We Are the Cops (24 page)

The NYPD really believes in the separation of worker and rank.
Most bosses, as they go up the ranks, they forget where they came from. They forget what they did to get where they are. And that’s probably the truth. Whether they forget or not, they just change. The higher you go up, in order to really succeed you have to become a company man. It’s all ‘do as I say and not as I do’.

Not everyone is like that, though. I’ve worked for some real lunatics – I mean some complete lunatics! And they were great lunatics.

I’ve been with this department for my entire career; started as a patrolman and now I’m the Chief.

I won’t lie to you, it can make it uncomfortable when you have to administer discipline or you have to assert your authority and let your guys know that they screwed up and then discipline them. It’s not fun but it’s something that I won’t hesitate to do. More times than not, they understand my position – as long as you’re fair about it. You can’t do things one way for one set of people or friends and then all of a sudden you’re coming down extra hard on others – because you can lose respect and the faith of your men that way. They may not like it at the time and there may be a little bit of sour grapes but I think, over time, they realise that you have been fair and they come right back in line.

And you can’t worry about it. Not everyone that you supervise is going to like you. They’re not going to carry you out of here on their shoulders when it’s time to retire and say, ‘All hail to the Chief!’ You hope that they would but I am sure there are some that won’t like you for whatever reasons, if they felt that
they didn’t get promoted and they got passed over or you had favouritism or they just didn’t like your philosophies on how you wanted things done. Those are certain issues that you have to deal with and you have to accept.

One of the other things you have to be real cognitive of is how you try to sell something to your guys and gals, or how you try to get them to behave or conduct business in a certain manner. They’re looking at you – they’re like your kids. You tell them not to do something but if you’re doing exactly what you’re telling them not to do – or not doing what you’re telling them to do – they pick up on that.

They’ll be the first ones to call you out and call you a hypocrite or say, ‘I remember when…’ You know? ‘I remember when you were out here riding around and we used to do this and that and now you’re in this position of authority, you’re telling me not to do it.’

So that’s something that you have to be careful and mindful of as you’re coming up through the ranks. Some of them may have thought that you were a marginal-at-best, type employee and yet you’re telling them to be this super-cop. So that’s something that can take away or diminish the respect of the people that you supervise.

But when it’s done and over, if you’ve done everything according to the best of your ability and in a respectable manner, then you should be able to go home and sleep well at night.

There was a point where I made a decision to stop taking promotion
exams because being a sergeant was great. I enjoyed being a sergeant. I was a first line supervisor so I was out there with my troops – with the guys. I could respond to calls and be as involved as they were. So I loved being a first line supervisor. Then I looked at the lieutenants and as far as I’m concerned they’re the most worthless level on the police department. They’re like fish out of water. It’s like being in limbo. You have the captain who’s in charge of the precinct, you have the lieutenants who supposedly supervise the sergeants and then the sergeants supervise the guys on the street. So the sergeants are the ones that really run the show. Lieutenants don’t know what the hell to do with themselves. They’re usually totally lost.

I have always had a belief that the so-called military chain of command that police departments have is a dysfunctional organisational structure, because you have all these chains and all these levels of command and at least two levels are totally useless. You could get along without them and nobody would miss them.

We would never write anything down. You’re supposed to do ‘stop, question and frisk reports’. We would never do them. The only thing the bosses cared about was how many summonses you wrote in thirty days – like moving violations, traffic and so on. You had to give a book of summonses a month. The rule of thumb was – to stay out of trouble – you had to give a book of summonses and make at least two collars (arrests) in a month. But I decided I’m not giving any summonses and I would just collar everybody. I made a lot of collars.

Regular police officers have to write a book a month. It’s a quota. You have to. If you don’t, they deny you days off, they fuck with you. They’ll deny that there’s a quota but there absolutely is a quota.

If you didn’t live in Detroit, you’d think it was absurd that people have as many shootouts with police as they do here. Working here, your mindset has to be that it’s commonplace, so you have to accept it. Because if you didn’t, you’d be sitting here for hours, worrying, ‘Why are they shooting at us?’ If your mind couldn’t grasp it, it’d drive you nuts.

But working here, well, it’s a wild city; the criminals are wild. This block here is very nice but two blocks over the whole street is crazy. And it’s like that – one good, one bad, one good.

When you hear that there are more good people than bad, that’s an accurate statement but the bad definitely outweighs the good. It’s survival of the fittest. People aren’t working and they’re trying to survive. If they see you out there by yourself, whatever you got, they’re going to take it.

Being a cop in Detroit, you have to accept that you can get into anything, not just specifically gunfights. You have to accept that you’re going to have to get physical at work. You have to accept that. You may not come back alive. You have to accept that. When you accept that, it helps you clear your mind so that you can do your job.

Do I get frightened? No. Do I get scared? Yeah. But doing your job supersedes you being scared; you’ll be scared after it’s
over. You can’t retreat – I’m not sure if that is the right word to use, retreat – but that’s not even in your mind. Your mind is, ‘I’ve got to get this guy and not get shot.’

So scared? Yeah. Scared is good. Frightened? No. Here’s the difference: Frightened is cowering behind a desk not doing anything. Being scared means you’re going to be cautious whilst you’re trying to deal with whatever it is.

But these guys here – the police officers – in Detroit, they’ve been taken advantage of for so long. The officers here make less money and get less benefits but they still come into work and do the job. That’s the hard part. That stuff makes me wonder, ‘Wow, they must really like this job.’ To do what they do, even after they’ve had their pay taken, getting their medical benefits taken, getting their pensions and stuff touched on, they still come to work and they still put their lives on the line for people that don’t appreciate it. I mean, some people do appreciate it, but there’s a lot of people who don’t. They’re always ratting on police, but these guys still do their job. That shows you how special they are.

But working in Detroit is one thing – I don’t live here and that’s for obvious reasons. But if we didn’t police, who would? If we all just walked away, where would we be? That’s the reason I still work in Detroit. I know people who still live here and can’t move out. If they don’t have me, who do they have? If they call me, they know I’m going to come. If I’m not here to do that, who’s going to come?

This incident I’m going to tell you about is one where I get made
fun of at my work because ‘it’s not what cops do’. You may find it strange that I get made fun of for this but these are the types of people that I work with. They’re very selfish and self-absorbed. This is just a city that they work in and that’s it. And the people we encounter are ‘turds’, and that’s it. It’s hard to work there sometimes.

Anyway, there was this kid, he had a BB gun and he went up to a kid at high school and robbed him of his Cartier glasses. Took the Cartier glasses down to Detroit and sold them. Well, this knucklehead is on video at the high school, doing it. I showed the video to the school security and they identified him immediately. Well, this was a kid who went to an inner city Detroit school and he was running track down there. That school’s track coach ended up taking a job at another school as their track coach and he brought some of his kids with him – because it’s all schools of choice; you can go to school where you want. Well, this kid runs the 400 meters in like, 42 seconds. He has Olympic scouts looking at him. He was a senior at the time when he did this robbery. He had a full-ride scholarship to a college for track.

So I’m interviewing this kid and he’s polite – ‘yes, sir’, ‘no, sir’ and all this kind of stuff. I told him that I knew he had done the robbery. I showed him the picture from the surveillance.

I said, ‘I know you did it but I don’t get it. You’re full-ride track scholarship to college, you’re doing well at the school. I don’t get it.’

He starts crying. Then I come to find out that this is his story: he lives in one of those houses that you think is abandoned
in Detroit, but it’s not. It just looks like it is. There’s no power. They have gas – it’s the only utility they can afford to keep on – and they heat the house but the furnace is broken, so they heat the house with the oven, by leaving its door open. They borrow water from the neighbour and boil it to wash with. The entitlement benefit card that underprivileged people in Michigan get – it’s called a Bridge Card because there’s a picture of the Macka-now Bridge on it – is for your food benefits. The only person in the family who was able to get the benefits was his sister. So they were all living off the sister’s Bridge Card for food. The dad had some horrible disability so he wasn’t able to work. This kid hadn’t gotten any new clothes or shoes for two years. He was wearing clothes that didn’t fit, dirty shoes where the ends were blown out because his feet were too big for them. Now, you know as well as I do that at high school, if you show up like that, what’s going to happen to you? Peer pressure’s a bitch, right?

He stole the glasses, sold them for two-hundred bucks and went to a resale clothing shop and bought a pair of tennis shoes, two pairs of jeans and a couple of t-shirts so that he could go to school in clothes that fit him and were clean. You don’t have a soul if that doesn’t break your heart. Did the kid just commit an armed robbery? Yeah. But did he do it because he’s a thug, a turd, a sociopath? Would I like to have heard that he took the two hundred dollars and used it to turn on the electric service or buy food? That would have been better, right? But to an eighteen-year-old kid, having clothes and shoes to wear to school is just as important as those things. I’m not so callous that I don’t understand that.

Unfortunately for the kid, I had to send the case to the prosecutor’s office – it’s an armed robbery – and they come back with the warrant for armed robbery. I had several phone calls with the prosecutor, wrote two letters to the judge urging them not to give this kid a felony conviction. He was going to confess. Oh, and I petitioned for them to release him on a personal bond with a tether, which his unheard of in felony cases but I was able to convince the judge so that he was able to go back to school and run track. My next hope was that they give him a ‘high misdemeanour’ – where he doesn’t do any jail time and no felony so he can stay out of jail and keep running track. This was a kid whose life was at a fork – one way was felony conviction, prison, lose scholarship, come out of school, go back to abandoned crack house in Detroit and end up back in prison. The other way was get a misdemeanour, get my ass back in school, I learn my lesson, go to college in Ohio with my track scholarship, I become something. I wrote two letters to the judge and pleaded with the prosecutor but unfortunately my prosecutor’s office didn’t see it that way – or the judge didn’t – and he got a one-year felony conviction.

But I caught so much shit at work for fighting for this kid. But here’s the thing, I don’t do this for everybody. In my time in the detective bureau, I’ve probably dealt with four hundred ‘in-custody’ arrests. Probably two-thirds of those were fifteen to twenty-year-old black males. Maybe four or five of them I’ve fought for. Like I really didn’t think they were bad guys; I really thought that they deserved a second chance, that the reason they did what they did was more societal and due to where they were
growing up and their circumstances, not who they were as people. So it’s not like I’m trying to set everybody free and give everybody a break. There’re a few that I’ll fight for but, as with that kid I’m talking about, it can be disheartening.

I know that the women before me, who were on the job a long time, were tortured every day. It was just impossible to be a woman on the job before. It’s definitely much easier now because we have diversity and all these lawsuits and things like that, so everyone walks on eggshells around the woman on the job now.

You definitely have your guys who are, you know, they push the envelope. You’ve also got the public; nobody wants to listen to a woman. That’s never going to change. There are things that are just never going to change but it’s probably a lot easier than before.

Most of the guys on my job are very good. There are a handful of guys that will, you know, every time they address you, they’re addressing you as, ‘Hey baby.’ Oh my God, I want to punch them in the face! Or like, they just say inappropriate things. They say lots of vulgar things that a man should never say to a woman. But there are only a few guys – maybe two or three – that are even remotely inappropriate like that. I just tell them that they are disgusting pigs and then move on.

I requested to go to the graveyard squad, because that’s where I’m comfortable; I like working graveyards. Everyone out there had just got off field training and that’s where they send them –
they send them to these graveyard squads – you work from ten at night to eight in the morning. As soon as they get off probation or field training they go to one of these graveyard squads because they’ve got no seniority and older guys don’t want to work it.