The Good Guys

One of the two detectives motions me to the side of the doorway. For a moment, I'm confused, and then I understand--the gentleman we are calling upon might very likely decide to fire a gun through the door at us.

The gentleman's name is Willie and he is the prime suspect in the near-fatal stabbing of a woman named Barbara. Willie's apartment is on the sixth floor of a freezing, filthy building with little piles of dog turds in the hallways.

The two detectives are both Irish, both big. Both wear sports coats and ties and identical tan raincoats. Their names are Jack Monigan and Danny O'Sullivan, and if you saw them on TV, you would say the casting was too on the nose and why couldn't they get anybody who looked real? Monigan is the more extroverted of the two and has kept up an endless stream of amusing chatter. Now he falls momentarily silent and bangs on the door.

There is no response. Monigan calls out Willie's name and hammers on the door so loudly that anybody inside has to think the door is coming in on him. Still no response. After about five sustained minutes of banging and listening, it is clear to me that Willie is out and that we are wasting our time. That is when somebody inside stirs and gruffly asks who's there. Monigan says it's the police and that we have to talk to him immediately.

The door is opened by a very short, very powerfully built black man with a bare chest. He has obviously been asleep, though it is scarcely nine P.M.

"Hi, Willie," says Monigan, breezing into the small, shabby apartment with O'Sullivan and me close behind him, and the endless stream of amusing chatter is switched on again, with Monigan commenting on the decor and on the lack of heat and asking what Willie pays for rent and asking how old Willie is and observing (continued on page 188)Good Guys(continued from page 166) that Willie is in great shape for a man of 52, all the while swiftly and professionally scanning the place for possible ambushes, and then, quite conversationally, winding up with: "So, Willie, Barbara says you stabbed her in the back--that true?"

Willie reacts to Monigan's question with bemused tolerance. "Oh, no, no, Ah didn' stab Barbara," he says. "In fac', Ah only heard about it after she was in the hospital for two days."

Monigan suddenly wheels around and faces the adjoining bedroom. "Is there somebody in there?" he says. "Come on out, I want to talk to you."

Slowly, sheepishly, a huge black woman with a deep scar over her right eye and a gigantic pair of breasts drifts out of the darkened bedroom.

"Why, Barbara," says Monigan, "what are you doing here?"

Barbara looks embarrassed.

"Barbara," says O'Sullivan, "is this the man who stabbed you?"

"Oh, no, this not the man," Barbara mumbles, studying a small speck of lint on her dressing gown. Willie smiles at us, apparently satisfied that the confusion has been cleared up.

"Who stabbed you, Barbara?" says Monigan.

"Somebody in the street," says Barbara. "Ah don' know who."

"You said in the hospital that it was Willie who stabbed you," says Monigan. "You said, 'Willie stabbed me and I'm going to cut his heart out.' That's what you said. You really mean to tell us you don't know who stabbed you?"

Barbara inspects a rip in her gown. There is a longish silence. She sighs.

"Ah knows who stabbed me," she says quietly.

Monigan and O'Sullivan look at each other, at me, at Barbara, at Willie.

"OK," says Monigan. "OK, then. Look, Willie, just don't do it again. OK?"

We leave and start back down the six flights of stinking steps.

"Well, it's between the two of them now," says O'Sullivan to me. "This, by the way, is not at all an uncommon type of stabbing."

•

It is the first night of a three-month period I spent riding with cops in the Ninth Precinct in Manhattan. I had started hanging out with homicide cops in order to research a novel about a mass murderer and a homicide detective, which is called Love Kills, and I had become fascinated with cops in general. With how they behave and with how they are not quite like the way they are portrayed on television and in the movies. I wanted to find out what they were really like, and what had made them become cops, and what terrible secrets they knew about us, and how that knowledge made them different from the rest of us. I decided to do my finding out in the Ninth Precinct in the East Village of Manhattan.

The Ninth Precinct is a curious blend of ethnic groups--Dominicans, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, Puerto Ricans. It is the New York headquarters of the Hell's Angels. A few irrationally optimistic souls have renovated a sprinkling of quaint brownstones in the neighborhood, but the bulk of the precinct is wretchedly ugly. The streets are heaped with putrefying garbage and abandoned furniture so horrid that even the destitute couldn't bear to live with it. Hulks of charred and rusted metal that were once cars have been stripped of everything removable and set afire and are no longer anything at all.

Tenement buildings whose stench would be even worse if there were any heat are filled with people who must wear overcoats in their apartments and keep the gas jets lit on the stove all day and all night for warmth. Drunken derelicts and heroin addicts and muggers and packs of wild dogs roam the empty streets after dark. Seven police officers have been killed in this precinct in the past few years, more than in any other precinct in New York.

The Ninth Precinct station house is located at 321 East Fifth Street. It happens to be the one they used on Kojak.

Monigan and O'Sullivan work out of the Ninth Precinct Detective Unit, which is quartered on the second floor in a grimy institutional-green squad room that looks like it was painted during the Boer War. Huddled along one wall are five olive-drab steel desks, each sporting a broken manual typewriter and a steel chair with foam upholstery coming out of its vinyl seat.

A temporary-detention cell called a cage stands at one end of the longish squad room. At the opposite end is the office of "Fast Eddy" Mamet, the one-legged Jewish squad commander of the Ninth Precinct Detective Unit and Monigan and O'Sullivan's boss.

Lieutenant Mamet lost his leg in an off-duty accident after 16 years of working the worst crime areas in the city without a major injury. He now uses an artificial limb that continues to be a rich source of amusement to his rough-and-tumble crew: Cartoons featuring one-legged men are taped to the walls. And a couple of Christmases ago, they affectionately nailed an old wooden leg with a trouser and shoe on it to the doorframe of Mamet's office, with a hatchet sticking out of its top and the whole festooned with tinsel and Christmas ornaments and a card that said: "To Fast Eddy, Merry Xmas from the Mongols."

Mamet, along with two sergeants and 19 plainclothes detectives, is responsible for investigating such crimes as are reported in the precinct, apprehending the perpetrators, or "perps," as they are called, and putting together enough evidence to lock them up and have them prosecuted by the district attorney.

In my three months at the Ninth Precinct, I rode with Mamet's plainclothes detectives in unmarked cars as they investigated crimes already committed; I rode with the uniformed patrolmen in their marked cars as they answered radio calls about crimes in progress; and I rode with the Anti-Crime Unit--scruffily dressed semiundercover cops who patrol in beat-up sedans and old cabs--whose job it is to stop crimes, if possible, before they happen.

While I was hanging out in the Ninth Precinct, I was involved in roughly 60 cases, of which these are but a sampling:

1. A white derelict was slashed by three black men while being robbed of 25 cents.

2. A black artist slashed his wrists and bled all over the stairs in his building but failed to kill himself; he was attended by his wife and by a neighbor who last year got three months in jail for throwing lye into her boyfriend's face.

3. A large black woman got so mad at her common-law husband she threw a full-sized couch down a flight of steps.

4. An elderly white woman in a walker stabbed her black common-law husband to death.

5. Two Hell's Angels raped a 16-year-old girl.

6. A store owner was shot and stabbed in the arm and testicles during a robbery.

7. A man was shot five times in the face with a .25-caliber pistol during a dispute over drugs.

8. A reward was posted for information leading to the arrest of the person who threw an eight year-old girl off a roof to her death.

9. A radio car was bombed by the F.A.L.N., but nobody was injured.

10. An undercover narcotics cop was shot in the chest while entering a local social club, but his bulletproof vest saved his life.

(continued on page 214)Good Guys(continued from page 188)

11. An elderly Italian woman died of an ordinary heart attack.

12. A 13-year-old girl was raped and sodomized by a man in his early 30s, who It'll instantly in love with her and advised he'd kill her if he ever caught her with another man.

It is commonly believed that cops never follow up on cases involving the theft of small amounts of money, yet I have been involved in the investigations of three consecutive cases in which (1) a teenaged boy was robbed of a leather jacket and four dollars; (2) an old woman was robbed of ten dollars: (3) a young woman was robbed of some cameras. The detectives in the last case stressed the importance of keeping records of serial numbers and of engraving one's Social Security number on items of value. They were optimistic about chances for recovering objects thus protected.

The above three cases were the first I got involved in at the Ninth Precinct and I was impressed with the professionalism and the compassion with which they were handled. I am sure there are cops who are apathetic and cops who are lazy and dishonest, but I think they are in the minority and, besides, I am bored hearing about them. I'd rather tell you about the honest, hard-working, heroic cops I encountered in the Ninth Precinct, whom I saw saving lives and protecting property, retaining their humor in the midst of grotesque circumstances, risking their necks and being shit upon by the people in the street and, even more so, by the police department itself.

When I first got to the Ninth Precinct, 1 didn't quite know where I wanted to look for the things I wanted to find out, so I just started hanging out with the cops and hoped I'd get my bearings.

•

I am cruising with an Anti-Crime team in the wee hours of the morning. It's too cold for crime, so the streets are deserted. "The best policeman is named Jack Frost" is a police homily I will hear repeatedly. It is so quiet that cops are telling Polish jokes on the police radio.

Suddenly. Anti-Crime man Dave Flannery spots a kid carrying a heavy shopping bag, looking "wrong." Flannery gets out of the car. The kid sees him and scoots into a nearby building. Flannery takes off after him, followed by his partner, followed by me. On the stairway to the fourth floor, the kid drops the shopping bag, sending apples, containers of chocolate milk and macaroni TV dinners flying in all directions. Flannery lets the kid escape. "You have to be pretty low to lock up anybody for stealing food," he says.

•

I asked the men at the Ninth Precinct what had possessed them to become policemen. To many, it was largely a matter of following in their fathers' or grandfathers' footsteps--I know at least three cops in the Ninth who even managed to be assigned their fathers' or grandfathers' original "shields," or badges. To many, it was "the Irish bit--if you couldn't afford to go to college, you went into civil service, for the security."

To many, it was the excitement: "It was either that or become a cowboy. I've never been able to work at a desk or anything inside." a uniformed foot patrolman explained. "It's exciting to see life in the raw, and you do get to help people, too, which is very satisfying."

Said a cop named John: "1 enjoy locking up bad people."

Most. I think, became cops for fairly altruistic reasons: "Being young and idealistic," says Flannery, "you think you're going to go out there and right a lot of wrongs. Then you find you're hampered by the courts and by the department itself and you find everybody's against you. Nobody loves a cop."

Most cops I've talked with have given up their civilian friends. They feel that nobody but another cop understands them. And when they're off duty, they dread strangers' finding out what they do for a living.

All cops are required to carry their guns off duty. I ask Chris Reisman, who's a bachelor, how the women he dates react when they discover the revolver clipped inside the back of his belt.

"It turns them right off," he says. But what can you do? I ask--you can't just leave the gun at home. "You tell them you're a drug dealer," he says. "They'd sooner have you be a drug dealer than a cop, anyway."

Reisman, like all cops, is all too aware of the policeman's status of outsider. Neither the law-abiding civilian community nor the criminal community will claim him, so he is utterly alone. And if it's hard to survive in either the law-abiding community or the criminal one, it's all but impossible to survive in both: Cops have to live by two totally conflicting sets of rules at the same time. "Which means," says Reisman. "that at any given moment, we're betraying either the one or the other." If they break the law-abiding community's rules, they might wind up in jail. But if they break the criminal community's rules, they will most likely end up in a wooden box.

There is an entirely different moral code in the street. Ghetto life is miserable and therefore cheap. People shoot each other for little provocation or none at all. Not making your quota of dope sales and making a pass at somebody else's woman are two of the more commonplace justifications for killing somebody. In the ghetto, there is nothing wrong with stealing from a store during a blackout, or at any other time, for that matter. A man who'd robbed over 30 stores in less than a year was sell-righteously indignant when arrested--he hadn't once taken anything from an actual person, he said.

Police-department rules and regulations don't apply to the reality of the street. In the street, Reisman feels, a college education is not an asset but a curse: It could cause you to intellectualize things instead of respond to them viscerally and directly.

Reisman's partner, Andy Glover, was shot to death five years ago while stopping a car to give its driver a ticket. The driver was wanted for homicide and thought Glover was arresting him for that. If Glover had continuously expected the worst from people, perhaps he'd be alive today. At least that's Reisman's feeling.

•

A superintendent of a building has allegedly attacked one of his tenants. She is now in Bellevue with 32 stitches in her head. Detective Bob Hayes allows me to sit in on the super's interrogation.

The super's story is that the woman came at him, for no apparent reason, with a machete, then tripped and fell and hit her head. Hayes is very gentle with him and asks if he can afford a lawyer. The super says no. "Then the court will appoint one for you," says Hayes, "and now I'm going to have to arrest you."

The super is dismayed. "Right now?"

"Why?" says Hayes. "Isn't now convenient?" No, says the super. "When would you like me to arrest you?" says Hayes.

"How about tomorrow morning?" says the super.

"OK," says Hayes, "how about nine o'clock?"

"Make it ten," says the super.

"But be sure you're here," says Hayes. "I don't want to have to come after you."

The super promises to be there at ten the next morning and Hayes lets him leave. I ask him why he let him go.

"For one thing, I know the guy," says Hayes, "and I know he isn't going to run away. For another, I haven't talked to the complainant yet. For all I know, he's telling the truth and she's a psycho."

Hayes and his partner, John Babich, and I go to Bellevue to see the complainant. Babich is in his 40s and chews a cigar that rains a steady stream of ashes on his black vested suit. He is a former undercover narc and has been in the interrogation unit only a couple of weeks. I ask him if I can call him John.

"There are millions of Johns," he says. "Call me Babich."

The complainant is lying in a hospital bed with several tubes coming out of her. Her face is badly beaten, her eyes are puffed and her head has been shaved and sewn together with three neat rows of stitches. Her name is Bonita.

Hayes asks Bonita how it happened. She replies in a heavy Spanish accent that she was on her way out of her building to buy dog food when the super attacked her, for no reason, with a stick.

"Were you carrying a machete, Bonita?" Hayes asks.

Bonita professes not to know what a machete is.

"A big knife," says Hayes. "Were you carrying a big knife when he came at you, Bonita?"

"A beeg knife," she says reflectively and mulls this over. "No," she says finally, "I don't theenk so."

•

Patrolman Airel Vasquez tells me he responded not long ago to a call to assist a sick baby and found at the given address a baby carriage in the middle of the living room covered with a black-silk scarf. Inside the carriage was a baby who had been dead at least a week. It had been beaten, burned with cigarettes and repeatedly bitten. The baby's father was convicted of the crime and sent to prison.

"I don't like people anymore," says Dave Flannery. "I used to, but I guess I've seen too much."

•

From the first night I began riding with cops, I asked them to tell me stories of their heroic deeds. I never got any response, which puzzled me. And then, after I had been there awhile, I began to understand. It wasn't that they hadn't all done their share of heart-stopping rescues, it was that they were embarrassed to talk about them. "A real hero doesn't consider himself a hero," I was told. I persisted. And I asked their friends. Cops don't mind talking about the heroic exploits of their friends.

Patrolman Dennis Harrington and his partner revived a heart-attack victim on 14th Street in a driving rainstorm and saved his life. Flannery rescued three youths in Brooklyn one bone-crackingly cold February night by jumping into the water and pulling them to safety, one by one. He almost drowned in the process. John Poppe and John DeBerry delivered a premature two-pound baby and are responsible for its being alive today. Ed Mamet has 20 medals, one of which resulted from his saving six people in a burning building in Brooklyn--fire trucks couldn't get their ladders up, because an elevated-train platform was in the way, so Mamet and his partner went in and pulled them out. Mamet ended up passing out from smoke inhalation and almost didn't make it out of there himself. Jim Liedy has 30 medals, mostly resulting from gun arrests. One of those involved wrestling on the floor with a psycho who fired off several shots before Liedy managed to take the gun away.

"This job is all a head game," says Chris Reisman, after I watch him and fellow Anti-Crime cop Barry Noxon pull a would-be suicide off a six-story parapet. "Your life depends on being able to figure out what the other guy is going to do before he does it. But no matter how weird what you're handling is, and no matter how well or how poorly you handle it, the same situation is going to come up again soon and you have to do it all over again. You get a chance to correct any mistakes you might have made the last time. After a while, you start to make jokes about it. You pretty much have to if you want to keep your sanity."

•

When policemen are in tight spots, are they afraid? "Oh, yeah," says Jack Monigan, "you get apprehensive. When a guy's supposed to have a gun, and you walk into a room you're not familiar with and you hear a gun cock, you get scared--there's no two ways about it." How does he handle it? "I really don't know. You just do what you have to do, and afterward, when it's all over, you start to shake."

Do cops ever think about dying? "Yes," says Reisman, "probably more than most people. It tends to make you live more immediately. You're much less willing to accept deferred gratification or deferred joy. Or promises."

"I've had dreams about it once in a while," says Dennis Harrington, "but I really don't dwell on it. I don't tell my wife most of what happens, because I don't want her to worry. I tell her the funny things that happen. I've been in a couple of hairy situations, but I didn't dwell on them. You get so you can cope with it. Not that you're a hero or anything, it's just that you're aware of it. You're also aware of the fact that in this precinct, we've had guys assassinated, by the Black Liberation Army--this is where Gregory Foster and Rocco Laurie were killed--and you're aware of the fact that if anybody wants you, there's nothing you can do about it."

When Mamet was an undercover narcotics cop, he dealt with his fear "by not wanting to be a coward. By forcing myself to do whatever I had to do because of the stigma attached to not doing it and to saying I was afraid." Mamet was a narc for four years and worked up in Harlem at night, where his was the only white face. Often he was with junkies who wanted him to shoot up with them. He was always able to talk his way out of it, saying things like he had hepatitis and didn't want to use their needle. Once, at a party, he ran into a guy he'd sent to jail three years before and was terrified the guy would give him away. "I pulled him into another room and told him what would happen to him if he revealed who I was. I scared him so much he left the party."

Another time, Mamet was arrested with a bunch of junkies by two uniformed cops. Mamet didn't have with him the .25-caliber automatic he usually hid in his crotch, and he was the only one holding drugs. When the two cops found the drugs, they punched him around and threw him into a cell. He asked to speak to them in private and was able to convince them he was a narc. One of the cops who'd beaten him was eventually thrown out of the department.

Outside of assassinations, why do cops get killed? "One reason is that they hesitate longer than they should before shooting," says Monigan. "A perfect example is this sergeant in the Fifth Precinct, Sergeant Johnson. The perp had a knife and he came toward him. By the time the sergeant decided to shoot, it was too late, he'd already been stabbed. There is always a tendency to hesitate. Sometimes it's fatal. Some guys go 20 years without ever firing a shot. On TV, they're shooting all the time."

"There were a couple of cops killed one year with knives," recalls Harrington, "and I remember thinking, Boy, it I ever come up against a guy with a knife, I'm not going to wait. I'm just going to shoot him. And I walked around a corner one day and there was a guy who had a woman up against the wall with a knife at her throat, and my first impulse was not what I thought it would be. It was in the winter, I had my gloves on and I grabbed the knife by the blade and just yanked it out of his hand. As much as you might think you'd want to, you really don't want to shoot anybody. If there's another way to do it, you will.

"One night, we had a guy in a delicatessen who'd stolen a couple of swords. He was high and wild and he had a sword in each hand. We went in there with our guns out, but my partner just lunged at the guy, grabbed the swords and yanked them out of his hands. After it's over, you say, 'Gee, it seems like I did an awfully stupid thing.' But when it actually happens, what's going through your mind is, I think I can disarm this guy without killing him. I don't have to shoot him. Not ever having shot anybody, I wonder what makes a guy decide."

•

As a result of the heavy criticism of its men by the public and the press following such investigations into police corruption as that of the Knapp Commission, the New York Police Department has become absolutely obsessed with its image. Its self-policing arm, the Internal Affairs Division, is continually tapping cops' phones, spying on them with high-powered binoculars and sophisticated night-vision equipment and conducting what it calls integrity tests: A cop suspected of being corruptible will be tempted with large sums of cash by a stranger who is in reality an undercover man to see what the cop in question will do with it. In the opinion of many cops I talked with, the N.Y.P.D. would rather nab a wayward cop than a civilian criminal.

Besides the spying equipment and the demeaning integrity tests, there are the infuriating restrictions, both official and otherwise: "When I was in the Tenth Precinct Anti-Crime Unit, they didn't want anyone in civilian clothes making drug arrests," Harrington tells me. "They never came right out and told us why, but we assumed it was because in civilian clothes you can't be monitored. In uniform, you wouldn't be foolish enough to go into a bar, shake somebody down or anything like that. But in civilian clothes, I guess they figure you're more apt to try it. It's harder to be seen."

"To whatever extent the department remains sanitary by not having contact with narcotics, we lose a substantial amount of respect on the street," says Reisman. "These are crimes that are conducted virtually in our presence, which we're all but told to ignore. And they generate problems that make our work even more difficult: A junkie has to steal. And he's generally going to steal somewhere near where he's copping. Also, a hard-working private citizen sees drug activity in his community and he notifies the police. He sees that they don't do anything about it and he loses faith in the police. Then, on other occasions, he's less inclined to tell us about other things, because he thinks either we're not going to do anything or we're active partners in the criminal activity."

Since the Knapp Commission, detectives are forbidden to enter any bar, liquor store or pawnshop without official permission and without being accompanied by a superior officer. Also, detectives are forbidden to speak to prostitutes or other underworld types for information on people who've committed crimes.

Although cops are allowed to pay people five dollars apiece to fill out police line-ups, the procedure for getting the money has at times been a masterpiece of absurdity: First you filled out a form to the commanding officer of the Field Internal Affairs Unit, signed by your own commanding officer; then you hand-delivered the form to the borough coordinator, who endorsed it; then you took it to the Field Internal Affairs commanding officer, who endorsed it and made a log entry and issued you a check; then you took the check to a bank to get it cashed; then you got all the people who were in the line-up back into the station house and made them sign receipts for their five-dollar bills; then you sent in the receipts with all the signatures, and if you didn't end up with the same number of signatures as five-dollar bills, you had to start all over again.

"They treated you like children," says Flannery.

•

Policemen feel that their hands are tied by the judicial system as much as by the N.Y.P.D. "The system was based on X number of people who should be incarcerated," says Monigan. "You've tripled the number of people who should be incarcerated by now and you haven't changed the system to allow for it. Do you know how much it costs to maintain a prisoner in jail? A hundred and ninety-four dollars a day!"

"The courts can't handle what we're bringing in," says Harrington. "They're overloaded. You can go down to court with a case on a silver platter, and if it's not a superhorrendous crime, they're not even going to prosecute. They're going to reserve the spot in jail for a guy who's done his eighth mugging. You go to court with a case like theft of services from a restaurant. They started something recently called declined prosecution. The D.A. says, 'Yes, it's a crime and it really did happen, but we're not going to prosecute, because we don't have the resources.' So a restaurant owner might spend all day to get a complaint drawn up and then find out it's not going to even be prosecuted. And he feels like he's paying his taxes and he's just taken a real screwing. He got screwed by the guy who ripped him off, and now he's gotten screwed by the courts."

Why, I ask Flannery, does he think the courts are so lenient with lawbreakers?

"I don't know," he says, "this is supposed to be the land of the free, you know? They don't like to deprive an individual of his freedom, and all this kind of garbage. And yet I walk through the area I work in and I see iron gates on all the windows. So who's really being imprisoned, the criminals or the honest citizens? The old people in my area go out only in the morning, because that's when the robbers and the junkies are sleeping off whatever they did the night before. The honest majority has to suffer for the criminal minority."

Mamet has another angle: A detective's batting average, he explains, is the number of cases he "clears" by arrest. A D.A.'s batting average is the number of his cases on which he gets convictions. A judge's batting average, especially in the New York Supreme Court, is based on the number of his decisions that are upheld on appeal--when he decides a case, he thinks ahead to what would happen on appeal. If he thinks the evidence or the procedures in a particular case are questionable, he'll throw the case out rather than risk its being overturned on appeal and making him look bad. "Also," says Mamet, "cops feel judges don't know what they went through to bring the case to court--they probably spent weeks or months on the case, risked their lives, and then the judge lets the guy walk away with a slap on the wrist.

"I also think that an obsession with constitutional rights has weakened the police force. A cop can observe the search-and-seizure laws, but if he merely walks up to a suspicious-looking person and asks if he's carrying anything like dope or guns and the person says yes, then that is called submission to authority and the case can be dismissed. The court could rule that the person was frightened and didn't realize he had a constitutional right to refuse to answer. A case can also be dismissed if the evidence rolls under a car or is thrown out of sight--if a cop loses sight of the evidence for even five seconds, that case is out the window.

"Another thing. If you're a cop talking to a witness to a crime, and as he's speaking you begin to realize he might be the one who committed the crime, you must stop, tell him he's a suspect, read him his rights and tell him that anything he says will be used against him.

"The questioning of juveniles can only be done at those station houses that are acceptable to the court--this isn't one of them. Also, a parent or a guardian has to be present. Sometimes a parent or a guardian won't come in. In that case, even if the kid admits to the crime, the case will probably be thrown out. Until just recently, we couldn't even fingerprint a juvenile."

When a cop takes a prisoner to court, he has to wait in the Tombs along with 100 to 150 other cops for anywhere from several hours to a couple of days for his case to be called, sitting and doing absolutely nothing--a daily waste of thousands of dollars in wages and an appalling waste of crime-fighting manpower.

"A cop cannot shoot at a car in which perpetrators are fleeing a crime unless the car is being used as a weapon against him, like, to run him down," says Mamet. "If he tries to run you down and misses, you can no longer shoot at him once he has passed you by. The state penal code says you can, but the N.Y.P.D. says you can't. N.Y.P.D. regulations compromise state law."

It is not only the penal code that makes cops' jobs difficult nowadays. It is also the attitude that the man in the street has developed in recent years.

"People aren't afraid of cops anymore, and that's too bad," says Reisman. "They take pride in wising off to us, being rude and not cooperating. People figure a cop can't lay a hand on them anymore. If we do anything they don't like, they can gave us official trouble. It makes the job harder and more dangerous, because a lot of times you find yourself in situations that don't allow for negotiation. For example, there was a fire in Brooklyn not long ago and people refused to leave a burning building--they wouldn't take the cops' word for it that their goddamned building was coming down around their ears. The general assumption is that we don't know what we're talking about. Except for a few areas of the business community, people are not getting the protection they're paying for."

A common practice in drug or prostitution collars, I'm told, is for the arrested person to file a false complaint with the Civilian Complaints Review Board. A prostitute will say that the arresting officer demanded sexual favors or asked her to pimp for him. A drug dealer will charge that the cop turned in fewer drugs than were seized. All complaints are laboriously investigated by the I.A.D. and go on the cops' permanent records. Even though almost all such charges prove groundless and the notation Unsubstantiated or Unfounded goes into the books, a cop with a number of unfounded complaints will generally not be promoted.

•

Some cops I know think heroin dealers should be not jailed but shot. You have heard that heroin was developed to get morphine addicts off morphine and that methadone--which is just as dangerous as heroin--was developed to get heroin addicts off heroin. One thing you may not have heard is that addicts on the methadone program take the methadone the Government gives them free and sell it on the street to buy heroin.

Another thing you may not have heard is that addicts on the methadone program are on Social Security, even though most of them have never produced any income of their own. The Federal Government is allowing junkies to be classified as disabled and to collect Social Security benefits. Technically, the Government is subsidizing methadone clinics all over the country through Social Security.

One night my detective friends introduced me to several black hookers in Hell's Kitchen. Although the hookers had impressive breasts and seemed definitely female, I was informed that they were, in fact, merely gentlemen with silicone ornamentation. I was amazed. I was even more amazed to learn that several of them had had sex-change operations at a hospital in Yonkers that cost $3000 to $5000 apiece and that those operations had been paid for by the Government as well--the lads, you see, are junkies on the methadone program, and are therefore covered by Medicaid. All they had to do to get the sex-change operation, I was told, was to get a psychiatrist to say that the operation was necessary for their emotional well-being and--bingo!--taxpayers get to cough up five grand for some junkie hooker to get his plumbing changed.

•

A nine-year-old girl has run away from an ex-junkie mother who beats her. We examine the little girl's laboriously printed goodbye notes, parts of which read: "I love you so much. You want me to go away I did.... See what I mean you hit see what. Love.... I love you very much.... Love, good-by Mom, Love.... I will come to you one day."

"You notice how much mention there is of love?" says Monigan.

"Abused children," I say a trifle smugly, "are--"

"More attached to parents who beat them than normal ones, I know," says Monigan. "I sure don't like this case."

The police have been looking for the little girl for several days now, and for the first time, they are beginning to suspect foul play. Two of the mother's other children have died under mysterious circumstances. Perhaps the mother found the little girl after she ran away and beat her to death. Perhaps, at the very least, the girl was sexually assaulted.

"Of course, some nine-year-old girls in this neighborhood are built better than my wife," says Monigan, "and have had more sexual intercourse than you and me put together."

Three days later, the girl is found unharmed.

•

Monigan and I are leaving the scene of an ordinary D.O.A. "You missed a great one a few weeks ago," he tells me. "The guy had been dead for several days. It was so cold in the building the corpse wasn't badly decomposed, but rats had eaten the flesh off his arms from the elbows down. That caused us a bit of trouble at first." Why? "Very difficult to get fingerprints when their hands are eaten off," he says reasonably.

•

"The first time you come upon a junkie lying in his own vomit," says Harrington, "you don't feel sorry for him, you almost hate him--because, man, how could you let yourself get like that? After a while, you mellow. If you're lucky, you mellow. If not, you really let it all get to you, and then you're going to be one of the guys who end up killing themselves."

In recent years, at least two policemen of the Ninth Precinct that I know of have committed suicide. A cop who was implicated in an alleged drinking incident at Gracie Mansion shot himself to death. In 1979, there were eight suicides in the N.Y.P.D. What causes cops to take their own lives?

"I think a lot of pressure is brought on cops by the police department," says Monigan. "Minor infractions are so frowned upon and dealt with so harshly that some guys really take suicide as a way out. The suicide rate is high because guys don't leave work problems at the station house. That's why we get so foolish here"--he points to the wooden leg nailed to Mamet's doorframe--"to lighten it up a little. If you don't do stuff like that, you take it all home with you and destroy everyone there. Eventually, you end up committing suicide or killing somebody."

"You're never allowed to show anger," says Harrington. "You're supposed to turn the good emotions on and suppress the bad ones. That's why so many guys become alcoholics, get divorced, blow their brains out, stuff like that." As a matter of fact, cops have higher rates of divorce, alcoholism and suicide than any other profession in the world. And their average life expectancy is only 59--about 13 years less than that of the average American man.

New York cops appear to be doing at least as good a job as other cities' policemen, but with far less equipment. The typewriters they use to prepare all their reports are barely usable. Their cars, both marked and unmarked, are falling apart--every one I rode in had either a broken two-way radio or a couple of doors that wouldn't open. "I sometimes wish I had more in my trunk than a tire and a jack," says Flannery wistfully. Like what? "Oh, like maybe some oxygen equipment. Emergency Services has some, but we could sure save more lives if we did, too."

There is so little money to buy underworld information and to set up drug arrests it borders on the tragicomic: "I made an undercover buy up on 14th Street," says Harrington, one of the few cops in the Ninth Precinct permitted to make drug collars, "and it was the first one I ever made. The guy wanted four dollars. I didn't have enough money, so I had to beat him down on the price. That really ticked him off when I arrested him. He said, 'Hey, man, you were gonna lock me up anyway, why'd you beat me down on the price?' I said, 'Well, man, all I had to spend was three dollars and 30 cents.'"

The morale of New York cops is generally very low. The layoff of 5000 men in 1975 was, according to Mamet, "the greatest blot on the N.Y.P.D. in its history." Mayor Beame had promised that if the men worked five days without pay, there'd be no layoffs. The men worked the five days. Beame laid off 5000 cops. Although many of them were eventually rehired, there are over 700 still out of work, which is felt to be, among other things, a definite hazard to public safety.

Oddly enough, morale among the men of the Ninth Precinct seems generally better than that of the rest of the department. Why? "This is a very, very dangerous place," says Monigan. "We've got seven plaques downstairs for guys who've been killed here, yet morale is relatively high. Being in a busy place and knowing it's so dangerous makes it...exciting. And when it's an exciting place, there's a much closer camaraderie among the men. And that camaraderie, that esprit de corps, gives an uplift to the entire place."

Maybe that's why most of the men I've met at the Ninth appear to like their work, regardless of the hardships. "There are guys here," says Harrington, "who hate to go sick, because they just don't like being idle. In this job, if you want to abuse going sick, you can abuse it, but the average guy doesn't. I had a broken arm not long ago and I worked anyway. I tried to fake it. I put my partner's coat over it--he's six feet, four--and it covered my cast. I couldn't face the prospect of lying around at home idle for six whole weeks."

•

Some signs on the wall of the Ninth Precinct: (1) YOUR LIFE IS IN DANGER TODAY. YOU MUST DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. (2) TO ERR IS HUMAN, TO FORGIVE IS AGAINST DEPARTMENT POLICY. (3) WE THE WILLING, LED BY THE UNKNOWING, ARE DOING THE IMPOSSIBLE FOR THE UNGRATEFUL. WE HAVE DONE SO MUCH FOR SO LONG WITH SO LITTLE, WE ARE NOW QUALIFIED TO DO ANYTHING WITH NOTHING. Somebody bitter about police salaries has amended the last line to read: To do ANYTHING FOR NOTHING.

•

One night shortly after midnight, officers Vasquez and Phillips and I respond to a call to back up an ambulance on a cardiac case. A very old man who has no legs and who has just had a heart attack is being gently helped into a folding wheelchair. When the old man hears he's being taken to the VA hospital, he begins to cry. A short conference follows between him, the cops and a female neighbor. Then the old man is helped back into his bed and we leave.

"He realized that if we took him to the VA hospital, he probably wouldn't ever go back home," explains one of the cops. "He wants to die in his own bed. It doesn't seem like a lot to ask."

•

I had begun my research wanting to find out what cops were really like, and what they knew about us, and how that knowledge had affected them. What I found out about cops is that they are more conscientious, compassionate, ill-equipped, restricted, playful, heroic, depressed, alienated and suicidal than I'd imagined. What I found out that cops know about us is both a bit better and a lot worse than I'd expected.

Because, of course, there are two Americas: the one in which people live by the American Dream and the one in which people have given it up. Cops are right on the border line--they live in the dream and they work in the nightmare it has created. I'm amazed they're not all schizophrenic.

It is not that being a cop is tough. It is that being a cop is almost not even possible anymore. And yet these men persist. Unless they are able to find support from either the public or their bosses, if not both, it is hard to see how much longer they can continue doing what they are doing.

"Drunken derelicts and heroin addicts and muggers and packs of wild dogs roam the streets after dark."

" 'You tell them you're a drug dealer,' he says. 'They'd sooner have you be a drug dealer than a cop.' "