We Are the Cops, page 2
I had no burning desire to be a cop; didn’t grow up my whole life saying, ‘I’m gonna be a cop’. Nothing. I was a truck mechanic. I was a happy truck mechanic. I had a bad run of luck on trucks; I got run over, had a transmission fall on me, but still, never thought I was gonna be a cop.
I was on my way to an engagement party in New Jersey with a friend of mine. He didn’t get the gift, I didn’t get the gift, so we stop at this mall in Queens. As we’re walking in, there’s this cop standing there handing out applications to take the police test. I take it, fill out the application, took the test three months later and nine months after that I was hired as a cop. That’s how I became a cop; I walked into a department store where a guy handed me a piece of paper. Twenty-four years later, if I could find that guy I would give him the biggest kiss. It was the greatest move that I ever took, but back then I didn’t know it was the greatest move. In fact, I almost quit on my first day after getting to my precinct.
My first assignment ever – finished my training, finished the academy – my first assignment was to sit on a hospitalised prisoner. He was in the intensive care unit; I never saw so many wires and tubes coming out of a human being in my entire life. Everything you can imagine was hooked up to him.
I’m like, ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’
He was handcuffed to the bed – this guy ain’t going nowhere. He’s going nowhere. Even if he wakes up, he ain’t going nowhere!
I left that day saying, ‘I just wasted eight hours of my fucking life.’
Back then I was a very active guy. I was within a hair’s breadth of quitting. I was absolutely disgusted. I worked in a precinct with old timers, guys with a lot of time – anywhere from eighteen years to thirty years – and these guys would all say that being a cop was the greatest job they ever did. For my first five years on the job I didn’t understand how they could possibly say this was the greatest job they ever did. I enjoyed it, but I didn’t love it the way these other guys loved it. I couldn’t understand loving the job to that level. I mean these guys loved the job. But somewhere around twelve years on the force I started to understand why people loved the job. And I’ll tell you right now, it’s the greatest job I’ll ever have my entire life. The people you meet, the things you do; it’s just the greatest job ever.
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I was very, very lucky. My class was the last class before there was a hiring freeze and the precinct I went to was kind of split between younger cops and cops with a lot of time on the job. And because it was such a bad and busy place, everybody looked out for everybody else.
You quickly learnt how to do the job because you were working with guys who had like, fifteen to eighteen years on the force, so you just went out on patrol with them. Granted, they wouldn’t let you drive, they wouldn’t let you talk on the radio, they wouldn’t let you say anything when you went to a job but they didn’t treat you bad and if you made a mistake they’d just say, ‘Don’t ever fucking do that again’, and they’d leave it at that.
You got all the shit assignments but in terms of learning how to do police work, they taught you how to do police work the right way, so that nobody was getting hurt. They taught you how to be a real cop. It wasn’t like it is today where these kids have no idea; where the blind are leading the blind.
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Some guys will look for a job in the wanted ads in the newspapers or else they’re planning out their careers and going to college or whatever. But they look and they see that being a plumber pays this amount and an accountant pays that amount and a casino worker gets this amount. But the police pay this amount – therefore I’ll be police. And if that’s how you decided that you wanted to be a policeman, then you fucked up because that’s not how it works. As lame as it sounds, the police picks you.
My mum worked for Highway Patrol, my Dad worked for Highway Patrol, my flop stepbrother worked for Highway Patrol but I was never interested in doing that. I was having a perfectly fine time making an ass-load of money building bridges. Then I started reading cop books. Then I started listening to cop stories. And then pretty soon I’m thinking, ‘I’ve got to be a cop’. Do I know when that happened? No idea. But all of a sudden I decided I had to be a cop.
I went and told my boss and said, ‘I’ve been here ten years. I’m leaving. I’m gonna go be a cop.’
‘What for?’
‘I don’t know. I fucking do not know, but that’s what I’m going to do.’
And that’s how I decided.
A while later, I went to my police oral boards and they ask the question, ‘Could you take a life if you had to?’
I say, ‘Of course.’
‘What makes you want to be a cop?’
And I said, ‘Hey, I’m not here with the Miss America speech – I don’t wanna save the world. I don’t want to work with disadvantaged children. It’s a job that you need people to do and I think I can do it. When someone calls the cops for help, I wanna be the guy that shows up. I want to be the guy that fixes it, makes it right. If some little kid’s lost and I find his parents, that’s a victory to me. The rest after that is gravy, almost.’
Then they’ve look at my application and they go, ‘How much money did you make building bridges last year?’
I said, ‘Forty-two thousand dollars.’
They said, ‘You know you start at twenty-six thousand here?’
And I said, ‘Yeah, I know that.’
They said, ‘Well, you’re about smart enough to be a cop.’
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The things that you see with the new generation that we’re hiring and the thing that we’re losing with our new generation, is the ability to communicate with other people.
One of the biggest things in this job is learning how to talk to people. But this new generation of cops, they don’t know how to talk to people. Their interpersonal communication is zero. I mean, I don’t know if it’s because they are so used to texting rather than talking? The recruits now, they want to email or text rather than talk. I don’t know if it’s because these kids sit at home and play computer games all the time but they don’t want to actually speak to you.
And the other one is, the ability to read and write – it’s gone out the window. It’s insane. Somehow I think it’s all connected but I don’t know how. It’s so weird.
I give talks in high school and people always ask me, ‘What courses should I take? Should I take criminal justice?’
I say, ‘No. We’ll teach you the law. We’ll teach you search and seizure. We’ll teach you how to use force. We’ll teach you all the police stuff. You need to go out and take courses in English composition, public speaking and things like that because if you show up at my academy, I can’t teach you how to talk to people. I can’t teach you how to read and write. These are things you should be able to do before you become a cop!’
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When I came on the job I was a reserve officer, I was nineteen and I was viewed as a spy for the Chief – I couldn’t be trusted. No one knew who you were or they didn’t know if you could do your job – handle yourself on the street – or if you were going to be a complete idiot. So you got the shit assignments. Everyone looked at you a little sceptical, like, ‘let’s see what this guy’s going to be all about’.
Once you worked, you know, a couple of months, people realised that ‘this guy’s a good guy – he’s nice, he knows what he’s doing’. And so on. Once you’ve been to a couple of bar fights or calls with other officers, people accepted you and trusted you. But it took time.
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The guys that are in The Bronx always say that The Bronx cops are the best and that The Bronx is the best place to work; they think they’re really good and granted, they have some pretty decent restaurants and you can eat pretty good and hang out and drink pretty good. But then they sent me to Harlem. They sent six of us to this one place at the same time. We were all pretty much devastated as we all thought that we were staying in The Bronx and would live our lives as Bronx cops - and that would have been great but then you walk into the precinct in Harlem. You drive down the block and it’s half abandoned and burnt out. It was a hellhole. Then you walk in the front door and the first thing you see on the wall are thirteen pictures of police officers who had been killed in the line of duty and this particular precinct has more officers murdered than any other precinct in the city.
That was a little bit eye opening and you think, ‘Oh boy! What am I getting my hands into here?’ But then you kind of get on with it. There ended up being some really good guys there – really sharp, smart, good guys. As far as I was concerned, they blew every Bronx guy I ever knew, away.
You were busy. In Harlem you’ll do anywhere between ten and thirty of your own jobs – let alone backing up on jobs – in an eight hour period of time, especially on a weekend or a holiday. You and your partner were going from job to job to job. We’re talking about a place that was a mile square, half abandoned and burnt out and they were averaging seventy plus murders a year. One place! And there’d probably be five hundred shootings of people that didn’t die. It’s not as bad now though. It’s way better. They got the murder rate down. One year I think they had three, maybe five, if they even had that many. How did they get in down so low? A little bit of the police taking back the streets, you know? There was a period of time where the whole precinct, everybody, was on the same page. If there were lazy people, nobody would work with them or go near them. Everybody worked.
When you went to work, you knew that somebody was getting arrested, somebody’s going to jail and you’d work in groups and teams to make that happen. And so we just took the streets back. And over time, all these really bad guys, well, we’d put them all in jail.
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Have I seen a difference in the people we’re hiring? Yes. The economy collapsing has caused a big problem. It’s caused a big problem because people are losing their jobs and the police department has been recruiting. So people are like, ‘Hey, the police department’s hiring! Where else can I get a job and earn potentially seventy-five to eighty thousand dollars a year? It’s enough to still raise a family, I get full benefits and it’s a neat job. It’s the full package. Where else can I get that? Well, I’m going to go be a police officer!’
So the economy has kind of become our recruiter. Whereas in the past we were recruiting people that were in colleges or coming out of the military and people that wanted to be police officers, now they’re coming to us because they need a job. But they don’t realise the amount of commitment required or what this job entails. And so they come into the academy and we run them through a myriad of high stress scenarios and they realise very quickly, ‘Oh no, this is definitely not what I signed up to do.’
And so that’s where our attrition rate also comes from – they just go away because they realise that this is more than a paycheque and some medical benefits. There’s a whole other aspect to it that they didn’t realise; the dangers, the commitment that it takes. I mean, you get guys in the academy on day one who show up thinking that the second they graduate from the academy, they’re going to become homicide detectives. That’s the kind of mentality that we’re facing right now.
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A lot of guys don’t want to go the supervisor route, as they don’t want to supervise these morons, because they are responsible for everything these rookie cops do. And they’re morons!
I was taught how to talk, I was taught how to walk, I was taught how to hold myself regardless of what the job was that I responded to. Now you have a guy with two years on the job teaching a guy with six months on the job. How does that work? I got taught by guys with twenty years on the job.
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You’re like a newborn when you go out there. There’s no way the academy can prepare you for what you are going to see every day and what you are going to do every day.
When they give you a radio and the car keys and say, ‘Well, good luck!’ That’s a whole different feeling.
And I think you see more in your first year in Baltimore than you would in your whole career in some other jurisdictions. It’s like dog years; one year in Baltimore is worth seven years elsewhere.
2
On The Job
Whether it’s catching thieves, arresting drunks or reporting a traffic accident, day-to-day policing can have its own challenges (I witnessed the widest range of emotions from officers on this chapter) and there is a lot of truth in the adage that ‘no two days are the same’. Simply being on the job – out on patrol, doing what people expect police to do – it is often the case that these are the days when the police officer will encounter the strangest, the funniest or the most dangerous situations. A SWAT officer told me that he had found working regular patrol to be far more dangerous than working SWAT because officers often patrolled alone and were unprepared when the unexpected happened.
Something I often heard officers say was, ‘All the stories just blend into one.’ That alone was testament to just how much a police officer does and sees day in, day out, throughout their career. I would occasionally see an officer struggling to think back and recall a particularly interesting tale to tell me about. But the truth is, each and every one of them could probably give me enough material for an entire book on their own.
Being ‘on the job’ and working the streets every day, police officers become numb to what it is they are required to do and they often forget just how unusual their job can be. To them it’s just another arrest, another car chase, another incident. But to those who do not inhabit their world, it is all funny, fascinating, shocking and new. So I encouraged them to just tell me something – anything – even if they didn’t think it was all that interesting. But of course, these stories would be interesting and if that incident, whatever it might have been, had been the one, single thing the officer had told me about in the course of the interview, it would have been worth it for that alone. And by getting the officers to focus on just one of these incidents, it would always lead them to other stories as their memories opened up.
‘There are so many times I wished I’d kept a journal, just because everyday something happens that most people would be amazed by,’ an officer in Michigan told me.
The tales and experiences I heard were a real mixed bag. Talks with some of these officers would last just a few minutes whereas others would, and did, go on for a good few hours. The stories ranged from funny to sad, routine to outlandish. Officers laughed, officers cried. The interviews varied widely and that, of course, is just how policing is.
Your friends always ask you, ‘What’s it like being a police officer? Tell me a cool story.’
And you have to wonder, well, what is a cool story? What do you mean by that?
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Our officers encountered a guy sitting on the kerb, bleeding profusely from the testicles. He had gone to this man to get his balls removed and this guy advertised that he could do that. He did it in his house. So on this dudes kitchen table, he took his balls off and when we did the search of the house we found the balls in the fridge. In a Tupperware bowl. And his name was Dr Wang. I mean you can’t make this shit up! Wang, the ball cutter!
The long and the short of it is – no pun intended – the victim had sought out this person through some homosexual website and sought out this guy because he wanted his testicles removed. Apparently there are a lot of people that want this to happen; there are people that want this done. But at the time you couldn’t just go into a doctor’s office, because they wouldn’t do it. So there was this website – eunuch dot com or some crap – which is where he found this cat. So he goes in this guy’s house, they have some small talk or whatever and then he jumps up on the dining-room table and this kid proceeds to remove his testicles. Now the kid said that testicles are a delicacy and he actually had them in a Tupperware bowl in the refrigerator with some, like, strawberry pie. And they had even shared some pie. You can’t make this shit up! Have some pie and have your balls cut off!
So the officers show up and they see the guy and his jeans are just saturated in blood. At first we were treating this as an assault with intent to maim – this is what we’re thinking – but the victim said that he hadn’t been assaulted. He said that he had come here for this express purpose.
Well ultimately, you’ve got to charge somebody with something; you don’t call the police and have all this going on without somebody going to jail. So they charged the guy with operating without a medical licence. Wang, the ball cutter.
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I got called to relieve a swing shift unit – they were doing a standard burglary report but they had to go and do something else – so me and my partner went to take over and we made contact with the two officers.
They’re like, ‘Yeah, we cleared the house, everything’s good. Here’s the owner of the building. He’s got all the information so that you can take the report or whatnot.’
So we’re sitting there and as my partner and I are talking, this stuff starts falling off the roof above us – you know, the popcorn ceiling, so to speak.
I’m thinking, that’s odd. And then, ten seconds later, - ‘CRASH!’ – the suspect comes falling through the ceiling, literally right onto the table in front of us.
The guy had scampered into the roof when the previous two cops came but they didn’t go up and check that area.
The burglar was hiding up there and as he was trying to sneak out he just happened to drop right through the roof, right onto the table where we were sat! We were literally sitting down, taking the report and started to see a couple of white things falling and then we look up and CRASH! He comes right down on top of us. And we’re like, ‘Whoooooa!’ and then the scramble was on! We got him into custody but we had a chuckle about it later on.
