Oscar the Grouch, the 23rd Precinct’s house cat. Photo by Amy Kellner
6:33 We’re at Duane Reade. It’s a shoplifting charge. Shoplifting is a huge part of being a cop. Usually junkies stealing razors or whatever else they can to sell to bodegas to get money for heroin or crack. They’re bad at it though, so they usually only steal about five dollars worth of shit and they almost always get caught.
It’s truly amazing how much time and energy goes into such an irrelevant crime. No matter how little they steal, the police have to fill out a scratch complaint, then both officers have to put in the complaint number and the arrest number, then the arrest number goes to fingerprint, then they print out a summary, then they fax the booking sheet to the DA, then they have to take the perp to central booking, and wait for them to go through that. And that’s if things go smoothly. If the perp is sick, you have to take him to the hospital, handcuff him to the bed, and have him examined before doing all the above bullshit. Sometimes perps will let cops do all the bullshit first and then say, “I have diabetes,” at the last second--just to fuck with them.
We’re pissed. Why can’t the cops just come in and scare the shit out of the person like in the 1950s? Better yet, why can’t the store security do that themselves and just put a Polaroid of the person by the door so they never come back? We’ll tell you why: Lawyers. Fear of litigation has ruined everything. We say this to the cops, and they agree. We are now bros. Bros with bulletproof vests.
Anyhoo, instead of the usual crackhead, this time the perp is a 14-year-old Jewish American Princess. She stole some makeup and a plastic purple pen. Luckily this girl is underage, so they’re just going to call her parents and we can get out of here. Both cops are still pinning their dreams on dinner.
6:40 The girl is frantically calling her mother and her nanny. Her mother’s phone is turned off (typical). Eventually the police break it to her that we have to call daddy. She screams, “FUUUCK!” and buries her face in her hands, sobbing. It is very hard not to laugh at this point. Then she wails, “Can’t you just drive me home?” and her audacity sends us down one of the aisles cracking up.
6:42 The staff sergeant comes in (can you believe how much money and time this little cunt has wasted?) and verifies the complaint. Sarge takes us back to the station and Jones and Rodriguez take the J.A.P. over in their car.
6:44 Some lady almost cuts us off while we’re in the sergeant’s car. The captain who’s driving bawls her out. We press on.
6:51 The paperwork begins and we sit there for about an hour while our hosts fill out forms and wait for the parents.
7:23 The parents show up, and seem more worried about their daughter’s rights than the fact that she just cost the city about $2,000 in labor, wasted several hours of everyone’s time, and killed dinner for all of us.
7:30 Rodriguez explains to the parents that if he took the daughter to central booking, the other kids would have recognized that she didn’t belong there and would have kicked her ass. The parents are starting to understand that their daughter got off easy. They’re apologizing and we’re wishing Veronica or whatever her name is went to jail.
7:44 We’re back on the beat. Jones and Rodriguez have to wait for a new dinner slot. In this case, it’s 8:30. And that’s assuming nothing goes wrong. It does. But first, more bullshit.
7:52 We get a call about a man screaming for help. It’s only a block away.
7:53 We’re here and nobody’s screaming. We ask headquarters for a call back. Nothing.
7:55 We leave.
7:59 Noise complaint. It’s in this disgusting building with shared bathrooms and the smell of piss in the hallway. But all we see is yuppies walking in and out. A Ralph Lauren-type with a Starbucks cup sneers at us as we walk in. We go to the apartment and hear nothing. The call was anonymous so we can’t ask for more details.
8:05 We leave.
8:07 We park the car on the corner and wait for traffic violations. There is a crazy old black man yelling, “Praise Jesus” again and again and again like a robot. Jones goes, “Holy shit does that guy ever love Jesus.” A huge part of this job is riffing.
8:15 We start whining that there’s not enough action. Rodriguez and Jones say they like it this way. “I just want to make it home in one piece,” explains Jones. Then Rodriguez tells us about a time he had to wrestle a 6'5", 400-pound monster on crack. He called for civilians to help, which they did. It’s illegal not to help an officer in need. We ask the name of that charge. Rodriguez thinks it’s Disorderly Conduct but checks his Palm Pilot to be sure. He has all three Lord of the Rings movies on that thing. Who knew Puerto Rican cops were capable of such high levels of nerdity.
8:17 We get a call. Some woman was just robbed of $5,000. Jones goes, “You want action?” puts on the sirens, and we’re off. This is fucking fun. We are whipping through traffic at 50 miles an hour in a giant SUV. This is great news for us, but we can tell our bros are bumming. This isn’t even their sector and they’re losing dinner again. We find out later that the guys who were supposed to be in charge of this area were on a bullshit call like a noise complaint or something. That is not on. You’re supposed to abandon a call if it’s bullshit and you’ve got another call. Fuckers.
8:21 We’re there. Fuck that was fast. A chubby, cute black girl in her early twenties runs over to the car. She is completely hysterical and making no sense. She’s shaking and yelling something like, “Her mans, her mans does this all the time! How did her mans know—my cousin was—what? Officer, it was with my cousin! We have to—officer, they took it! My cousin—120 West 94th is a drug building!” Jones is telling her to calm down. “Just give me a description and tell me which way they went.” She says, “Three of them was tall and one of them was”—and she points at Jones—“um, the way you are,” which was funny. She says they went north, and about four undercover guys head north. Then she says they circled around the block and went south. It becomes evident that she knows the perps and she knows where they went, but she is hoping to avoid giving up that information. We go to the cousin’s apartment. It’s in the projects. The undercover guys go upstairs and we wait outside (under the awning, because people often throw shit at cops from their windows—they call it “air mail”
. He’s not there. Doye. They’re gone.
8:32 The cousin shows up. Her name is Maria. Maria keeps repeating, “Shaniq, you got to call your momma.” Dinner’s not looking good.
8:35 We start driving around trying to find someone that matches the description. Good luck. What are they going to be doing, wandering around high-fiving each other? The lady on the cop radio keeps including the masks they had on their faces in the description, like they’re still going to have them on. Jones notes this and then sighs, “This one’s going to the detectives.”
8:40 We are back at the station. The two girls are being questioned separately and their story reeks. Here’s what we know for sure: Shaniq ran into her cousin Maria, whom she had not seen in a very long time. Shaniq shows Maria $5,000 in her purse, and they go smoke pot under the stairs in the lobby of some project (how about the fact that you can include pot smoking in your complaint and you don’t get in shit for it?). Soon after, they are robbed. Shaniq calls the cops—stoned.
There’s nothing else for us to do now but play Columbo. It’s pretty fun, actually. You see it happening all over the station. Cops are sitting there unraveling various mysteries like it was on The Sopranos last night, only when they say, “I’m telling you—she knows these perps and the cousin is involved,” they’re talking about real crimes. Neat, eh? While Maria was being questioned, we got to ask Shaniq some questions, and vice versa. We weren’t supposed to, but could you resist? During our questioning, some problems popped up. Maria says they hit Shaniq with their gun. Shaniq didn’t see a gun. How did the perps know they were there? Where’d you get the money? Why were you going to go back to your mom’s to smoke pot if she’s on a ventilator?
When we asked Shaniq what the money was for she said it was for college. Actually she said she it was “intuition money,” which is definitely something she desperately needs more of. Whenever Maria gets asked a question that she can’t answer, she looks shocked, fake cries (no actual moisture ever left her eyes), and says, “I was so scared.” It’s one thing to have to deal with liars all night, but these were some of the worst liars in New York City. Honestly. They lied like people do on sitcoms where you’re supposed to know they’re lying. Like, Jack Tripper style.
9:13 Maria’s sitting there fake crying and calls over to Jones, “Officer, can you go get me a tissue, please?” He gives her a paper towel and says, “That’s all we got.” Then she asks him for a cigarette. He says he doesn’t smoke. Then, about ten minutes later this bitch has the nerve to call over Jones again, point to one of the female narcs, and go, “Officer, I KNOW she smokes because I seen her smoke before. Can you ask her for a cigarette for me, please?” We stare at him with our eyes bulging out of our sockets. He rolls his eyes back at us and tells her, “She’s busy.” Can you believe this shit? Can we go back to Serpico days, please?
Eventually we start seeing through the bullshit, and all the pieces fall together. Shaniq shows Maria her money. Maria then leads Shaniq to a well-known pot smoking spot and secretly texts the boyfriend something like, “We’re at the spot. Come rob us. Pretend I don’t know you.” Maria kept telling Shaniq “You have to call your mother,” but what she was really saying was, “Look, bitch. You know you can’t keep pretending that money was from your mother. You know you got it hustling, so if you’re going to blow up my spot, I’m going to blow up yours.” She was right. When we went up to the cops to give them our brilliant theory, they told us what the detective told them. “It’s simple. We’re going to call the mother. If she didn’t give nobody no $5,000, someone’s going to jail.”
10:12 Four crackheads are brought in and stand next to us. Two men and two women. Know why? Crack makes you fucking horny. Doing it with all dudes is like renting movies with a blind man. When you’re a multisexual group you can plug in to each other and give crack the biology it deserves.
They’re wearing handcuffs. One of them pushes us aside and starts puking in the garbage. Then she pisses her pants. We asked one of the narcotics guys why she’s puking. Isn’t that a heroin thing? He says, “She’s drunk, too,” and walks off.
The other crackheads are calm as nails. Have you ever done crack? There’s this weird part where you get so high and edgy you actually plateau and become calm again. That’s where they were. Sitting on top of Crack Mountain.
10:22 Rodriguez comes out. It looks like they’re going to be dealing with this for the rest of the night so we might as well go home. We ask them if they’re going to get a chance to eat. Jones goes, “Nope. What will happen is, I’ll end up eating the chicken tonight when I get home AND I’ll probably pick up some McDonald’s on the way.” Then he grabs his gut and shakes it before adding, “That’s why I’m so fucking fat.” Like a butterfly that flaps its wings on the other side of the world, that dumb cunt stole a pen and fucked up everyone’s life.
10:23 We leave the station and walk up to Perp Pizza. They’re closing up. We ask the guy if he knows his pizzeria is called Perp, not Mama’s, and he says, “Yes, we have very good food. We used to be on 96th. We have pasta and lasagna too. Very good.”
