Paul Bacon

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

  When I was done, I walked to the complaint room and handed the report to one of our civilian administrative assistants. The woman was sitting in front of a computer, entering complaints into the department database. I watched her review my report, her eyes darting between the charge and the narrative. A look of skeptical disdain washed over her face, and she said, “You better pray the CO doesn’t come lookin’ for this.”

  So pray I did. My prayer seemed to have been answered, because I never heard from the inspector again, and I continued to work with Clarabel on the four-to-twelve. I figured I’d heard the last of the video store incident, but the following week, Detective Latham approached me to discuss my updated report.

  I ran into Latham while I was standing next to the same desk in the main lobby where the inspector had given me his thinly veiled ultimatum. The detective seemed to feel the need for more secrecy. He asked me to talk with him in the men’s room.

  Detective Latham pushed open the restroom door and looked around. A cop was washing his hands in the sink, so the detective waited until the man left. Once inside, the detective pulled my report out of the pocket of his suit jacket, pointed to my narrative, and said, “Was this what the complainant told you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Then why’d you call it harassment with lost property?”

  “The CO told me to.”

  The detective took a deep, noisy breath through his nose and grimaced as though he was preparing to dead-lift a four-hundred-pound barbell. I felt a cold trickle at the base of my spine.

  He asked me, “What do you think happens to complaints after they go in the system?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, reflexively taking a step back, sensing that he was about to punch me.

  Seeing me cringe, the detective tried to compose himself. “Okay, okay,” he said, dropping the anger in his voice. “I understand that you’re new, but you need to know the detective squad reads every complaint, even if it’s for bullshit like this one.”

  The men’s room door began to swing open, and the detective pushed it closed. “What the fuck?” said the voice on the other side of the door.

  “A minute!” the detective shouted, then he turned back to me and said quietly, “Don’t let the CO intimidate you. He does this all the time. He just wants to keep his crime numbers down so he can get promoted and leave this shithole precinct.”

  Out on patrol with Clarabel that night, I decided it was time to revisit the video store incident with her. I felt like I’d been slapped from two different directions, and I wanted to know why.

  “I tried to sign the complaint,” she said. “But you wouldn’t listen.”

  “You weren’t telling me anything,” I reminded her.

  “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to tell you.”

  “You still think I’m in IAB, don’t you?”

  “No,” she said, adding, “Well, maybe.”

  “My God,” I said. “What do I have to do to prove I’m not a rat?”

  “It’s not something you can prove. You’re either a rat, or you’re not.”

  “If I was in IAB, don’t you think I’d have turned in the CO by now?”

  “Maybe you’re biding your time, collecting more evidence. This downgrading thing is a big problem, but you didn’t hear that from me.”

  “How big a problem?”

  She nodded deeply. It was big.

  “But then we’re screwing ourselves,” I said. “How are we ever going to get more cops if the borough doesn’t think we need them?”

  “You’re starting to understand how things work around here,” she said. “You glad you came to the Two-eight?”

  In truth, I was glad. I got to be with her all night, five nights a week. I didn’t dare tell her, though. It didn’t seem appropriate at the time. Plus, I thought that mushy sentiments would only turn her off.

  “No,” I said. “This place sucks. I should have stayed in MSU.”

  “Too late now,” she said.

  CHAPTER 25

  BY THE SUMMER OF 2004, 9/11 was starting to feel like history. American flags no longer flew from taxi antennas, the downtown skyline stopped looking naked without the Twin Towers, and the original reason I joined the force seemed like a distant memory. Then came the Republican National Convention.

  For the first time ever, the GOP was coming to New York City, where Democrats outnumbered Republicans about five to one. A quarter of a million demonstrators were expected to voice their protests at some point during the convention, near the site at Madison Square Garden and at numerous other locations around the city. Some groups were pledging peaceful assemblies; others were threatening to screw things up by any means necessary.

  For months before the convention, Lower Manhattan was turned into a 24/7 panic zone. Ground Zero was an irresistibly theatrical backdrop for the GOP, and their plan for appearances there brought the city’s terrorism fears to their highest level since 9/11. The result for the NYPD was a stunning new approach to looking busy. “Operation Critical Response Vehicle Surge” was a mouthful, and an earful, sending long lines of patrol cars through the streets with flashing lights and blaring sirens—every day for weeks on end.

  Clarabel and I were scheduled to do our normal patrol duties in the Two-eight for the first two days of the convention, when the largest protests were expected to take place downtown. Hundreds of thousands did come to march, but only a handful of arrests were made. I, for one, was relieved, since I had sympathies with both the protestors and the police department. It seemed that the greatest potential for violent conflict had passed.

  On the third night, when we were scheduled to work downtown on the Republican detail, I was expecting an easy one. I walked into our normally lonely locker room and was surprised to see two dozen cops noisily suiting up. My coworkers laughed and punched each other, donned riot helmets, and body-slammed lockers. The depressing atmosphere of the basement was gone, replaced by a spirit of joyful menace I might have found amusing during almost any other event.

  Carlyle was holstering his backup gun as I walked in. When he saw me, he shouted down the aisle of lockers, “What are you doing here? You should be with all your liberal demonstrator friends outside the Garden. This is your big night.”

  “I don’t have any friends,” I said. “All I have are you hard-ons.”

  “Bacon, baby!” Carlyle squealed with delight. “Listen to him! He’s one of us now. You ready to crack some skulls, bro?”

  I opened my locker and started taking off my street clothes. “What do you mean, ‘big night’? I thought the worst was over already.”

  “It’s just getting started,” Carlyle said. “To night’s A31.”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “August thirty-first,” he said. “This is the night when all the agitators we were too pussy to lock up before are gonna make us pay in blood.”

  As Carlyle explained it, a surprise attack was reportedly being mounted at the convention site in a few hours. A legion of protestor groups was joining for an unruly flash demonstration two or three times larger than the previous days’ events. It sounded like a harrowing assignment, but by pure luck, our squad pulled a light security detail far from Madison Square Garden. While others would be clashing with the forces of mayhem, we would be standing outside the Central Park Boat house, an upscale restaurant where two convention-related events were scheduled: a dinner for a midwestern Republican congressman, and an after-hours party for California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

  Central Park was off-limits to protests, though we did see a lot of people in the park with Bush-bashing signs and T-shirts. Most of them wandered around aimlessly, their numbers too small to qualify as a demonstration. Thousands passed by us, yet for some reason no one seemed the least bit curious about the fifty police officers and men in black guarding the Boathouse.

  Apparently unknown to the protestors, they were only feet from an open-air restaurant filled with a conservative cong
ressman’s entourage. If they knew, Clarabel and I agreed, they’d be swarming the place, so when people asked us what was happening at the Boat house, we said we had no idea.

  It took an astonishing three hours for someone to pick up the scent, and they practically had to be led by the snout. Nudging them along, perhaps inadvertently, were the Billionaires for Bush, a half-political, half-comic troupe of left-leaning activists who dressed like pretentious rich people and praised all things Republican. The Billionaires just happened to come by the Boat house while they too were wandering in the woods, but unlike the other protestors, they read the situation in an instant.

  Slyly, the members of the group, costumed in mink stoles and silk ascots, began chatting up the out-of-towners as though they were all at the same party. The diners seated along the footpath could not avoid being part of the spectacle, and they didn’t seem to mind. The Billionaires’ act was so polished that they came across as free entertainment. Whether or not the diners picked up the irony was anyone’s guess, but the Billionaires were so well behaved that we felt safe not doing anything about them.

  About ten minutes into the Billionaires’ act, an observant group of demonstrators began gathering behind them and settling in, like crows on a fence. Cell phones were pulled out, foot messengers were dispatched back to the main walkway to recruit more bodies, and the word began to spread.

  Our well-kept secret was out. As a crowd started to gather, I stopped leaning against a tree, Clarabel put away her cell phone, and Sergeant Ramirez began pacing along the metal barricades. Elsewhere, Secret Service agents started talking into their cuff links, and a group of NYPD bosses in white shirts fell into a huddle. I looked at my watch. “Perfect,” I said to Clarabel. “Eighteen hundred hours on the dot. Just in time for meal.”

  Clarabel nodded, then grabbed a barricade with both hands and hurled herself over the top—a bouncing black ponytail and a flash of boot soles. Before she got away, Sergeant Ramirez walked up behind her and bopped her on the head with a rolled-up roster sheet.

  “Not so fast, lady,” said the sergeant. “Wait until we see what these people do.”

  By now, about fifty protestors had gathered along the veranda, dwarfing the original pack of Billionaires but showing no clear direction. Lacking leadership, they milled around without bothering any of the diners. It looked as though they might never get up a head of steam, and many started to leave.

  “This looks like a nonstarter,” I said to the sergeant.

  “Yeah,” she said. “You guys go catch some z’s. I don’t know how late we’re gonna be here. Just do it in shifts. These things can change in a heartbeat.”

  Clarabel and I walked to a lot next to the Boat house, where she’d parked her car. We’d driven to the detail in her old Honda Civic because the Two-eight couldn’t spare a vehicle, and I didn’t own one. After letting me in the passenger side, Clarabel got behind the wheel and lowered her seat to a horizontal position. She folded her arms across her chest and said with a yawn, “Your turn to stay up, right?”

  “No, but go ahead and crash,” I told her.

  I could have used the shut-eye, but I was more tempted by the chance to watch her sleep. I laid my face on the headrest and stared at her profile, soaking up her unusually quiet demeanor.

  Without opening her eyes, she said, “Why are you looking at me?”

  “I’m not looking at you,” I said.

  “You are too. I can hear it.”

  “That’s your imagination.”

  “It better be,” she said, then drifted off to sleep—and eventually so did I.

  Sergeant Ramirez woke me up by rapping on my window. “Get up, my little chickens,” she said, pointing back toward our post. “Things are happening.”

  Looking across the lot, I saw that the previously flagging group of protestors had grown to at least a hundred. I poked Clarabel in the arm.

  “Noooh,” she said irritably, “It’s only been five minutes.”

  “It’s showtime,” I said.

  “Is Arnold Schwarzenegger here?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then go away. He’s the only show I wanna see to night.”

  “It’s the demonstrators,” I said. “They’re back with a vengeance.”

  “What?” she said, pulling herself up to look outside. “Oh, shit.”

  While we jogged with the sergeant back to our post, I asked her, “What happened?”

  “Some guy with a bongo drum just showed up like some kind of pied piper,” she said. “He brought fifty bodies with him, and they keep coming and coming. I think this may be part of the A31.”

  I felt a twinge as we approached the noisy crowd; the last time I’d been to a political demonstration, I was standing on the other side of the barricades. It was George W. Bush’s first inauguration in 2001, when I’d gone down to Washington to get within screaming distance of the new president’s motorcade. Bush v. Gore had been the first national election I’d watched from beginning to end, and being as how my side had lost, I took the whole thing kind of personally. I wanted someone on the other side to feel as offended as I did, so I joined a five-thousand-strong march aiming to shake up the parade route. Despite our amazing energy, we were stopped far short of our destination by Washington police, and it all seemed like a flop. At the time, all I could say was what fascists the cops were for suppressing our free speech, but now, standing in their shoes, I wondered how I had ever taken myself so seriously.

  The demonstration continued to grow until nearly three hundred people were pressed up against each other, every one of them making a different kind of loud noise—screaming and shouting and banging and pounding and honking and tooting. It would have been a brilliant moment for free speech, except the people they were shouting at seemed completely unaware of their presence. The tables along the edge of the veranda were all full, and the guests were chatting away as if they couldn’t even hear what was happening ten feet away from them.

  After letting the protestors go on like this for two hours, we received orders to disperse the crowd, and they left without incident. They must have been all screamed out, I thought, and not a moment too soon, as it was almost time for Governor Schwarzenegger’s party. At nine fifteen P.M., the Boat house was emptied of patrons, the surrounding wooded areas were cleared of stragglers, and a massive shuffling of the deck took place.

  In our new posting, Clarabel and I were shifted from the front of the Boat house to the Ramble, a dark, forested area in back of the restaurant overlooking a famous lake, a fixture in cinematic love stories filmed in New York. Quiet and remote, with a yellow moon rising above the city skyline, it was the kind of place I would have brought a girl to make out for the first time in high school. There was even a big flat rock to stretch out on, and our entire post was in shadows, enabling us to keep watch on the Boat house without anyone seeing us. As we sat down next to each other on the rock, I started to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” Clarabel asked.

  “I was just thinking a bottle of wine would be nice about now,” I said.

  “In your dreams,” she said, scooting her butt in the other direction. “I don’t do charity.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” I shot back. “I’m not that interested.”

  “Not that interested?” she said. “But you are interested, aren’t you?” “No more than you’re interested in me,” I said.

  “Which is not at all, you understand? It’s just platonic.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Good,” she said.

  * * *

  Despite how it sounded, our conversation struck me as an encouraging development. A subject I’d wanted to broach for many months was now out in the open, and in a game of inches, there were no small victories.

  I leaned back and gazed into the murky haze above. “Did you know,” I said to my partner, who’d been raised in Manhattan, “that when the sun goes down in most places, there are thousands of points of light up in
the sky? They’re called stars. I’d like to show them to you sometime.”

  “I’ve seen stars,” said Clarabel. “I’ve been to the planetarium.”

  We talked a little while longer, then sat quietly, enjoying our peaceful solitude, until the silence just seemed weird.

  I turned to Clarabel and said, “Is your radio even on?”

  “Yeah, right? What ever happened to that A31 shit?” she said, wiggling her volume knob. “Oops. Mine’s been off.”

  I tested my radio and said, “Mine too.”

  We turned up our radios to hear complete pandemonium on the airwaves.

  “No, Central! ” a cop shouted over a background of sirens. “Not fifteen under, FIFTY under. Five-oh bodies under arrest at my location. You got that? ”

  “Ten-four,” said the dispatcher, “But WHICH unit is raising Central? ”

  Clarabel said, “Sounds like a total cluster. We should call someone and find out what’s going on.”

  She pulled out her cell phone and got in touch with a person who kept her very entertained in Spanish for about five minutes, then hung up with a puzzled look.

  “Who was that?” I said.

  “You’re not gonna believe this,” she said. “There’ve been six hundred collars so far.”

  “Where?”

  “Around Union Square and the Garden.”

  “So there really was an A31?”

  “Sounds like it.”

  * * *

  At around ten thirty, a caravan of American-made vehicles—some very long, others very large—rolled up to the Boat house under NYPD escort. A few minutes after that, we saw the perfectly coiffed head of Arnold Schwarzenegger through an open window in the main dining room.

  “He’s in the building!” Clarabel shouted, then hopped to her feet and started jogging back into the forest toward the restaurant.

  “Shouldn’t we stay on post?” I called out to her.

  “There’s no one out here at this time of night,” she shouted back.