Paul Bacon

by Bad Cop: New York's Least Likely Police Officer Tells All

  A few seconds later, a man appeared from around the corner carrying a children’s car safety seat. If this weren’t enough for a positive ID, he was also absurdly dangerous looking: shirtless and bearded, with a big nose, frizzy brown hair, and a sun-baked junkie physique. Part Frank Zappa, part crocodile, the bare-chested man stumbled across the alleyway like he was drunk. The car seat in his hand was draped in blankets, making it impossible to tell whether or not an infant was inside.

  Arriving at center screen, the two-dimensional suspect looked up and, with startling realism, immediately laughed in Haldon’s face. “Whatcha gonna do, pig? ” he taunted. “You gonna shoot a man with a baby?”

  Haldon, a devoted father of two toddlers himself, beseeched the suspect, “Sir, I think that you may be intoxicated. Before we go any further, please put the car seat on the ground slowly.”

  The bare-chested man reached into the car seat with his free hand and pulled out a foot-long silver machete. Haldon finally sprung into action, grabbing for his mock gun. He pulled at the grip, but it wouldn’t come loose. He tugged and twisted until he finally gave up and wielded the only weapon he could find: his right hand. He made a gun shape with his thumb and forefinger and shouted at the perp, “Stop right there!”

  Mercifully, the instructor gave a silent command, and Zappa dropped the car seat and began charging at Haldon with the machete raised over his head.

  “Blam, blam, blam!” Haldon shouted, curling his finger as if squeezing a trigger.

  By Haldon’s third blam, the perp’s face filled the entire screen, his gaping, shockingly unhygienic mouth wider than Haldon’s shoulders. The image loomed above us all for a moment, then was replaced by the words SCENARIO COMPLETE.

  Laughter broke out across the room, leading to a round of foot-stamping that shook the flimsy metal walls of our trailer-turned-classroom. The instructor brought the revelry to an end by turning on the overhead room lights. My classmates moaned and pawed at their eyes as if they’d just been maced.

  Officer Kurtz took off his reading glasses and asked Haldon, “What were you hoping to accomplish with your finger?”

  “I had to do something,” Haldon replied.

  “O-kay,” said the instructor. “Well, we have no shots to review, so we’ll just skip the playback. Hmm. Who should be next?”

  Bill Peters had been skulking in the shadows, so naturally the instructor called on him. Bill stood up, accepted the simulated gun from Haldon, and then quietly took his place in front of the video screen. Normally, he would have already made some kind of self-deprecating remark by now to guard against embarrassment. He said nothing, however, making me think that his holdover status had driven him to new depths of insecurity.

  The instructor switched off the room lights, and the back alley image reappeared on the screen. “I’m gonna start you with the same scenario,” the instructor told Bill. “But keep in mind that things are not always as they appear to be. Got it?”

  “Got it,” said Bill. His voice was surprisingly firm for a man teetering on depression. To say nothing of the double vision.

  “Okay,” said the instructor, and the scenario began again: the alley, Zappa, baby carrier. But when the suspect challenged Bill to shoot him, the scenario took a different turn. It must have been the meatball hoagie talking, because Bill exploded in front of our eyes.

  “PUT DOWN THE FUCKING BABY, YOU DISEASE-CARRY ING PIECE OF SHIT!” he screamed, silencing the room with his sudden, awesome rage. Our normally boisterous group sat perfectly still, eyes peeled open and mouths shut.

  The perp on the screen seemed transformed as well. Rather than grabbing a machete with his free hand, he reached for the sky in apparent submission. “Whoa, whoa! I was just kidding, officer! Let me show you something,” the suspect said, then turned his body away to reach into his back pocket.

  Bill whipped out the fake gun and fanned a half-dozen simulated bullets in the blink of an eye. Just as quickly, the SCENARIO COMPLETE message reappeared, and the instructor brought up the lights again.

  This time around, only half the room was overcome with hysterical laughter. The other half was applauding and screaming Bill’s name. Bill grinned, soaking up the unusual display of peer approval.

  Officer Kurtz stopped us short. “Before you get too cocky,” he said to Bill, “let me show the outcome I’d picked for you, the one you would’ve seen if you hadn’t blasted the guy back to the nineteen seventies.”

  The misunderstood Mr. Zappa, as it turned out, was reaching not for a weapon but for an official court document proving his custody of the reportedly kidnapped infant. The camera even zoomed in on the document to show a raised government seal at the bottom, verifying its authenticity. Like the brutal, contorted face of Haldon’s attacker, the image of the official seal lingered on the screen just long enough to add insult to injury.

  “As I said,” the instructor told Bill, “things are not always as they appear.”

  Bill dropped his head under a chorus of insults from the same people who just seconds earlier had been chanting his name.

  “Quiet, everyone! Listen up!” the instructor had to shout to be heard. “We’re dealing with more than one aspect of police work here. Officer Peters may have misread the situation, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone end a scenario so fast. Let’s look at the playback.”

  We reviewed each of Bill’s shots in slow motion. His first two bullets struck the suspect’s lower thigh and hip, shown as yellow dots, meaning nonlethal hits. The next four were red—kill shots to the man’s stomach, heart, chin, and forehead. In other words, Bill had painted a straight line of fire from the man’s kneecap to his brain. This hardly seemed like the work of someone about to flunk out of target shooting. And it proved something I’d been thinking for a while now: All Bill needed to shake him out of his doldrums was a little confidence. Short of that, his newfound hatred for criminals seemed to have done the trick.

  “Top notch,” said the instructor. “Too bad he wasn’t actually a perp.”

  “At least I didn’t shoot the baby,” Bill said, then cackled at himself for the first time in three days.

  “How long do you think it took you to squeeze off six rounds?” the instructor asked him.

  “I don’t know,” said Bill. “Four or five seconds maybe?”

  “Try point-nine seconds,” said the instructor. Another huge round of applause for Bill.

  CHAPTER 10

  WE RETURNED TO THE ACADEMY at the end of our two-week range cycle, but we never quite settled back into our old routine. After shooting live ammunition and practicing real-life scenarios, it was easy to think of ourselves as full-fledged cops, and a restless energy infested our entire company. Tardiness became a major issue, as did shouting and pushing matches, vendettas, and pranks.

  During musters, people could not be convinced to stop talking in formation. This offense carried a penalty of twenty-five to a hundred push-ups, depending on the mood of the instructor. And no matter how many people were chattering, all thirty of us had to get down on the floor and pay as a group. Despite this, people would talk in formation every day, and we would get busted for it every day.

  It was in this devolving environment, six weeks before graduation, that I was pulled out of law class by Officer Sheronda Wynn, our Official Company Instructor, a kind of homeroom adviser. Like Moran, Officer Wynn was laid-back to the point of being almost completely in effective at her job. A plump and slow-moving former transit cop, she also demonstrated that special brand of officers’ efficiency, which was to say she wouldn’t waste a single step if she could avoid it.

  Officer Wynn appeared at our classroom door, angrily waving me out into the hallway as though I was making her late for a flight. When I met her outside, she told me, “Your company sergeant’s been demoted. Since you’ve got the highest grades in your company, you’re next in line to take his place. So, do you want it?”

  “Demoted?” I said. “What happened?”

>   “What’s it matter?” she said. “He fucked up.”

  “But how?” I said, trying to picture Moran making a mistake. He was a shirker, but he wasn’t sloppy. I couldn’t imagine what he’d done to lose his stripes.

  “Look,” said Officer Wynn, “I only got ten minutes left in my meal and a whole baked potato to eat. Do you want it or not?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s kind of a bad time to take over.”

  “At the very end? Don’t you want your choice of command?”

  “Yeah, I know. Can I think about it over the weekend?”

  “No!”

  “What’s the rush?”

  “I was supposed to replace Moran before y’all went to the range, but I forgot. If the CO sees him wearing sergeant’s collar brass again, it’ll be my ass that’s demoted.”

  She was annoying, but she was right. While everyone else would receive their assignments by virtual lottery, company sergeants got their first pick. It was nearly impossible to change precincts after orders went out, and unlike the military, the NYPD had no rotation system for relieving members pressed into hardship duty. Wherever I wound up after graduation was where I’d be stuck until I retired or got promoted. The department could put me anywhere: the crime-infested South Bronx, which was more than I thought I could handle, or the snooty Upper East Side, which just seemed boring.

  I was aiming for the First Precinct in the Financial District, former home of the Twin Towers. It was close to where I lived, and, more important, it had been the site of two terrorist attacks in the last decade. Protecting it from another attack seemed like an honor and an important thing to do. With two thousand recruits in my class and more than seventy commands in the city, the chances of getting my pick seemed very small, so I made up my mind immediately. A month and a half of daily humiliation would be worth it.

  Moran was nonchalant when Officer Wynn pulled him out of class and broke the news about losing his position. When he and I met in the men’s room later to trade collar brass in private, he actually looked relieved.

  Handing me his gold-colored sergeant’s chevrons with an ironic smile, he said, “Don’t let ’em fuck with you,” and then he swanned his way back out the door. Officer Wynn had different advice: “Don’t be flexin’,” she said, her way of warning me not to be too dictatorial in my new role. I gave their suggestions only a moment of thought before deciding I would just be myself and see how that worked.

  CHAPTER 11

  JUST BEING MYSELF TURNED OUT to be not such a great idea. Rather than myself, I should have been a different person entirely, someone with much thicker skin. And maybe a cattle prod. For the next six weeks, I tried everything I could think of to keep my bunch in line. I gave them reasoned arguments about the benefits of remaining quiet in formation. They kept talking. I told them I had the power as company sergeant to take their deportment cards. They kept talking. They were so stubbornly loud that I dreamed of inventing an aerosol product called Shoosh! that I could just spray over their heads before inspection.

  On the last day of the semester, I arrived at our homeroom a few minutes late to find that all hell had broken loose. While half the class watched and cheered, a group of five recruits were attempting to turn our audiovisual cart into an amusement park ride. Three members were hanging off the back of the twenty-four-inch television, and two more were trying to squeeze their butts onto the VCR shelf. By now I knew not to ask them nicely to behave like adults. I shouted at them to “Cut it out!” but they only laughed at me. I didn’t have any cards left to play, so I just closed the door to prevent any passing instructors from seeing inside.

  According to tradition, company sergeants were supposed to receive gifts from their troops on the last day. The company members typically pitched in to raise a few hundred dollars that their sergeants would use to buy a dress uniform or a backup gun. It was generally thought that company sergeants worked harder than anyone at the academy, and their success as leaders was reflected in how much money they received. As such, I wasn’t surprised to find that all I was getting for my efforts was a headache.

  Before I could take stock of all the other disasters in the making, Bill Peters came in and grabbed me by the arm. He led me to a desk across the room, ordered me to sit down, and started grilling me.

  “I didn’t think it was possible,” he said, “but you’re worse than Moran.”

  I said, “It’s the last day. Besides, Moran was lazy. I’m just . . .”

  “Spineless?”

  “I was going to say ‘laissez-faire.’ I’m into quiet leadership. You know, leading by example. I’m not comfortable always telling people what to do.”

  “You better get comfortable real quick, bucko, or people will walk all over you,” Bill said with a sweeping gesture around our classroom. “As you can see.”

  “But I don’t have any real authority here,” I said. “I’m just another recruit.”

  “If you think things will be any easier for you on the street, you’re in for a big surprise. You gotta bust heads!”

  “I don’t see it that way.”

  “How do you see it? Because I’m dying to know.”

  “I think we should be peacemakers more than head busters.”

  “Peacemakers? Are you serious?” Bill said, looking deep into my eyes. “Holy shit, you are serious. Man, I feel sorry for your future partner, if you can find someone crazy enough to work with you.”

  “Hey, Bacon,” said Clarabel, rescuing me from Bill. I eagerly turned around and began soaking her in. After six months in our ugly gray recruit shirts, this was the first day in our service-issue midnight blues. The darker motif made Clarabel look more intimidating and sexy.

  “What’s up?” I said, quickly moving in front of Bill to hide him with my body. He and Clarabel hated each other.

  “I knew these assholes wouldn’t get you anything,” Clarabel said, holding out her hand, “so I brought you this.”

  Bill peered around me and said, “What is it, Witchy-poo? A magic wand?”

  “It’s a replica of your dick, all right?”

  “It’s a pen!” I said with all the joy I could summon, hoping to drown out their pissing match, as well as mask my disappointment. It wasn’t a really nice pen at all, though it was kind of fat and heavy like it was supposed to be nice.

  “This is awesome! I love it,” I said, sliding it into the breast pocket of my new blue shirt. “I’ll use it to write my first ticket.”

  Ten minutes before the end of class, Officer Wynn arrived and the room fell silent. It wasn’t a last-minute surge of discipline; we knew she’d been picking up our precinct assignment list, the single printed page that would determine the course of our lives for the next twenty years.

  “That’s right. Mm-hmm. I got it,” she said, fanning herself with a freshly copied list. She knew the wait was killing us, and she loved it. She crossed the room slower than the Mendenhall glacier, then, aeons later, sat down in her chair and proceeded to make herself cozy—wiggling around in her seat, clearing her throat, fogging and wiping her glasses, clearing her throat again.

  I felt my pulse quickening. All the crap I’d put up with, the toil and humiliation and push-ups, would be forgotten if I made it into the First Precinct. After only another four or five hours, Officer Wynn began calling out our assignments in alphabetical order.

  “Alvino,” she began, “Four-four Precinct. A dump. Stock up on skell gel.

  “Anderson, the Seventeenth. Very posh. Welcome to early retirement.

  “Bacon . . .” she said, and I stopped breathing.

  “The Three-two. Nice knowin’ ya.

  “Cabrera . . .”

  The Three-two? I didn’t even know where it was. I pulled out a precinct map. Starting in the single digits at the southern tip of Manhattan, I followed my finger up the length of the island. The teens started in Midtown, the twenties wrapped around Central Park, and every command in the thirties was on the north side of 110th Street—also
known as Harlem, USA. Seeing this, I let out my breath so pitifully that Bill gave me a pat on the back.

  I’d never seen myself working in Harlem. While many other places in America had a street named after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a civil rights activist who tried to blur racial lines, Harlem had an avenue named for Malcolm X, who redrew the lines over and over with a broad-tip Sharpie.

  After the assignments had all been read, I checked the list to see if Officer Wynn had made some kind of mistake. She hadn’t. I was officially slated for the Thirty-second Precinct. Interestingly, Moran had gotten Midtown North, the most coveted assignment in the city. Most male recruits wanted to go there because it covered Broadway and Times Square, where a carousing cop had a multitude of impressionable female tourists to choose from. This could only mean one thing: I’d been sold a bill of goods. I must have taken Moran’s spot after the company sergeant picks had been put into the system.

  I was peeved, and I wanted to complain to Officer Wynn, but she was already heading out the door, making her unceremonious departure from our lives. Typical, I thought, then turned to look across the room at Moran, that snake. This had to be his doing. Only he could have pulled off this sleight of hand. I felt like congratulating him and punching him in the stomach at the same time. My only consolation was that he and Clarabel hardly talked anymore, their little fling appearing to have remained just that—a little fling.

  Moran was sitting alone at his desk waiting out the remainder of the hour, so I walked over to have a little chat. I made sure not to sound angry, since our former company sergeant was very tight-lipped, and I needed him off his guard.

  “So,” I said, “you’re going to Midtown North.”

  He nodded.

  “That’s great. Was it your pick?” I asked, knowing full well it was. Moran nodded again, then let a grin creep across his face, which was starting to turn red.

  “Seriously,” I said, pretending to be a good sport. “I’m not pissed or anything, but really, what happened? Why did I become company sergeant?”