THERE IS NO
PUNCHLINE, JUST SOME REALITY
THE BANALITY
OF RACISM:
WE ARE ALL
HUMAN
This is not
the bar in the story but is pretty close to it
TAGS:
NYC, NYPD, SOUTH BRONX, WASHINGTON HEIGHTS,
TWO
COPS, RACE RELATIONS, PD INTERACTIONS WITH PUBLIC,
NYC
IN DARKEST DAYS – 1970’S-1980’S,
HOW
THINGS HAVE CHANGED,
A
STORY
(Sunday December 14, 2014
Washington Heights, NYC) It was a dive bar, more akin to a corner saloon than a
bar. It was the kind of place where the
top shelf liquor had been replaced by the rotgut well booze. There had been an even seedier bar a block
south back in the years they worked this neighborhood but that had long ago
changed into a nail salon that did hair weaves, sold wigs, and had a worn out
bookie taking the street number asleep in the back room 24/7. The place was pretty much empty at the time
they arrived; just a few old Dominican guys working off the hangovers they’d
bought last night. Despite the Citywide
ban on smoking in public places like restaurants, diners and bars, the ashtrays
on this particular bar looked like they’d not been emptied since the last time
the Giants actually won a game. They
were winning on this day though.
They sat drinking ice cold
bottled beer not speaking to each other, just watching the game. They were comfortable in each others
silence. This was the natural result of having known each other since the
neighborhood back when they were scrawny, wiry kids playing in the brick strewn
lots and partially burnt out husks of what were at one time beautiful brick
pre-war five story walk-ups. They grew
up a block apart along a stretch of Fox Street in The South Bronx just as that
once desirable Borough was in the process of becoming “The South Bronx”. They attended different high schools, he went
to a Catholic School, his buddy, the local public high yet they remained
friends throughout which, at times, was not without problems.
THE FOX STREET OF THEIR YOUTH
His buddy did a stint in the
Army after high school and served in some remote base in Texas in a unit of the
Military Police. He went to college during those same years enabled to do so by
a modest scholarship and a generous work-study program supplemented with a few
hours a night in the produce section of the A&P on Jerome Avenue. Every time his buddy came home on leave they
would meet up and go out somewhere “downtown”, somewhere in Manhattan. His buddy would tell him stories about his MP
duty in far southwest Texas while he would talk a little about college and that
his mind was beginning to open somewhat.
It seemed to him that it was important to get an education but was not
precisely sure why. He had no major in
his first years just drifting through taking courses that seemed interesting to
him. His buddy said he planned to take
advantage of the GI Bill once his Army tour was over and said he thought he
might like to be a cop.
***** *****
January 1981 was one of the
coldest months in the history of New York City.
While everyone dealt with the brutal arctic blast and anxiously await
the Spring, they would be in for a more bracing reality than anything yet
delivered by Mother Nature. By July 1981
crack cocaine and drug-related crime, an enormous homeless population, and a pitifully stagnant
economy had rendered our Great City a boiling unsettled caldron that would
continue to simmer for the rest of the decade.
It was into this toxic mix that he and his friend found themselves newly
minted rookies with the NYPD. They had
made it through the Academy and both were selected to work with “The Big Boys”,
a term that distinguished the main NYPD force from both the Housing and Transit
Police Divisions. (The first Bill Bratton, the Bratton who served as NYPD
Commissioner under Mayor Giuliani until this City got too small for both of them ) did away with those distinctions and united all rightfully into a
consolidated, singular NYPD with Housing and Transit Patrol Bureaus in 1992. It was now that their real training would
begin and, for the next seven years they would still be regarded by their peers
as rookies. The older Cops believed it
took a rookie seven years to mature out in the streets, seven years of baptism
by fire to attain the level of street smarts, instincts, and effectiveness the
Job required and to earn the trust of the older fellas that is so vital to how
pairs of Cops work.
As fate would dictate they
were both assigned to the same Precinct.
The NYPD once made aware of personal friendships between Cops, in those
days did their best to have them assigned to the same Precinct. They did not, however, extend this “courtesy”
to members of the same family. No
brother would be assigned to the same Command as his brother. It was in recognition of the dangers of the
Job that prohibited the possibility of two members of the same family finding
themselves in mortal danger. A mother
should not lose two sons on the same day from the same incident but it was
different than with lifelong friends.
***** *****
As they sat quietly nursing
their drinks and smoking the place began to fill up. Soon the atmosphere was loud; full of
laughter and easy banter among the regulars.
While neither of them knew anyone in the bar personally, they would
catch a glimpse of a familiar face in the mirror behind the bar. When eyes met there were almost undetectable
nods of recognition. Both he and his
friend had spent years working in this neighborhood and, just like Cops, the
denizens of the streets and hot summer nights had good memories for faces. Despite the toll the years had taken on their
faces, they were all still recognizable to each other. None of the familiar
faces came over to them to say hello or share a drink; they were, after all, on
different sides of the fence. If anyone
in that bar harbored long standing resentment or anger towards either of them
they were wise enough to keep it concealed and to themselves. They may have been two middle aged men having
some Sunday afternoon drinks in a shithole bar in Washington Heights but, they
were Cops.
As the Giants struggled on TV
they began to talk about current events; the circumstances and happenstance
that seem to have thrust their City into disarray. Nightly demonstrators and protestors were
taking to the streets; some obstructing traffic, others staging mass “die-ins”
at key intersections throughout the City, while others marched and chanted
demanding “justice” and “respect”; some calling stridently against the NYPD and
the “brutal practices” and “patterns of abuse” that they believed granted White
Police Officers the license to kill “people of color” indiscriminately.
It was at this point in their discussion
that they looked at each other and began to laugh. They laughed hard for a minute or two amused
by the recent rhetoric in the papers and on TV.
They were, at this point in their careers, considered by many as
dinosaurs; some of the few who had stayed OTJ for reasons the younger guys
could not understand. As their laughter
subsided they began to speak about the unprecedented divide between the NYPD
and the Mayor, the self-avowed “reformist”, Bill de Blasio. The disillusionment and distrust of de Blasio
among the members of the NYPD had escalated to what felt to be a point of no
return. When PBA President Patrick Lynch
began to distribute cards to be filled out by all Members of Service (MOS) to formally uninvite the Mayor and some members of the City Council from attending their
funerals, it was an audacious move but certainly not an abstract one for the
MOS. Every time a Cop begins his or her
shift on Patrol; in the projects, subways and on the streets, there is no guarantee
they will see their families again. Life
on patrol for a Cop is beyond hazardous and always has the possibility of life
and death hanging in the balance. There
is no such thing as a “routine” call.
***** *****
It was the Summer of 1984 and
they were part time partners. They
slowly rode up and down the narrow tenement lined streets just south of
Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. It
seems as if each stoop on these blocks had more people hanging about than the
next. The non-stop, static from the
radio transmitted calls without much distinction between urgency and
banality. The crack cocaine trade was in
full throttle and the dealers had grown sophisticated enough to have look-outs
on the rooftops with walkie-talkies in hand to alert the dealers in their
fortified apartments of the location of “Five-Oh”, the “PO-PO”, the “Polices”.
Calls that required them to
get out of their RMP immediately put them at risk as people in the buildings
would rain down everything from soiled Pampers to household trash. Sometimes they and their RMP were hit by
rocks or other thrown items. It was a
hostile environment and one in which the local drug dealers would always reign
with the upper hand. Working in an
environment such as this can change a man; it can harden his heart, occlude his
innate sensibilities, and have him rendered to the point he acts on pure
adrenaline-fueled experience and instinct.
It is beyond frustrating; the upside down nature of working such a
sector can make the Job feel like a Darwinian enterprise where only the
strongest survive. And, make no mistake
about it, it was a Darwinian environment, one in which the NYPD was not fully
in control of. Given that state of
affairs, the reality in those neighborhoods and on those streets, the Cops had
to assert greater authority and sometimes such displays of authority amounted
to nothing more than sealing off a block with RMP’s and having the Cops walk
towards each other from opposite sides of the block asking for ID’s, conducting
some impromptu Q and A, with the occasional crack in the head of some mope who
mouthed off or was otherwise “non-compliant”.
By the time they got back to their RMP they needed showers from all the
baby shit and garbage that had been hurled down on them.
***** *****
On this Sunday afternoon those
days seemed a lifetime ago. They both
carried scars, physical and emotional from those days, but they were still in
the mix. Neither of them ever had the
mindset of “20 and Out” and, to many of their peers that seemed almost akin to
insanity. After all, who would stay in
this Job any longer than they had to?
Perhaps more than some realized.
They’d both earned their Gold Shields in the early 1990’s, been assigned
to different Detective Units, gone back to school at John Jay on NYPD’s dime,
and felt they had more to offer not to the Job per se, but to the youngsters
coming up.
They had both filled out and
handed in their Detective’s Endowment Association cards with the same language
to the Mayor and City Council as those produced by Patrick Lynch, President of the PBA. They were both equally disgusted and
disturbed by the turn of events that had the NYPD so horribly estranged from
the populace and City Hall. They each
recognized that this was not an open wound that would heal anytime soon. And, to them, that was a shame. But they would not be persuaded to “pull the
pin”, they would not file their retirement papers until they felt weariness in
their bones and minds. They each had a
few good years remaining OTJ.
By the time they walked out
onto St. Nicholas Avenue the Giants had won, the night had come calling and a
brisk wind from the north made it feel colder than it was. They walked to the subway station on 168th
Street and descended the stairs to the warmth of the cavernous station
platform. He would take an A, C or E
Train south to his neighborhood on the lower Westside while his buddy would
change trains at 59th Street for an F Train to Queens. Some of the people on the platform looked at
them oddly, these two men of the same age and similar heights and weights. They smelled of Cop; every mope on the street
could tell a Cop from a mile away. The
only reason the folks on the platform gave them a second look was because one
of them was White, the other Black. Yes,
Black and White, lifelong friends and fellow Cops; two men bound by an Oath and
a shared belief.
They lived their professional
lives wading through shit storms of every variety; encountered every type of
person at their absolute worst. They
each separately felt the instinctual pangs when they rolled on a “domestic” and
found an innocent, quivering child huddled beneath a bed bearing the telltale
signs of prior physical abuse. Such experiences do not harden a man’s heart,
they open it.
As the subway swayed and squealed its way to a stop at the 59th Street station they shook hands, slapped backs and said see you later. Each went on the train ride home alone, one
Black Cop, one White Cop, back into the anonymity of a late night subway ride. As always they’d made tentative plans to meet
up to watch a playoff game, probably in a bar in Jamaica, Queens in a
predominately Black neighborhood. They
parted with that thought in mind while simultaneously saying a quiet prayer for
each other. As Cops no tomorrow was
promised, no plans guaranteed. The City could rage in anger and frustration
around them but they would not abandon it for Westchester or Rockland
County. No. This was their City and as long as they
served they would conduct themselves largely as they always had just a bit more
seasoned, somewhat wiser, and more confident in their tasks and ability to see
around corners. There were likely many
ways to earn a comparable salary but neither of them would even consider it
now; not yet. They still had a taste for
The Job and would not shy away from whatever dish was being served.
INTERESTING HISTORICAL LINKS:
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