Читать книгу Beat Cop to Top Cop - John F. Timoney - Страница 9

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Getting on the Job

Jesus, Mary, and holy St. Joseph, he wants to be a cop.

—CATHERINE TIMONEY

Sometimes, when a chief of police or other high-ranking police official is interviewed regarding his career, he will say that he always wanted to be a police officer. Not me. I never gave much thought to becoming a cop. In fact, I was not very fond of police officers while I was growing up in Washington Heights, a working-class neighborhood in northern Manhattan. Police officers, like parents or teachers, told you all the things you couldn't do. Police officers and their authority were resented and to be avoided.

However, just as I was getting ready to graduate from Cardinal Hayes High School in the summer of 1967, one of my childhood friends, Brian Nicholson, convinced me and about six other guys to take the police officer exam one Saturday morning. Back then, the NYPD gave “walk-in” exams; no prefiling was required. You just walked into a local high school, filled out some papers, took the exam, and went home.

After partying the night before (typical Friday night partying back then was drinking beer in Highbridge Park, hopefully out of sight of the local police), we all got up early and took the downtown A train to lower Manhattan to the exam site. After a few hours, with the exam complete, we took the uptown A train back to Washington Heights and bragged to the rest of our friends that we were all going to become cops! One minor detail remained, however: Did we pass the exam? No problem. We could just tune in to WOR AM radio on Saturday night when an announcer would read out the “official answer key” to the various civil-service exams that had been administered earlier in the day.

That afternoon I had announced to my mother that I had taken the police officer exam and was going to be a cop. First, she looked at me in disbelief, then bewilderment, then amusement, then finally with maternal support. We sat at the kitchen table that night and listened to the announcer read off the answers in an unemotional, matter-of-fact manner: (1) a, (5) c, (17) d, (89) b, and so on. Before I knew it, all of the one hundred answers had been given. I needed to score a 75 to pass.

I added up the score as my mother watched over my shoulder. Yep, I passed! I scored a 76, which was more reflective of the Friday night beer drinking and lack of sleep that it was of my mental acumen. Or so I convinced myself.

My father had passed away a year before, but I am sure he would have been proud of his son becoming a New York City police officer. A month after I graduated from high school, my mother and sister, Marie, moved back to Ireland. We had come to the United States in 1961, but my mother never adjusted to the fast pace of New York City, even though we had grown up in Dublin, not exactly farmers. My mother had begged my younger brother, Ciaran, and me to return with her, but he and I were having none of that. While I had just graduated high school, Ciaran was only beginning his junior year at Cardinal Hayes High School. So he and I stayed together in the same apartment, and I worked numerous jobs while he attended high school and worked after school in a butcher shop. Things were just fine, if precarious.

Three months after graduating high school, I entered the NYPD as a police trainee, since I was not twenty-one yet, the required age to be a full-fledged police officer. Police trainees wore gray uniforms and did clerical and administrative work throughout the seventy-six police precincts and at other administrative offices, including police headquarters. But these were not nine-to-five jobs. Just like regular police officers, we worked “around the clock”—one week of 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., followed by a week of 4:00 P.M. to midnight, and then a week of midnight to 8:00 A.M. This shift work was actually beneficial to me since it allowed me to work another job during the day (before a 4:00 P.M. to midnight, and after a midnight to 8:00 A.M. shift), which augmented my miserable biweekly salary of $112 as a police trainee, not nearly enough to pay the rent and support Ciaran and myself.

In early October on a cold, wet morning, I took the subway downtown to police headquarters on Centre Street in the heart of Little Italy. A massive four-story gray building, New York Police Headquarters was legend and had been the backdrop for many movies and television series. I was quickly sworn in with a few other lads by the then city clerk Louis Stutman, a little Jewish man who had been born into this position, or so it seemed. I would later learn that the city clerk was a very powerful position in the city. I would also learn what a great and understanding man Mr. Stutman was, as he was one of the men who would decide whether or not I successfully completed my twelve-month probationary period as a police officer in the NYPD.

After I was sworn in, I was directed to report to my new command (whatever that meant), the 17th Precinct, located on the east side of Manhattan, near the United Nations and other landmarks, such as St. Patrick's Cathedral. The 17th Precinct was known as the “silk stocking” district. It certainly could never be mistaken for the “woolen sock” district, if such a district ever existed!

Up to this point in my life I had been inside only two police stations, the 34th Precinct (my neighborhood precinct) and the 30th Precinct (where my old CYO—Catholic Youth Organization—basketball coach worked). Both the 30th and 34th precincts in northern Manhattan were old, drab gray-brick buildings whose interiors looked worse than their exteriors. My new command, the 17th Precinct, was nothing like those turn-of-the-century monsters.

The 17th Precinct is located on Fifty-first Street between Third and Lexington avenues on the ground floor of a high-rise office building. There is a large glass window in the front with a glass door at the entrance that allows full view of the interior of the precinct, specifically the desk officer. In the back, out of view, were the cells, about eighteen in total, which temporarily housed prisoners while they waited to be transported to court. The 17th Precinct Detective Squad was located on the second floor, which is typical of the majority of precinct detective squads throughout the city.

My first two weeks as a police trainee in the 17th Precinct were a bit of a fog, especially because I was working in an entirely new and foreign environment. As I said, I was not particularly fond of police officers as a teenager, and so this was a strange situation. However, within three or four weeks, I began to get the idea of policing and to get used to being around police officers, and I was getting more excited by it, even though I was a mere paper pusher or telephone-answering service. I started to like what I was doing and soon began to love it. I was “in the know.” Initially, all the police officers shied away from talking to me, but as a few got to know me, the rest followed. These were incredible guys! After a while they included me as they shared their cop-on-the-street stories.

While the uniformed cops were the regular guys, the fun guys—the really cool guys—were the detectives from the 17th Squad. They dressed in suits, wore pinky rings, and carried themselves with a certain swagger. They were commanded by a gregarious young sergeant who would always let me know which detectives were “catching” (assigned to investigate the cases that came in during the evening) and the restaurants where they could be located in the event of an important case that needed their immediate attention or an incident that they needed to respond to. It was clear to me that these detectives had the world by the balls.

While the detective squad room was on the second floor, the really interesting offices in the building were on the third floor, which housed the office of the Third Division Plainclothes Unit. These plainclothes officers worked for the division inspector (two ranks above captain) and were responsible for the enforcement of the vice and gambling laws as well as assorted other laws, especially those involving the illegal sale of alcoholic beverages. Their job was to enforce those laws, in the words of Mr. Dooley (the fictional character created by the nineteenth-century satirist Finley Peter Dunne), “meant to control the pleasures of the poor.”

As a police trainee I learned pretty fast that plainclothes officers were different from other police officers. They only worked nights, and not every night. So on a Thursday or Friday, they would enter the station house at one o’clock in the morning escorted by three or four ladies of the night who were wearing bracelets, but not the sort you buy in a jewelry store. They would deposit their charges in the holding cells and then proceed to the “124 room” (the clerical office) to type their reports. I watched this routine on a regular basis from my seat behind the telephone switchboard, where I answered calls from citizens who, at that time of night, were mostly inebriated.

After a few months on the switchboard, I was assigned to the 124 room one night because I could type. (I had taken typing at Cardinal Hayes High School.) That night, a couple of plainclothesmen entered the station with their female charges. They secured the arrested women in the holding cells and then came into the 124 room to type their arrest reports. Or so I assumed.

One of the plainclothes detectives came in wearing rings and assorted pieces of other jewelry and an open-collar shirt.

“Hey, kid, I can't type. Can you knock off these reports for me?” He put two dollars next to the typewriter. I dutifully typed the reports (six 5 x 7 sheets of heavy card stock alternating with carbon paper) and other assorted paperwork. When the reports were finished, the plainclothes officers retrieved their paperwork and their girls and headed outside to a waiting prisoner wagon for a trip to night court.

With the two dollars in hand, I walked over to my lieutenant, a silver-haired old Irishman with over thirty years in the department, who was barely awake and seemed bored by the whole arrest routine. When I showed him the two dollars, he responded, “Don't worry about it. They'll make that back in overtime.”

Some weeks later, the same plainclothes officers entered the station house at 5:00 A.M. This time they had in tow three or four guys who wore the same bracelets the ladies of the night had worn. In addition, they brought in box after box of liquor bottles and multiple cases of beer. They informed the lieutenant that they had just hit a “bottle club” on Third Avenue. The lieutenant nodded and handed them a stack of vouchers (property inventory reports) in addition to the normal arrest reports. A plainclothes officer came into the 124 room, where I was once again assigned, with the arrest reports and vouchers and placed five dollars next to the typewriter. He said, “Hey, kid, can you knock these off in a hurry? We gotta get to court before eight.” For a guy making $112 every two weeks ($1.40 per hour), a five-dollar tip for typing someone else's report was astonishing.

The Third Division Plainclothes Unit was probably the most infamous plainclothes unit in the city. It had a long and storied history dating back to before the Depression. In December 1968, at 157 West Fifty-seventh Street, two people (a man and a woman) were shot and killed and a third was seriously injured inside an apartment in this luxury building. It was believed that the victims were involved in some kind of prostitution ring and that the shooter was a member of the NYPD—Bill Phillips, a former Third Division plainclothes detective. Phillips was later tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison for the crime.

Also in late 1968, an address book was found inside a telephone booth and then turned over to a newspaper reporter. A front-page story with the names and addresses of bars and restaurants that were listed in the address book and that had given payoff money to the police appeared in the next day's paper—“proof” there had been a “pad.” (Pad was the slang for payoff. Those using police vernacular would refer to this guy or that place being “on the pad.”)

When the story broke, a duty captain was visiting the precinct and engaged the desk lieutenant in conversation regarding the address book. Half jokingly, he said to the lieutenant, “Look here, it says this restaurant paid a hundred dollars, yet the son of a bitch told us he was only getting fifty from that place. The lying bastard was holding out!”

Sitting there at the telephone switchboard and listening to the conversation, I was amused and yet a bit shocked at the casualness of the captain's conversation. But I must admit I was not surprised. The whole idea of pads and payoffs just seemed part of the everyday culture of the NYPD, and even a young, impressionable police trainee was privy to such conversations.

A few years later, the hearings of the Knapp Commission on police corruption were televised. The hearings featured numerous NYPD personalities, including the famous Frank Serpico. The plainclothes officers of the Third Division were also featured prominently in these hearings.

The net effect of the Knapp Commission changed the NYPD forever, and for the good. By and large, the recommendations of the commission were the right ones, including the notion of paying police officers better salaries and encouraging the education of young police officers. However, there was one particular downside to the recommendations. It made sense to recommend the elimination of plainclothes officers and the corruption they bred by establishing a centralized unit for narcotics and vice enforcement called the Organized Crime Control Bureau. But the unintended consequence of this recommendation was that local police officers were discouraged from enforcing narcotics, gambling, and other quality-of-life violations. This led to troubling situations where open-air drug markets flourished because, in order to prevent police corruption, uniformed police officers were strongly discouraged from making narcotics arrests. The irony is that average citizens, particularly those in tough neighborhoods, who observed open-air drug dealing going on even as police car after police car drove by, reached the understandable conclusion that the cops were being paid off to look the other way. Over the next twenty years, I must have heard that complaint at community meetings at least a hundred times.

The commission's recommendation to remove the NYPD from regulatory enforcement of the ABC (Alcohol Beverage Control) laws was aimed at ending the corruption potential from licensed and unlicensed premises. However, the unintended consequence of this allowed licensed and unlicensed premises to run amok and engage in more serious criminal violations, such as assaults, shootings, and drug dealing. This seemed to me not the best way to run a police department. Because we were fearful of corruption, we prohibited and discouraged police officers from engaging in activities at which they could be corrupted; yet we still had periodic episodes of corruption. The point is that police departments should never shy away from enforcing the law due to a fear of corruption. The bottom line is that you enforce the law, and if there is a corruption problem, you deal with the corruption problem. Years later, this would become one of the central tenets of Commissioner Bill Bratton's administration.

What I most remember of these early days was the atmosphere of the time, the zeitgeist of the late 1960s. The Vietnam War was in full bloom and with it the antiwar protests in every major city, especially New York City. In April 1968, Martin Luther King was killed, which resulted in civil unrest in most major cities across the United States. Months later, Bobby Kennedy was also killed.

The protests and civil unrest preoccupied the NYPD to the detriment of ordinary policing. It was policing by crisis. Hundreds or thousands of police could be handling antiwar protests in Midtown Manhattan, then head up to deal with the unrest and riots at Columbia University, and then later head to riots in the various African American neighborhoods in the city. There was a real feeling that Armageddon was at hand.

The Police Academy

Civil unrest and protests affected not only the ordinary policing of the neighborhoods but also training at the police academy. In February 1969, I was transferred from the 17th Precinct to the police academy to begin my six months of training to become a full-fledged NYPD police officer. The academy didn't have the feel of a regular school or college. Rather, it looked and felt more like a military boot camp mobilizing for war. Thousands of officers were going through the training, and the facility's capacity was always an issue. Incredibly, the academy operated seven days a week, from 6:00 A.M. to midnight. It was not uncommon to be doing calisthenics on the gym floor at 11:00 on a Saturday night or to be in the classroom at 9:00 on a Sunday night. The overcrowding had a huge, negative impact on the quality of the training. And the quality of the training was dramatically reduced by the protests going on out on the streets. I often found myself on the back of a flatbed truck delivering wooden police barricades to a disturbance on a college campus or to a demonstration in Midtown, as opposed to listening to a lecture in the classroom. But we still finished our police academy training on time, even if we were not fully prepared.

The irregular hours of the academy, while not good for training, were better for me, personally, because I could work my side job of driving a Coca-Cola truck to augment my salary. With my brother still in high school and rent to be paid, I needed both jobs. Unfortunately, the Coca-job impinged on my class work and my participation in class. I often found myself dozing off from lack of sleep. At the end of the six months of training, my academic instructor, Sergeant Corrigan, made note of my less-than-stellar participation in the classroom as he gave a verbal evaluation of each student's career potential. When he reached me, he stated, “Timoney, you will amount to nothing because you're lazy and you keep falling asleep in class.” I was too tired to tell him about my Coca-Cola job.

The biggest lesson for me from my academy days was not what I learned in the classroom but what I observed in and around the academy. When the civil unrest broke out after Martin Luther King's assassination, the NYPD—like a lot of other police departments across the country—hired a large number of new police officers. They were immediately assigned to the streets after meeting the bare minimum qualification for firearms proficiency: they were required to shoot fifty rounds of ammunition.

These officers received no other training, and so when things quieted down in the winter of 1968–69, these officers were sent to the police academy for their formal training. Some of them had been involved in gunfights over the past nine months, and others had made great arrests and had been involved in other hair-raising experiences. In other words, many of these officers were seasoned “vets”—not exactly prime candidates for instruction at the academy. To make matters worse, if that was possible, most of these officers finished their probationary period within their first or second month of the academy. That meant that no matter what they did or refused to do, the police department had little recourse. The officers were off probation and had job security, which the department could not take away, except in the case of those caught committing a very serious violation of department rules and procedures or a criminal act.

The massive hiring of thousands of police officers in 1968 and 1969 provides one of the most valuable lessons for any police chief or mayor contemplating such an action (most cities across the United States have engaged in such practices over the past few decades, with similar results). While emergency hiring may work in the short run, bypassing thorough background checks and providing inadequate training can mean only trouble in the long term.

The new hires can be valuable in the short term—putting down riots, stopping an awful crime wave—but eventually the police officers who have slipped through the cracks will come back to haunt the department. Within a few years, many of officers from the 1968 and 1969 classes got into trouble. Some, including a classmate of mine, were arrested for a variety of crimes—ranging from drug dealing and ripping off drug dealers to murder. As these cases garnered headlines, police administrators and politicians openly questioned the fitness of the members of the classes of 1968 and 1969. The cops responded with typical gallows humor by creating T-shirts emblazoned with I SURVIVED THE CLASS OF 68/69 OR I AM A PROUD GRADUATE OF THE 68/69 CLASS. While the T-may have been funny, their reference was anything but.