Cops

"My husband, the cop. Always has to be the big man. One of the neighbors gets a ticket, they show up on our doorstep. 'Hey, Jimmy, old buddy, can you fix this for me? I swear the light was yellow. Can you fix it?'

" 'Don't worry about it,' he says. 'No problem.'"

The wife of a police officer, a thin, conservatively well-dressed woman in her 50s, was trying to explain to me the gulf between illusion and reality in her neighbors' perception of her husband and in his perception of himself. He is a patrolman in a large metropolitan area and has worked the same assignment in the same precinct for 15 years.

"The big, important policeman. Do you know how he fixes tickets? He goes downtown and he pays them; that's how he fixes tickets."

She was angry about his behavior, but in telling this story, she wasn't trying to belittle her husband. She wanted to give me a glimpse of the man inside the uniform--not a hero or a fascist, a gunslinger or a centurion, just a mere mortal, like everyone else.

Cops and crime are a national obsession these days. America has more police officers per capita than any other nation in the world. And most Americans believe they know how a police officer does his job and lives his life, because they read the newspapers and see Kojak on TV. We tune in to prime-time television and watch cop shows--good cops, bad cops, private cops, secret cops, ex-con cops, jiggly and feminist cops, straight-arrow and rebel cops, fantasy and "real" cops. And it's not just television; American popular culture is permeated with images of the police as saviors or monsters, peace officers or pigs. But, in truth, when we see them riding around in their cars, we avert our eyes. Unless a cop is writing us a ticket, we never talk to the police, not even to say hello. In fact, we get very little realistic information on exactly what policework is like and even less insight into the day-today existence of police officers--the men and women, the human beings.

I wanted to go beyond the crime statistics and the sociological studies, beyond the cardboard characters of most fiction and official police press releases. I wanted to find out just who these people are, to have them tell me in their own words why they chose to be cops and how they do their jobs. I promised all the officers with whom I talked that I would not use their names. I wanted them to relax, to feel safe, to speak freely. I hoped that this confidential, off-the-record approach would enable them to tell me things they might not discuss with a partner or a spouse--things they might not admit even to themselves.

School of Hard Knocks

Here's how it begins for the typical young cop. A white male from a working-class family, he graduates from high school and serves in the military or spends a couple of years in junior college. He gets married. Soon there is a child to feed. The most heroic thing he does is to put food on the table for his family.

One day, he signs up to take the civil-service examination. He tells his wife, his family and himself that he's after a higher salary, job security and better benefits. That's not the whole truth. He's looking for a little excitement with his opportunity for advancement.

Once he's made it through the rituals of psychological questionnaires, polygraph tests and physical examinations, he spends approximately six months in the police academy.

At graduation, he and all the others raise their right hands and swear a solemn oath. Each one is presented a shiny metal badge, which is never quite as heavy as he expects it to be, and a pistol that drags down on his bell like fate itself. They are congratulated by the mayor and the chief of police, their families and friends. Now they're cops. Here are the stories they tell.

You come brand-spanking-new out of the academy and you think you're going to save the world. You'll make the streets safe for everybody. There won't be any more crime out there after you get done. Takes about two weeks to burst your bubble.

The first fellow I rode with said to me the first thing, "Have you ever ridden Midland before?" That's a black ghetto part of town.

"No, sir," I said. "I don't even know where Midland is."

He turned his head and rolled his eyes. I could see him thinking, Oh, boy, that's just what I need. Not only is he a rookie but he knows less than a rookie.

We get out there and he says, "On this call, I want you to do all the talking."

I get in there and I start talking to these people, like I was having a regular conversation. They look at me and look back at my training officer, and then they look back at me. They scratch their heads, lean over to the training officer and ask, "What'd he say?"

He would translate for me: "He said that if you don't shut up, he's going to kick your fucking ass."

"Yes, sir. We understand," they'd say.

I looked at him kind of amazed and said, "Did I say that?"

"You did that time."

After a while, you realize that you can't educate everybody you come in contact with, so there is only one other choice. Go down to their level.

•

I was patrolling a desolate highway in a rural part of the state when I get a call that there's an accident. There's injuries involved, so, naturally, being out of the academy not too long, your adrenaline gets pumping. You're going to try to do good and help people out.

I get there relatively quickly, within three or four minutes' time. It was a head-on collision dead smack in the middle of the highway median. The cars weren't burning, but there was smoke and steam rising up from them, because the engines had been compressed on both vehicles.

I looked inside and I just stood there for a second. I'm looking at this woman who had no nose on her face. The nose had been severed off. This is shocking to me, because without that appendage on the front of her face, you're really looking down the throat of the individual. I had my first-aid kit with me, and the best thing for bleeding we had in there was a Kotex. So I got that on her face and got her on the side of the highway. I'm trying to calm her down. I'm hearing the moans and screams from other people. I get her down and get one of the passers-by to help me out by holding direct pressure on her face. There was extensive bleeding.

There was a small child in the front seat of that car. I walked over and looked at her. The child was not severely lacerated, but it was obvious that she was dead. This young girl was two or three years old and died of massive internal injuries caused by the impact of the collision. I could do nothing for her. That was all, in that one car.

I walked over to the other car, and there happened to be four people in that vehicle. I went up to the driver's side and realized that we had a problem here, because the driver had no head. He was decapitated by a piece of flying metal from the car that he had struck--I later found out it was a he. He was in his early 30s. That turned out to be somewhat humorous, because it took six troopers nearly two hours to find his head. His head had gone out through the front windshield and actually landed over 300 feet from the point of impact.

The driver's wife, who was sitting next to him, was killed. She bled to death before I even arrived. There was another child in the back seat who was about nine or ten, and she was alive. She was talking to me. She was crying, asking me how her father and mother were doing. I went to her first, because she was the only one conscious and that I could recognize as being alive. I brought her out of the car and was holding her and telling her she would be OK. She was going into shock. I was trying to keep her awake and keep her going. As I'm talking to her, she looks at me and said, "Oh, you're a policeman." I felt so good about that--that she recognized that I was there to help her.

Then a little bit of blood began to come out of the right corner of her mouth and she died. I'll never forget that child dying in my arms as long as I live. I knew she was dead because when she died, she urinated. It sounds crazy to repeat this, but her warm urine, the last warm part of her body, was dripping all over my uniform.

The ambulance didn't arrive until about 20 minutes later. All this activity transpired within 15 minutes. You experience death and do all these things you've been trained to do, and you say to yourself, "Wow, I'm here."

An adult death you can accept. We're programed to accept that, but a child and an infant....

That was the first day I was on my own.

•

The street is very seductive and very sensuous. There used to be a place in Manhattan between First and Second avenues on 100th Street that was like Bombay--18,000 people in one block, and 17,500 had criminal records. The place was a zoo. Thousands and thousands of people were outdoors on the street. The one block had four cops.

It was hysterical. What went on in that block in one night was more policework--if you wanted to participate in it--than (continued on page 132) Cops (continued from page 86) most cops would experience in a lifetime on one street: stabbings, shootings, fighting, gambling, prostitution. I would go home at night and think to myself, What a world! What an experience! It's really exciting. The smells were even very special. It was smells I'd never smelled before, exotic.

And the girls. If a guy is fairly good-looking and has anything going--anything at all--and he works in the ghetto, he can fuck himself to death if he wants to. That's no bullshit. It's just so available. It's so easy to get laid.

This is a single man's job, because you meet literally thousands of women, and you meet them in unusually stressful situations. You come in as the knight in shining armor. Some guys will take advantage of that. There's this ethic that says you don't do it, but we all know that everyone does it. I don't think I locked up a guy the first year on the force without fucking his wife, girlfriend or mother.

•

I was on my first post. A young fellow walked up to me--he had his load on--and made some snide remark to me. I deflected it. He came back again and made some very personal remark about my family, and I started to ignore that, too. I looked around, and I was aware that everybody was watching me. I realized that if I didn't take this situation in hand right away, there would be nothing I could accomplish.

I pretended to walk past him, but before I got by, I kneed him right in the balls and dropped him to the ground. I picked him up gently, very gently, sat him on the stoop and walked away.

I never had a problem again on that post. I didn't beat him up or leave any scars. I didn't enjoy it. I didn't put myself in a situation where people would feel I was getting my rocks off. I just made my point. I had given him the opportunity to get his rocks off and leave. He didn't take it, and that was that.

•

I'd been a police officer for six days. Just got my uniform. I was riding with an experienced officer. He was actually a year younger than I was, but he had a whole year on the job.

This was a Sunday afternoon, a real nice, sunny day. We get a call up in a very expensive residential neighborhood--"Crime against nature." What's that? Somebody chopping down a tree? We're looking in our penal code. It's some kind of sex crime, we figured out. We drive up. There's another unit already there, so I walked up and said, "Hey, what's going on?"

"You won't believe this," they said. "There's a naked lady fucking a dog."

"Nah, you're kidding me."

"Well, go back and look for yourself."

We go back behind this house, which is a $200,000 home, and there's this naked woman screwing a great Dane. And it's not even her house. It was her dog, as it turned out. The resident is saying, "There's this lady in my back yard and I don't know what she's doing there. Well, I know what she's doing, but I don't know why she picked my back yard."

Obviously, we had to do something. It was beginning to draw a crowd. People were coming around. All these little kids from the neighborhood are showing up. She was oblivious to what was going on. She was really into it, orally copulating this rather large great Dane. So we decided we were going to separate her from the dog. They said to me, "All right, Dave, you grab the dog." I was the new guy.

I didn't think that was a real good idea, but I come up to the dog and tried to grab him. Naturally, he tried to bite me, bared fangs, "Raw! Raw! Raw-raw!"

"No, that's not going to work. Let's back off." We got on the radio and called up Animal Control. While we're waiting for the dogcatcher to show up, she's continuing with this thing. She was crazy.

This man comes up to me. He was about 40. He says, "You know, I am a visitor to this country. I am from Denmark. We have nothing like this in Denmark."

"I don't think we have much like this here in our country, either, buddy."

One of our guys runs back to his car and gets one of those little Instamatic cameras. He says, "I'm getting pictures of this." He's crawling up on hands and knees, getting some crotch shots of this gal. She wasn't bad-looking. She's chewing on this dog and sticking flowers up her twat.

A few minutes later, the Animal Control guy shows up. "Oh, yeah," he says. "It's Jane. She's always with her dog."

He put the noose thing on the end of a stick over the dog's head and started pulling the great Dane away. We got hold of her by the heels and we're dragging her the other way. Her point of connection with the dog is his testicles. We're pulling in both directions and the dog is going cross-eyed, yelping.

Finally, we break her loose from the dog. She turns as we grab her and she wraps her arms around this one officer, grabs him by the nuts and gives a big squeeze. He's yelping. We're calling, "You got her, Joe. You got her. Hang on."

We managed to get her down to the unit, wrapped her in a blanket and got under way to Mental Health to see if they knew what to do with her.

As we're starting to drive down to Mental Health, she crawls up into the back window of the car and all you could see was this big, white butt sticking to the window. We drive her down the street, laughing as hard as we can. She's mooning the entire city.

I'd only been on a week, and I thought, This is really going to be strange.

On Patrol

The police department is a service organization, open for business 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Dial their number and somebody has to answer, no matter what it is you want. A police officer deals with the desperate, the disturbed and all those people out there who are just plain lonely in the middle of the night. His duties put him on intimate terms with the bizarre things people are doing to one another and to themselves behind all the closed doors and drawn shades in the community. While the rest of us look the other way, he carts away the societal offal we don't want to deal with--suicides, drunks, drug addicts and derelicts. We call it keeping the peace, but the policeman often thinks of himself as humanity's garbage man.

A policeman on patrol does not solve crimes. For the most part, he spends his time with victims, not criminals. Something bad happens and someone calls the police. By the time the police arrive, the incident is usually over, and the officer at the scene can only try to pick up the pieces.

Stolen vehicle. The suspects were a good ways away from us, but my partner said, "They don't know the area and they're going to try to get off the main road. Let's go out after them, just for the heck of it."

We hadn't started down the road but about a half mile when here comes the vehicle the other way. We spun around and got behind them in a high-speed chase down a big old twisty, winding country road. No streetlights, no nothing.

We finally ran them to ground. They pulled over and stopped. We bailed out. It was a 14-year-old and a 13-year-old kid. We'd been told they were armed with a .22 pistol that they'd shot at the guy they stole the car from.

We jerked them out of the car and frisked them down. About this time, my partner found the .22 on one of the guys. I flipped open the back door and was getting ready to throw them in and this kid--a 13-year-old--turned around, looked me in the eye and said, "What about my rights?"

This is three o'clock in the morning, out (continued on page 161) Cops (continued from page 132) on a deserted road. These kids held up a man, stole his car at gunpoint, tried to outrun the police, and this kid's worried about his rights.

We throwed them in the back. Any way you look at it, there was a lot of adrenaline flowing. My partner and I sat there and looked at each other. Then we just busted out laughing. "What about my rights?"

•

It was a hot summer night. The streets were crawling, man. We're going to really get the big one. In the back of the young cop's mind is the big arrest that's going to transform him immediately to a suit of clothes and a gold shield. That's first and foremost--the Big Arrest. It could happen, and it could happen any time, 'cause we're in a prime situation. We're looking for the heavies.

We're all rearing at the bit. Six o'clock, we turned out of the station house, charging like a football team. Ten of us have got out the door. Almost directly across the street in front of the station, there's a dispute going on between a little P.R. and a black guy. It's a parking dispute. The black guy has scammed into the Puerto Rican's parking spot. The Rican was waiting for that spot, but he parked behind the space. But the spade came up and he slid in there. The Rican said, "No way, José. For a half hour, I been sitting here sweating my ass off, with no cerveza Rheingold, no nothing. And this nigger comes sliding into my spot." That's using their terminology, but that's the way they feel. They're very prejudiced against these people. They don't like niggers, and that's all there is to it. Forget the white/black thing; we're not even prejudiced by comparison with the Spanish guys.

This argument is bullshit. It could develop into a small little fucking violation, and we don't take violations--we take felonies. We're booking. We're getting the fuck away from these fuckers.

We're about ten feet away from these two dudes who are arguing and we hear, Bam! Bam! Bam! Undeniable fucking gunshots. We didn't even have to turn around. We know that one of the two has shot the other one. "Oh, God. I don't fucking believe it."

We turn around, and the Puerto Rican smoked the spade. The gun is still smoking, and there's the black guy, deader than a fucking doornail. Put three right in the fucking locker on this guy from about a foot away. I look at the gun he's holding and it looked like a police revolver. I think, He must, you know, be a cop. That was my first impression, because I thought, He's so fucking calm. There's ten of us cops with guns, ten feet away, and look at him. He's just looking at the body, holding his gun. Well, he's got to be a cop. I'm very fortunate.

I hesitated and didn't do what I really should have done, which is as follows: That fucker has a gun. He's just wasted this guy. My gun should be out. I should say, "Drop the sun." If he says nope, then Bum! You're dead. That's it. That's the smart thing. Totally justified.

What did I do? I hesitated. That was a mistake. But it turned out that I didn't get hurt. He wasn't a cop, but he wasn't a fucking cold-blooded murderer, either. He was an angry fucking man who wasn't too bright and just went the limit, man. Went the limit.

When me and you got mad as kids, you'd say to your friend, "I'd like to kill you." It's in us, the fact that we could conjure it up. The guys who commit it, they've brought it out and let it surface. They just snap, and that's that.

I walked up to him and said, "Give me the gun." The other cops with me now all have their guns out. It suddenly dawns on me, I got nine guns on my fucking back because they want him. It's a gun collar now, and it's a murder. This could be instant promotion. These fuckers will kill me to get this son of a bitch. Jesus. There was a moment of that thought.

I looked at the guy and I said, "Why did you do that?"

He looked back at me and said, "He took my parking space, man." Pure honesty. "He took my parking space, man." He had killed the fucking man. It might have happened the next day, and he would have just argued with the guy about the parking space. It might have proceeded to a very violent oral altercation. But this day was just the day that he snapped.

•

You work a four-to-12. Say out of the 30 jobs you've gotten on the shift, eight of them involve a spouse, male or female, telling the other spouse a palpable lie as to their whereabouts or as to who that was that didn't talk on the phone or whatever. On a given night, you've got eight instances in an eight-hour period where somebody has said they were out bowling with their friends when, in fact, they were screwing around.

You go home and your wife isn't home. Ten minutes later, she comes in the door. "Where the hell were you?"

"Oh, I was out with my girlfriends." And she probably was, but you've heard that lie eight times tonight. It engenders a certain emotional paranoia.

•

I got a call of a burglary in progress. I get there and this woman comes out in the road and she's yelling, "They robbed me! They robbed me! They took my jewels!"

"Lady, lady, who robbed you?"

"The gypsies!"

"Gypsies? In Southern California?"

We get into the house and there are five gypsy women. The victim says, "I was just sitting there, and all of a sudden, these gypsy women are in my house and they're taking my rings and my jewels." So I round up these gypsy women. I start talking to them and they just look at me. They had lots of cash, but they only spoke a Serbo-Croatian dialect, which almost no one knows.

Why me, Lord? This is a real mess. None of them had any identification on them. I get the sergeant down there. "What are we going to do with this?"

"Take them all down to the station," he tells me. "We'll figure out there what to do with them." We interview the victim and find out what they did. There had been some similar thefts reported in the area, so the sergeant told me to book them all.

Two of the five had babies, little babies. The gypsy men who showed up wouldn't take the babies, so we had to put them in the pediatrics ward at the hospital in protective custody while their moms are in jail. So I load all the gypsy women into a paddy wagon and I take them to the hospital to do all the paperwork.

Momma's holding her baby and I get her out and into the emergency room. There's a lot of people in there. I get the baby from her, and about that time, the gypsy woman figured out what's going on here. She's trying to get her baby back, and she starts chasing me. We're going round and round in a circle and all these people are watching.

This bitch pulls her top down, grabs both breasts and starts spraying me with gypsy mother's milk. I was amazed. It sprays a long ways. She was getting me with both barrels. I was laughing almost as much as everybody else. For years, all the guys claimed I was under the curse of the gypsy mother's milk. They kidded me about filing charges: aggravated assault with a breast. I've never had it happen again. But I was, in that one instance, attacked with a breast.

•

I remember an accident. It was a bad one, but it wasn't like people were injured all over the place. The car that got hit was flipped over. A woman got out, but she was dazed when I got there. Then she started coming to and she started screaming for her baby. I said, "Oh, shit, now there's a baby inside that car."

I go crawling inside the car. Here's this little kid, about six months old, a little girl. She probably bounced around in that car like a rubber ball, because they're so flexible. She's sitting there. She's not crying, and nobody ever thought to look for her.

When you pull the child out, you feel, "Oh, I can't believe this, that I did this." You're scared shitless to go and look, because you don't want to see the kid's head crushed and have to tell the mother. But then you come out with the kid. You're able to tell everybody something good. They're all clapping on the side. The ending was nice and those kind of things make you feel happy about doing the work.

Deadly Force

In TV and motion pictures, a bullet is often portrayed as a discreet piece of metal. When it strikes a bad guy, it produces a round, red polka dot approximately the diameter of a pencil. There is very little blood and never an exit wound. One shot--two at the most--and the bad guy drops like a rock.

The reality is both more and less than the Hollywood illusion. Bullets aren't sharp. They don't drill neat holes in flesh. Bullets rip and tear. They cause bones to burst and splinter. For all that destructiveness, a single pistol shot usually won't stop a human being instantly. Inertia and momentum can carry an attacker for a second or two--time enough to do a great deal of damage.

If a cop is lucky, his gun does its job, and he has chosen the right time and person to employ it on. The average police officer never fires his weapon in 20 years on duty. Some of them rarely draw their pistols except at the firing range. But it's there all the time, hanging from a hip or riding in a Velcro ankle holster, in the nightstand beside the bed or--all too often--under the pillow.

The first thing they ask you after a shooting is "What was your backstop?" This is a standard question. "What was your backstop in case you missed or in case the round went through the person?" My backstop was a four-lane, heavily traveled street full of traffic and the major-shopping-mall parking lot adjacent to the building. That's what it was.

"Did he fire at you?" they ask. They love to ask that question. "How many shots did the suspect fire at you before you shot him?" Like you're supposed to give the guy a couple of freebies to make for a better sense of fair play. Bullshit.

•

We got a call--man with a gun in a candy store. We get to the candy store and the owner says to me, "It's this kid, just ran around the corner. He's 15, he's wearing a blue jacket, a white shirt and dark pants. He pulled a gun on me. He had a fight with me earlier here, and he came back and pulled a gun on me. He just ran around the corner."

I jump in the car and drive around the corner. I see this description going into a building that turns out to be a youth home. I never really got a good look at him. I just had an impression of the clothing. I jump out of the radio car and I run through the door of the youth home. The place is crowded with kids, but I can hear footsteps ahead of me, running down the hallway.

I'm chasing the kid. I'm always just a little bit behind him. Up some stairs. Down that hallway. Up some other stairs. Down another hallway. Always one turn ahead of me. Then the hallway dead-ends where some elevators are and I finally come up on him.

He turned around and sticks a gun in my face and pulls the trigger. I watched the cylinder rotate. Nothing happened. I knocked the gun to the side. The kid doesn't even fight at this point. He's as stunned as I am that he pulled the trigger at point-blank range and I'm still standing there. I get his arms behind him. I cuff him. I get the gun and I stick it in my pants.

My first reaction wasn't to beat the hell out of him or to even touch him. My first reaction was "Why the fuck am I still here? Why aren't I dead?"

We get the kid out and put him in the car and take him to the station house. He's 15 years old. As near as we can make out from the situation, this kid has been sticking up cabdrivers. We got the gun in the house and I open it up. It's a .32 Smith & Wesson with three live rounds and three empty chambers. The hammer had landed on one of the spent rounds. If it had landed on any one of the three live slugs, I would have gotten my brains splattered all over that hallway.

He was a juvenile offender. I didn't hit him. I processed him through to the juvenile detention center, went down to youth court with him, and they let him go. Tried to kill me, had been sticking up cabdrivers and got nothing at all from the authorities. The worst punishment he got was when his mother came into the precinct and she started slapping him around because he'd taken her gun. He'd taken her gun out of the drawer. She slapped the shit out of him.

•

I made an arrest that night and I was processing him upstairs. One man at the desk heard on the radio that there was a 10-13--which is "assist patrolman." You could be doing anything, but the minute you hear 10-13, you drop everything. Then it came over, "Cop shot."

I don't remember who I was with, but we jump in a car and go down to the scene. When we get there, there's a lot of cops and people milling around. They say a cop got shot. I'm looking and I see a little bit of blood on the street.

"Who got hit?" I says.

"Mikey."

We started going through the motions, trying to get names and witnesses. In the back of my mind, I think, Flesh wound, just a nick.

We're there for maybe ten, 15 minutes and I said, "Let's go up to the hospital and see how he's doing." So we go up.

We walked right up to the emergency room and the nurses we knew very well were working. When we walk in there, I saw that not only was Mikey shot but the sergeant that was with him was shot. They were both cracked open, laying on a table. You could see their lungs.

The sergeant was a boss. I didn't socialize with him. But Mikey, he was over to the house. He was separated from his wife, so there wasn't that real family type of thing. But he'd come over by himself and we'd have a few drinks. He was getting back with his wife. I looked at him and it was like ... how personal can you get when you see a guy's insides?

I looked over at one of the nurses, Ann, and she was crying. Another of the nurses just made a gesture like, "It's over." Neither one of them made it.

They tell me Mikey was laying there in the street--that's the part that gets you--laying in all this garbage, just strangers around him. He was saying, "Call my people. Call my people." I don't know if he meant us as his people or his family. You don't know what goes through his mind when a guy dies.

The Detectives

Contrary to the popular image, the world of the detective does not glitter. The aftermath of crime is sordid, tragic, ugly. There may be bodies and coagulated blood, the smells of death and decomposition. There are bound to be pain and terror. The sounds are the sobs of the violated and the frenzied cries for justice from the families of the victims. To one side are frightened children with hollow eyes. This is where a detective works.

A modern detective's major tool is his feet. His feet carry him on the endless journey of canvassing neighborhoods for witnesses. His feet are also handy in the battle against the bureaucratic red tape in his own department as he walks from section to section searching for information, standing in line filling out his request form for access, filling out the request form for request forms.

The most effective detectives combine a dedicated tenacity in the face of this endless red tape with alertness in the presence of mind-numbing repetition--and no little amount of luck. When they are able to bring a criminal to justice, the heroism in their effort goes beyond the outlandish plots of television dramas. If a suspect is actually tried and convicted, it seems little less than a miracle.

I've spent thousands of hours sitting and waiting--sometimes based on a tip but more often than not based on a probability. That's like playing the big number in the lottery. The bosses say, "They been taking off Colonel Sanders' all over the city. The chances are that this one will be hit." So you set up for two weeks and you sit and wait and wait and wait.

To pass the time, we look at women a lot and make remarks--not very gentlemanly remarks, but no one is listening. What else is there to do? You can't read a book.

Usually, one of us is going through some kind of marital problems. We'll hash that over for a few hours. We will try to think up every which way the robbery could go down, try to plan for every contingency. You don't know what you're looking for. You don't know what kind of car they're driving. You just know how they're going to take it down when they do go in. Hopefully, you can see inside the store with your binoculars--if you're not sleeping.

It's just so boring, it will drive you crazy. There's nothing glamorous about the job until the shit goes down, and then it's not glamorous, either.

The biggest fear that I have is not about getting killed. It's about taking this guy off without hurting anybody else and not letting him get away--mostly not hurting anybody else. But it happens so fast that you almost miss it every time. Once you collect yourself and figure out that it is, in fact, going down, it's almost over. Your decision to shoot or not to shoot is like a split second. There are so many things that can happen. Will it go all right or am I going to hit some innocent person? Am I going to make the decision to shoot when it's not appropriate, when the guy really doesn't have a gun? That absolutely scares me to death.

We did a seven-week stake-out in a Kentucky Fried Chicken joint. We were wearing the red shirts and red bow ties and we're packing the chicken in boxes. We got so good at it that the manager wanted to pay us. But we never caught anybody. We'd be sitting in this place with a radio and they'd go and knock off the one a few blocks away. Frustration.

Another time, a few days before Christmas, ATF--the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms--called our robbery squad. They had an informant who said that a supermarket was going to get held up. Two or three blacks were going to do it, and they had gotten hold of a machine gun. That raised eyebrows. We worked it for the first night with ATF. Of course, nothing happened, which is the way it usually is.

The weekend rolled along, but we stayed on it. It was closing time and we were just about to pack up our shotguns. My partner is sitting at the wheel, and he looks out this little side window and says, "Hey, buddy, this guy sitting in a car right here just tucked a gun in his belt."

"Fuck you, asshole," I said. I didn't believe him. But I got up, since he did have a little bit of urgency in his voice. This guy walks toward the store, he pulls open the door and, all of a sudden, you see the security guard's hands go up inside.

Meanwhile, in the car sitting right beside us, there was a second guy. He rolls the car right up in front, opens the door and jumps out with what looks like a fucking Thompson. Have you ever seen one of those, with the canister? Jesus Christ. It turns out that it is not an authentic Thompson, but it was a damn good copy. The same configuration--semiautomatic, a 40-round clip with .45-caliber ammunition which can go right through them dinky vests they give us.

It's my son's second Christmas, and I'm thinking about him. And I do not want to get out of this van. I'm really upset by that Thompson. I didn't like that. I said, "Somebody's going to get hurt out here. I don't think there is any way to avoid it." I got my shotgun and I chambered a round. There's no cars anywhere to hide behind, and we can't hide behind the van in the position that it's in. So we're just kind of standing out there in the middle of the fucking parking lot.

When these guys came back out the door, the guy with the Thompson is in the lead; he comes out and he's looking right dead at us. One of us yelled, "Freeze, motherfucker!"

He's got the gun cradled like he's Machine Gun Kelly. He thinks that he's the baddest thing that ever hit the road. He's strutting. He all of a sudden saw us and he brought it up. I waxed him. I said to myself, "Fuck it. If he gets a burst off, we're all going to get it." Right behind us, there is an entire apartment complex and a four-lane main drive.

I went, Boom! He took off, running like a jack rabbit. Now, I've got a shotgun full of .00 buck, which is the equivalent of nine .32-caliber slugs all at once and he took off running. We're all following him in our sights, and thank God it's all bricks down through there. You can see the powder coming off the brick wall as the shots hit behind him one after the other. Finally, he goes down.

The second guy has a gun in each hand. He's got the security guard's gun and his own gun. He's got the cash drawer balanced on his forearms in front of him. He caught one of the .00 bucks right in the spine and went down immediately. The other guy had taken all the rest in the heart from the first shot and still made that run. The autopsy showed it. It's scary. You been watching cop shows all your life and you think when you shoot these people, they're supposed to fall down. But they don't do it.

The first guy died. The other guy lived, and he's in the penitentiary. He's filed a $7,000,000 lawsuit against us. He's suing us for violation of civil rights.

•

At the beginning, I thought it was great. I was chosen secretively out of this organization to be one of the guys who was going to work this undercover job. I thought that was fantastic.

An undercover guy pretty much does what he wants, nobody bosses you around. The first six months, I thought it was glamorous. I grew a beard, I wore shitty clothes, I didn't look like a cop. I didn't even look like the people I'm working with. I'm working with the Mob. It took me six months to realize what was going on. Nobody was walking around with long hair and a beard. They got three-piece suits and fancy shirts, silk ties.

We're making cases, but it's starting to get long--a year and a half. Several times, I think that they're going to wind it up, and then they change their minds. They say, "Let's go a little bit longer." The target date keeps getting extended.

We're doing some deals with some pretty high-level organized-crime figures in the state and around the country. For instance, I would fly to Florida and have lunch with them. Pretty big-time guys, the kiss on the cheek and the whole bit.

In undercover work, you come from this world of black and white into a world of "We don't give a fuck and whatever happens, happens." You're living like that and it's crazy. I'm wearing this recorder between my legs. I know they'd kill me in a minute. There's nothing on me that says I'm a cop. I'm there by myself. My nerves are really up. I'm starting to get to where I can't keep a meal down. I would eat with them and I'd be all right there with them. But when I would leave, 20 minutes later, I would be throwing my guts up on the side of the road. I started to feel these chest pains. I really felt like I was having a heart attack. I had diarrhea on a daily basis.

I go to this doctor that I'd known since I was a kid. That seemed safe. He checks me out on an E.K.G. He says, "I don't really see anything wrong with you. Are you under a lot of stress?"

I started spilling my guts, because I had to talk to somebody. He writes this thing down on a piece of paper from his prescription pad that due to excessive stress, it might be necessary for Officer Mitchell to change his position in the state police.

Now I got this piece of paper. Like a little kid, I go to my sergeant on the undercover gig the next day and I figure, This is it. I have a note from the doctor saying I'm under stress, too much stress. They'll have to let me out of this job.

He laughs. I say, "What are you laughing about?"

"We got a million dollars wrapped up in this. You're not physically hurt. You're going through stress. You'll be all right. You can handle it." That's the mentality of cops: You can handle anything. Don't worry about it, kid; you can handle it. I was devastated.

But finally when he gave me a real ending date, it got all right. There's a goal line. It will be over soon. Then I was fine again.

The big day arrives. We go to the National Guard armory that day at four o'clock in the morning. We're going to lock up like 28 Mob figures in the state, then it was going to expand from there. There's 100 FBI agents, 200 uniformed troopers there when I walk in. Law enforcement up the ass. I think, This is going to be the greatest day of my life. After two and a half years, I'm coming back, the prodigal son.

I'm one of the main figures in the investigation, so I'm standing there next to all these people from the FBI. We're supposed to get ready for this big press conference on the big raid, but I don't have anything in common with them. They're the people I say "Yes, sir" and "No, sir" to, that I have a militarylike relationship that goes on between us, but it's no more than that. They don't come from my world and I don't belong to theirs. I wasn't able to sit with the troopers, either. Nobody that looked like me was with the troopers. Those guys are turning, looking at me, pointing, but nobody is waving.

They start bringing in the defendants. They've picked them up and arrested them at their house. The armory is going to be the processing site. I was supposed to interview some of them. It would be a real shock value with me interviewing them. Maybe they would turn over quicker.

I go downstairs, and they're ready to fingerprint them. The troopers standing around, they think it's great. I thought it was going to be great, too. But I felt like the biggest cocksucker in the world.

I'm wearing a three-piece suit. My hands were behind my back. One of the guys says, "What did they pinch you for?"

"I'm with them," I said.

"You cocksucker," he says and then he spit. They were just looking at me. I couldn't even look these guys in the eyes. Here's guys I hung out with, guys I broke bread with. I really came to like some of them. And they liked me, trusted me.

One guy comes up to me and says, "How could you do this, Ben? You're my friend. How could you do this?" He was 60-some years old. He was like anybody's grandfather, a nice guy, but he dealt in stolen securities. That's what we locked him up for. He put a heavy guilt trip on me. I couldn't look at him. I had to put my head down.

Here I am, not in the troopers' group any longer, and the friends that I've had for the past two and a half years, I've just delivered into the enemy's hands. So now even the bad guys have told me I'm no good. I felt like a piece of shit, a stool pigeon.

Undercover is a very strange way to do policework, because you identify with the bad guys. It's a strange feeling to be trusted by somebody and then betray them.

Hardening of the Heart

Policemen hate and fear criminals. The cops, in turn, are feared and hated by most of the people they police. The establishment they serve seems to hold them in contempt. In the cop's opinion, the press is a mortal enemy, ready to chew up an officer's entire career just to spit it out as a sensational headline or a news update.

Cops also feel as though they get no support from their colleagues in the judicial system. They see the system of justice, including the judges and attorneys who operate it, as a broken-down machine.

It doesn't take a cop long to decide that even the police administration, like all bureaucracies, is more interested in maintaining the status quo and its own integrity than in protecting the rights of any one officer.

Finally, a police officer looks inside himself. He sees the calluses growing thick and hard over his ability to feel. He reconsiders his own motives with his new-found cynicism. If he is honest with himself, he sees how tarnished his ideals have become, how hard his heart is. The last disappointment is with himself.

The part that really caught up with me was seeing the death. A lot of people say they don't see a lot of it. I saw a lot of it. You go to somebody's house. She's crying because her husband died at the dinner table. The police are the first with everything. You're involved with her screaming, her crying. She wants you to play God. She wants you to bring life back into that person. You go through the motions. It really catches up with you.

What people don't realize is that I'm picking up the feeling, too--unless you're a callous, cold-blooded drug addict, you can't help it. Now they train you with different techniques about how to do this stuff. You don't go in and say, "Are you widow McNamara?" But nobody tells you how you're going to react. They don't train you how to deal with your own emotions.

So you tell someone their husband died and then, the next thing you know, you're getting the newspaper for the sergeant or lunch for the guys in the back room or you're going to a barroom brawl and you're the bouncer. You're breaking up a fight. You're not Superman. You can get knocked on your ass. When somebody punches you in the mouth, you can feel it, too. You're scared.

You're always scared. I don't give a shit who the cop is that tells you that he's not scared; that's a lot of shit. He's scared all the time. He's scared of looking like a fool, of being weak, yellow, of being a coward. Afraid he's going to say the wrong thing and get in trouble with the department. Fear is a policeman's life. It's impossible to go out on the street day in and day out and not have fear.

•

A lot of cops really want to believe that they're the type of guy that can do the things the cops on TV can do. They want to believe they can talk people into confessing and they'll fall down at their feet, instead of having a guy whipping out his cock and pissing on them or spitting in their face. You don't know what it's like until you're talking to a guy and there he is, smiling at you, but you're just looking at his face. Now watch his hands, because he's taking out his cock and pissing at you.

So you lock him up. So what? He doesn't give a shit. The fucking guy has an I.Q. of two. That's what it's all about.

Once you find out and you're comfortable with that and you can deal with that, then you can be very successful.

•

The smell was so bad, the building emptied out. It was in the middle of the block, and the bar on the corner had emptied out. People thought it was a sewer backing up in the basement.

We get there and open the apartment door, and there's this mound on the floor. It wasn't hardly recognizable. The stench was so incredible that you didn't breathe in the room. It's something I can't describe. I can't say it's like rotten eggs or anything. It was like nothing I ever smelled before. It was wintertime and the apartment was hot. This thing on the floor was a 19-year-old kid covered with maggots and blown up all over the wall.

The story, we found out, was that the mother had a heart attack and he took her to the hospital. He came home and shot up--died with the needle in his arm and laid there for two weeks while his mother was in the hospital. The body began to decompose. Since there were no breaks or punctures or wounds, the gases of decomposition made the body bloat. There was nothing for this expansion to come out of. The body blew up. He was on the walls and all over the floor, and when you rolled him over, he was nothing but a pile of maggots.

That shook me up a lot. It thickened the shell I was developing since I got on the job. As the shell thickens, you become more and more out of touch--not with the world but with yourself, so that when you walk in on a scene like this, you just shrug your shoulders. Another messy thing.

•

Here's a guy who lives out on a tree-lined street in a lily-white area with his wife and a couple of kids. He gets on the train or he drives into the center of the city to a ghetto area and he just deals with blacks. You don't see a white face all night unless it's your partner. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but he's living in two worlds.

He gets mo re work in one weekend than some entire towns get. Even if he's a racist and a bigot, you'd have to have a heart of stone to go into an apartment house there and take a look at babies without diapers, just laying there, filthy, no mattress. The kid's having trouble. And it's not just one. There's thousands of them out there.

He goes to a family fight and one of them is knifing the other. He sees the kids are in the apartment during this whole thing. People are drunk and overdosed.

He does that for eight hours a day, 40 hours a week. Then he goes home to the wife. He walks into the house and she says, "You better take the day off tomorrow; I've got a P.T.A. meeting and you got to take care of the kids."

He just saw, like, five people die tonight, and she's worried about the kids' new shoes. "I seen kids without clothes. They needed food!" He don't say that to his wife. He can't say that to his wife. He don't say, "Leave me alone. I got all these problems to think about." What does he say? Nothing.

•

The great danger in this job is not getting shot or stabbed. It's that you'll get fat or die of a heart attack. Or, because you let your nerves eat you up, you'll have a nervous breakdown. Or you become an emotionally disturbed person.

Chances are, shooting and stabbing aren't going to happen to you. There's a good chance that you're going to be dragged out of your patrol car or from behind your desk, dead from cardiac arrest. A good chance that you'll be a nervous wreck. A good chance that you won't be able to talk to normal people because of your own emotional problems. The rest of the shit, don't worry about.

You talk to the new kids and they can't wait to strap that gun on their side, go out there and show the world. They're going to do a job, man. I had that feeling, and it's a good feeling. But when the reality comes round, you got to worry about your sanity and making it through your career.

•

You come into the job with a lot of preconceived notions. No matter how worldly you are or knowledgeable you are, your body of experience has expanded exponentially because of the job.

Whatever sacred cows you may have been feeding all those years are slaughtered after a little while. That's probably the greatest single tragedy that every cop faces. You find out that nothing is on the level. You find out that people die for nothing.

Whatever it is that drives people to religion is what you experience. And yet you're in a position where you can't accept religion, because you can't function that way. The job runs against every good impulse you ever had.

"His duties put him on intimate terms with the bizarre things people are doing to one another."