniformed cops grabs us. He says, ‘Listen, I’m not sure if I should tell you this or not but when the first two cops got to the scene, there was a guy leaving the building who had red stuff on his pants.’

I’m like, ‘You’re kidding, right?’

‘No. He told them he was doing some painting and he’d got red paint on his pants. So they let him go.’

I’m like, ‘You’re kidding right? And if you’re not kidding, why the fuck did you tell me?’

So now we know that the first two cops on the scene let the perp go. They just let him go. Uniform cops.

So now my partner and I get hold of these two cops and say, ‘Tell us about the guy that was leaving the building when you first got here.’

They said, ‘He told us he had red paint on his pants.’

‘And you believed him? Have you seen the fucking room?’

That was a real struggle. I mean what the fuck do we do with that information? Do we have these two cops get killed? You know what I’m saying? I mean, do we give these two cops up and have them killed? They would have been killed! Luckily we were able to review the videotape and there was a guy on it and we were able to track him down. So we never killed those cops. We just called them morons. But my partner and I are from a precinct where everybody got on great. I mean we could have ruined their careers but it was handled really discreetly. Granted, at the end of the day everybody knew but it was handled in a way where these
two guys didn’t get killed.

Because we work under such extreme circumstances, when somebody was calling for help everybody would go. If you were processing an arrest in the station and you heard somebody screaming for help over the radio, you ran out the front door. Half the time you ran out the front door without a gun because you had to lock your gun up when you had an arrest. Half the time you would run out the door, jump in a car, you’d get to the scene and go to grab your gun and you wouldn’t have it. You’d be like, ‘oh fuck’.

So me and my partner are in front of the station house one day and somebody starts screaming over the radio and this other cop jumps into the back of our car. We didn’t invite him in – he just jumps into the back of the car. We’re like the first or second car on the scene and you know how when a car is still moving and you open the door and put your foot down? Your foot stays there and the car keeps moving? Well, my partner was the driver at the time and this guy does that exact thing from the back of the car. The car hasn’t stopped yet, he swings the door open, goes to step out, his right foot hits the ground, stays still and the car runs him over. So he actually gets ripped out of the car because his foot is stuck under the wheel.

So now I get out of the passenger side of the car and I’m like, ‘Are you okay?’

And he’s like, ‘Yeah, yeah, but the wheel is on my foot!’

So I’m like, ‘Back the car up! The wheel is on his foot! Back the car up!’

My partner rolls the car forward and runs him over again!

I’m like, ‘No, no! You’ve got to back up!’

So he backs up and rolls over him a third time! Runs him over three times!

Cops like overtime; we have these expressions: ‘we turn the trash into cash’ and ‘collars for dollars’.

I’ve been around the world; cops are the same everywhere. They complain about the exact same thing: pay and overtime. If you were just a regular patrolman, you made shit.

There are two guarantees with this job – you’re never going to starve but you’re never going to be rich either.

I remember driving around on ‘midnights’ and we would be looking for collars because you made the most money in overtime on midnights. You made an arrest on a midnight shift and you couldn’t process it ‘til eight in the morning, so you’d get seven or eight hours overtime.

I remember driving around three cars deep and we would just be going up and down the block jumping out on people, throwing them against the wall, patting them down and going through their pockets. If they had bullshit contraband – like knives or brass knuckles – we would just take it from them and send them on their way. It was almost like legalised fucking robbery. We never stole anything though; we never stole money or anything, but it was just like, you know, like here’s a knife. No,
that’s not good enough, get rid of it. He’s got brass knuckles. No, no. We need felonies. Get rid of ‘em. We were looking for guns; we’re looking for drugs. Knives and brass knuckles were not good enough. If we found those we would smack ‘em on the back on the head and send them on their way. I remember thinking, ‘we’re fucking robbing these people’.

That was common; that was every fucking night. And it would only start after three or four in the morning. You couldn’t really do it after six – you had to stop by five because there were decent people that lived there. So you had a short window to get this accomplished. Anybody out on the street at three o’clock in the morning in Harlem on like, a Tuesday night, is not a good person.

My neighbourhood that I work in is the absolute worst neighbourhood in Boston. But I’m so complacent and so comfortable there that I don’t even – and don’t tell this to my husband – sometimes I don’t even wear my bullet-proof vest. I should wear it at all times but I’m like, ‘whatever’. Sometimes my back is hurting or whatever, so I’ll just leave it in the locker, you know, give my back a break. But there are certain areas I will not go out to without wearing it.

They don’t make the best vests for women either. They’re all lumpy and gross. But I have been to The Bronx in New York and I’m like, ‘Jesus Christ! I wish I was in a bullet-proof car, never mind a vest!’ Everybody over there looks like a criminal. Everybody! It’s totally different to Boston.

The vests are bad and they make these pants for the women that go up over your belly whereas the men have pants that sit at their waist, so I buy the men’s pants as they fit me better. I don’t want to wear pants that are just over my belly button. It’s so uncomfortable, you know? It’s not the 1970’s anymore; it’s time to upgrade our uniforms.

This woman calls the station. I’m doing a report. It’s like two o’clock in the morning.

‘Police, can I help you?’

This woman’s screaming hysterically and I’m pulling the phone from my ear. This was right before we had Enhanced 911.

‘What’s the problem ma’am?’

‘My baby’s not breathing!’

‘Okay. Where are you calling from?’

‘I don’t know where I am. I know the town but I don’t know the name of the road.’

I’m then having to multi-task. I don’t have any dispatch training. I’m a cop – I’m not a dispatcher. I’m trying to explain how to do child CPR whilst trying to get little bits and pieces of information about where she’s calling from to the ambulance, to get them rolling in the right direction. I’m basically doing this for four to five minutes.

‘Do you remember what part of town you came into? Keep doing the compressions, keep doing the blows. Did you pass any businesses?’

‘We turned left onto a major road.’

‘Okay, the main town road, this is good. Do you remember getting to a blinking light?’

‘No, we turned off before we got to a blinking light. There was a big picture of a strawberry.’

So now I know roughly where they are. I get the ambulance going in that direction and at the same time she’s screaming hysterically doing CPR on an un-breathing infant.

Finally I figure out where she was and she says, ‘I can see the ambulance!’

I’m like, ‘Thank God! I’m going to let the line go now ma’am.’

I got into the cruiser and started to head up that way and as I’m close by, the ambulance got on the air and… and… and all I could hear was a screaming child. So they managed to get the kid back. So…

(At this point the officer broke down and began to cry)

It certainly makes up for long nights of bullshit and drunks. You don’t mind getting banged up physically every now and then; it’s just the emotional toll that this job can take on you if you are not careful. It’s awful.

Anybody you put cuffs on instantly becomes the toughest guy in the world – ‘I’ll fuck you!’ or ‘I’ll beat your ass!’ – because they know you’re not going to touch them when they’re in handcuffs.

So we used to have this thing where I’d say to my partner, ‘Hey, he’s got my cuffs on and I need them back.’

Then we’d take the cuffs off and as soon as the cuffs were
off we’d say, ‘Okay motherfucker, what are you going to do now motherfucker?’

They’d always back down.

The department has changed its ways a little bit. It’s been up and down over the years but now they’re actually letting us defend ourselves and use some offence. If someone throws a freaking punch at your face, you don’t have to risk trying a twist lock or an evasive move or run back and pull you’re stick out. Now you can block the punch and pop them right in the freaking pie-hole. But not everyone has these skills; everyone wasn’t raised in a bar or everyone doesn’t go to the gym and do the ‘Billy Blanks’ or MMA practice or anything.

What this job all boils down to, to me – after twenty-two years – is if you’ve got to kick someone’s ass, you’ve got to kick someone’s ass and you can’t let your own ass get kicked because you’ve got too much shit on. If you get knocked out by someone, that person suddenly has a taser and a stick and a gun to fuck up all your friends with. So you can’t lose. We won’t lose and we will survive. I was always told, ‘If you get shot, fight through it.’