Paul Bacon

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

  I could only imagine the worst, and Randall’s prisoner wasn’t helping much. “This girl is Dominican? I’d like to see her,” he said to me. This seemed like a lot of cheek for a man being led into a jail cell.

  I said, “She’s a police officer, okay? You wouldn’t like her.”

  “If she’s Dominican, she’s trouble, bro. Watch yourself.”

  Fifteen minutes later, I was waiting for Randall’s perp to be cleared in the hub site’s admission area when I heard Clarabel call my name. I turned around and saw her standing on the other side of the barred door leading out into the lobby. The last time I’d seen her, she looked like Scarlett O’Hara in a fiery-red cocktail dress. Now she looked more like a street urchin with a baggy hooded sweatshirt and tattered jeans.

  “Oh, you busy?” she said, turning down the hallway to leave. “I’ll catch you some other time.”

  “Wait!” I said. I shoved the barred door to open it, but it was locked. I shook the door handle back and forth, making a lot of noise with no effect. As Clarabel disappeared, I asked the hub-site attendant, “Can you let me out of here, please?”

  “The key’s in the lock,” he said without looking up from his log book.

  Three inches below my shaking hand, I found the key. I turned it, opened the door, and bolted out into the lobby.

  Clarabel was in the Two-eight’s muster room, buying a Coke from a vending machine. “I heard the news about Harbor. Congratulations. That’s mad cool,” she said, unscrewing the cap on her soda and taking a drink.

  Randall must have told her about my tryout. After the ride down, it was the least he could do.

  “Yeah, thanks. I’ve . . .” I said, feeling a tickle in my throat. I forced myself to cough, and the feeling went away. “I’ve already started training for it. How’s the Two-eight?”

  Clarabel glanced out into the lobby with an embarrassed look and said, “It’s all right, I guess.”

  “Do you make many coll—” I started to say before my throat clogged up with mucus. This was horrible. Was I twelve years old? I was like an AV club member talking to the prom queen, just hoping my voice wouldn’t crack. I covered my mouth and coughed again, feeling an immediate relief. But as I pulled my hand away, I saw a hideous blob of yellow mucus wiggling in my palm. Smooth, Bacon, I thought. What next? A nosebleed? I discreetly closed my hand and said, “Excuse me.” I searched around the room and found a metal trash can by the men’s room door.

  “You all right?” Clarabel said.

  I quickly turned my back to her and shook my hand over the trash can, releasing the evidence into a heap of chicken bones and used KFC napkins. Making sure the nasty blob had made its way from palm to can, I looked too long into the abyss, and I started to gag. This produced more phlegm, until my mouth was filled with it, and I spat out a shot-glass-sized loogie. It was disgusting and a little painful, but it left my windpipe feeling squeaky-clean. I turned suavely back to Clarabel to resume our conversation.

  Covering her mouth and hiding her Coke bottle, she said, “Don’t give me your SARS.”

  “It’s nothing,” I told Clarabel. “We’ve just got the AC cranked up in the van.”

  She waved me in closer and said, “Let me feel your forehead. Just don’t breathe on me.”

  As she pressed her palm against my head, I took a surreptitious sniff, hoping to detect a trace of perfume on her wrist, but all I smelled was french fries.

  “Oh my God. You’re on fire!” she said, pulling back her hand in shock. She peered into my eyes. “And you look like crap.”

  “It’s the end of the night,” I said.

  “No, you got something,” she said. “You’ve probably been working too hard. You always do. You should get some rest. Call in sick if you have to.”

  “I can’t go sick,” I said, remembering what Sergeant Watts had said on our first tour together. “That’s just a number against me.”

  “Don’t be stupid. They ain’t gonna make you a scuba diver if you cough up a lung.”

  “I already am a scuba diver.”

  CHAPTER 20

  I WOKE UP THE NEXT DAY to a horrible, high-pitched screaming, like the sound of an old Buick scraping by an endless row of parked cars. Without thinking, I scrambled around my bedside for my gun before I dimly remembered I’d left it in my locker at work. As the piercing, shrieking noise went on, I spun out of bed, caught my feet in the sheets, tumbled to the floor, and then jumped to my feet in a defensive stance. Now fully upright and at least partly awake, I realized what the noise was: my building’s security alarm. My apartment sat beneath the stairwell to a roof door that was rigged to go off when anyone tried to get outside. In order for the alarm to be audible on the first floor, where the superintendent lived, it had been set loud enough to cause brain damage to anyone on the upper floors.

  The coast was clear, but standing up so fast had given me a painful head rush. My ears began ringing even louder than the alarm, and a curtain of creamy white light closed in around my vision. The rush passed after a few seconds, leaving me light-headed and struggling to stand. I fought back with all I had, but my legs turned to rubber, and I collapsed back onto my futon. I tried to lift my head, but couldn’t. A mysterious force was pinning me down like some kind of giant magnet under the bed. I’d never felt tired like this before.

  The alarm was silenced a few minutes later, and I heard the super’s footsteps trudging down the stairs, past my apartment door. I fell back asleep for a few hours and woke up choking on my own breath. If I tried to take in more than a mouthful of air, I would start coughing up phlegm. If I’d ignored every other warning sign, this one immediately got my attention. My brain was running dangerously low on oxygen. Flashing lights and red flags were popping up all over.

  Saint Vincent’s Hospital was only a few blocks from my apartment, so I walked to the emergency room, taking things very slowly to avoid unnecessary exertion. I expected a long wait to see a doctor, but with the deadly SARS still grabbing headlines, I received the red-carpet treatment. All my paperwork was done for me by nurses wearing surgical masks, and within an hour of arrival I was given a chest X-ray and whisked up to my own private room on the fifteenth floor. A few hours after that, a doctor, also wearing a mask, appeared at my door with an X-ray film in his hands.

  “Officer Bacon?” he said.

  Barely able to breathe, I just nodded.

  The doctor walked up to my bed and studied my face. “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  I let my eyelids droop.

  “You should have called an ambulance,” he said in a parental tone, then, with a little more warmth, “I think you know the number.”

  I tried to smile back, though I probably just looked like I had gas. “Now, I don’t mean to scare you,” he began, scaring me. “And I wouldn’t normally tell a patient this, but because of your line of work, you should know what you’re facing. You came very close to dying this morning.”

  “Dying?” I managed to squeeze out.

  He closed his eyes and nodded.

  I took a short breath and whispered, “Is it SARS?”

  “We won’t know for a little while, but it’s not looking like SARS,” he said. “It looks more like pneumonia.”

  Pneumonia? I thought. I didn’t know people even got pneumonia anymore. It seemed so last century. Like rickets, or dropsy. I’d thought it was like polio, one of those diseases they automatically vaccinated you against in grade school all over the first world. I gasped for another syllable and said, “How?”

  The doctor sidestepped my question, focusing on the X-rays instead. Holding the film up to the ceiling lights, he pointed at a bright, fuzzy area taking up most of my left lung. “This blur is what we’ll get rid of using antibiotics,” he said, twirling his finger around the area of infection. “We’re going to concentrate on that for now.”

  He put down the film and said, “You’ll probably be with us for a few days. After that, you’ll need to take at least two weeks
off of work. Would you like us to call your employer?”

  I looked at the hose sticking out of my elbow joint, following it up to a clear plastic bag hanging next to my bed. I could almost hear Sergeant Watts telling me, “Don’t go sick unless you’re literally in the hospital with an IV in your arm.”

  I nodded at the doctor, kissing my spotless record good-bye.

  After four days in quarantine, my final SARS screening came back negative, and I was released from the hospital. I went on the Internet when I got home to learn about pneumonia. I could see why the doctor had avoided giving me an explanation. There were as many ways to catch pneumonia as there were vehicles for disease transmission—bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites, even cancer. It was the number-one killer of old people and the chronically ill, making it less a disease than a prelude to death. Despite the prevalence of pneumonia, its cause was generally described as “idiopathic,” which translates roughly as “nobody knows.” I could have gotten it from a sick prisoner, or I could have gotten it from a carton of milk.

  The antibiotics cleared up the lung infection after two weeks, as the doctor had promised. I still felt more tired than usual, but the exhaustion came and went at odd times of the day, and all my other symptoms were gone. I recovered so quickly that I actually showed up for the Harbor Unit physical test, even though I knew I had no chance of winning it. Throwing caution to the wind one last time, I went to the Police Academy and joined a group of twenty huge cops who looked like they beat up Navy Seals when they were feeling bad about themselves. I dropped out after the first event, the push-ups, but I asked the testing staff if I could stick around for the whole day. They must have felt sorry for me, because they let me hang out and watch, as well as participate in the mile run. I placed second out of four in my heat, miraculously without suffering any breathing problems.

  Instead of going out with my squad, I went back to work on limited duty, answering phones at the Nineteenth Precinct. When I returned to full duty, I was disappointed to learn that my squad had been disbanded when our old van finally drove its last mile. The MSU cops on the day tour were driving the jalopy through West Harlem when it just stopped moving. Unable to jump-start the beast, they’d left it for dead in an alley, where it was no doubt beginning its second life as a graffiti magnet and transient motel. Abandoning a police vehicle in a high-crime neighborhood was a perversely creative act, like scuttling an old ship in warm seas to start a new coral reef.

  Witherspoon and Randall were split up and placed in different squads, and when I came back on, I was stuffed into a van full of people I’d never worked with before—save for Haldon, whom I’d known at the academy. Haldon was still the thoughtful, kind-hearted man I remembered, and just as baffled as ever that no one understood why he was a cop.

  Our unit’s primary mission had also changed in my absence. The new flavor of the week was the Stop, Question, and Frisk Worksheet. Known by its shorthand clerical title, UF-250, or just two-fifty, this form was originally conceived to keep tabs on the many heated encounters between NYPD cops and the general public. The two-fifty wasn’t a summons, but the two forms had a lot in common. Like a summons, the two-fifty was a small rectangular card that fit inside a cop’s memo book for easy access. Like a summons, it provided a checklist of common occurrences to increase accuracy and reduce writing time. And like a summons, the two-fifty wound up being as much a phony measure of police activity as a tool of law enforcement.

  Still a little shaky from my pneumonia, I entered the new two-fifty regime with caution. The standard of proof required for this kind of stop was reasonable suspicion, a very low bar floating somewhere between probable cause and “He just looked like a perp”—and tending toward the latter. Given this wide latitude, I knew we’d be expected to bring in a slew of two-fifties every night, exposing ourselves to more liability and strife than seemed prudent in my new frame of mind.

  Six weeks into the stop-and-question spree, our squad was driving through West Harlem when we saw two young men standing in a darkened doorway. Our supervisor, a short-fused sergeant named Lindbergh, told our driver to stop, then said to the eight cops in the van, “Two-fifty those guys.”

  We piled out of the vehicle and surrounded the men, who put on a highly public display of righteous indignation. They were greatly outnumbered, and their inflated reaction seemed tactical: an attempt to face us down the only way they could. It was still early in the evening and the sidewalks were crowded, so our intrusion into their space probably felt humiliating. Their shouts and demonstrative body language were enormously effective. They rallied the crowd and made me so queasy that I just wanted to crawl back into the van. But we’d started this, and we’d have to finish it.

  I approached the man standing on the right since I was behind on my two-fifties. I hoped to just get his information and be done with it. I pulled out my summons binder, flipped it open to my two-fifty worksheet, and set pen to paper.

  “What’s your name, sir?” I asked the man.

  He said, “Do I come into your neighborhood and ask you your name?”

  “I know,” I said. “I don’t want to do this any more than you. So if you just tell me your name, I’ll let you go.”

  “Let me go? Am I in your custody? What did I do?”

  “It’s complicated. So please, just give me your name and address. Make it all up if you like. I’m not giving you a summons.”

  “And now you want to know my address?” he said. “Have you ever heard of the Fourth Amendment?”

  I stared at him in silence while I fought back an urge to scream.

  “Why are you wasting my time, Officer Bacon?” he said, glancing at my shield. “Don’t you have better things to do?”

  Seeing that he wasn’t going to make up a name like most people I stopped, I began writing the word REFUSED on the form. I only got as far as REFU before half our squad, including Sergeant Lindbergh, was surrounding us.

  The better-things-to-do defense, I had found, was not as clever as most people thought, especially to a group of overworked and browbeaten police officers. This was the man’s first mistake. His second mistake was hastened by my colleague Haldon, who had drifted over with the rest of the pack, apparently thinking he could defuse the situation. As the man continued to rant about his taxes paying our salaries, the kindhearted Haldon reached out and gently stroked his upper arm.

  “Don’t worry, sir,” Haldon consoled the man. “It’s only a two-fifty.”

  If any other cop had done this, I would’ve thought he’d just gone out of his mind. But it was Haldon, who’d lost his mind long ago.

  The man’s eyes flew open, and he shrieked, “Why are you touching me?”

  “It’s okay. It’s okay,” Haldon said soothingly, continuing to pet the man as though he was a cocker spaniel.

  By the fourth gentle caress, the man had had enough. He batted away Haldon’s hand—an understandable reaction, I thought. The sergeant wasn’t as sympathetic. He quickly reached out and grabbed the man’s wrist, and it might have ended there, but the man pulled his arm back. This knocked the sergeant off balance, causing a reflexive mass response that resulted in a dog pile of cops on top of the man, and on top of me.

  Lying beneath four cops, with the butt of someone’s gun jammed into my side and someone else’s knee compressing my chest, I found it very difficult to breathe. I barely managed to crawl shy of the pile before I blacked out. When I stood up and collected myself, Sergeant Lindbergh told me to summons the man for disorderly conduct. I asked the sergeant if we could speak in private, and he indulged me in a short conversation down the sidewalk.

  “I’m not prepared to dis-con this guy, boss,” I said. “That was as much our fault as his.”

  “But you gotta cover your ass. What if he tries to sue you for personal injury?”

  “What difference would a summons make?”

  “If you don’t bang him for something, it looks like we just rolled up and got in his face.”


  This, of course, was exactly what we’d done. Saying as much would have been insubordination, though, so I took a different tack.

  “But he’s not hurt,” I said.

  “Trust me,” said the sergeant. “A guy like that’ll make something up later.”

  “Why would he sue me? I didn’t jump on him.”

  “He knows your name. You think he’s gonna forget a cop called Bacon?”

  “What about Haldon?” I said. “He touched the guy first. Can’t we let him write it?”

  “How many summonses you got this month?” the sergeant asked.

  “None.”

  “Dis-con him.”

  I dropped my head.

  The sergeant said, “What’s the problem?”

  “I haven’t even gotten the guy’s name yet,” I said.

  “I got his ID right here,” the sergeant said, handing it to me.

  I took the card and said, “He’s not going to be happy when I write him up.”

  “You’re a cop,” said the sergeant. “You wanna be popular, join the fire department.”

  I started moping back down the sidewalk, and the sergeant called after me.

  “You wanna shut this guy up?”

  I nodded.

  The sergeant said, “Since you gotta run his name through Central anyway, run him now, before you tell him about the dis-con summons.”

  “And?”

  “And, he’ll pop a warrant. Then he won’t say shit.”

  “I don’t think he’s gonna pop,” I said. “He seems pretty squared away to me.”

  “The louder they are, the guiltier they are,” said the sergeant. “It’s a scientific fact.”

  I picked up my radio and raised Central for a name check. Two minutes later, the dispatcher said, “Your ID comes back to a Harris, first name Frederick. One outstanding warrant, failure to appear in New York State Supreme Court for first-degree criminal possession of a weapon. One outstanding warrant, New York County Criminal Court, violating a restraining order. One outstanding warrant . . .”