WHILE THE CITY SLEEPS

The work I do on this website sometimes gets me accused of living in the past because I do use material collected then to fill in the empty space that confronts me each weekend. That's when I go back to the file of police reports that are my fallback resource when inspiration gives out. There are eight million stories in the naked city, as the TV announcer used to say, and I have some of them.

First lets look at some of the short stories, just to illustrate the variety of incident I faced every time I stepped out of the station house to go and visit other station houses from one end of Queens to the other, in peace and quiet one night, in fire and flood the next. The work varied and the way it was reported varied even more. For instance, here's a robbery report from the 107th Precinct in Fresh Meadows. It tells us that two black males with guns hit the checkout lines at a supermarket and made two cashiers empty out their registers and then got away with the contents.

The interesting thing about this was the way the missing money was reported. There was $324.68 gone from one register and $394.40 from the other. I'd never seen such exact figures before and I've never seen them since. Were they included in the radio alarm, I wonder. "Be on the lookout for two male blacks with following cash in their possession..." "Yeh, we know it's an open and shut case, but you gotta find them first."

From the meticulous to the slapdash is only a step sometimes, as the next report reveals. It's the story of another robber who stuck up a grocery store not far from the one above and fired a shot into the wall behind the counter. The owner, unhit, dropped to the floor anyway, possibly pretending shock. His son ran to help him and he actually was shot. The father, though, terminated the robber with one shot from the concealed gun he'd gotten from under the counter.

That's it. The trouble was, it wasn't even the shadow of a report. A lieutenant made it, but a captain was notified. Probably he made a report in full, making this one a nullity. No reason for making it, even. It leaves out ...everything, damn near. First, the shooting victim. How is he? Where is he? What's his story? The dead robber. What's his cause of death? Who is he? Have we got his gun? Did he have a record? Was anyone seen with him? Have the detectives notified anyone about him? Have we got any witnesses? Has the scene been secured and examined? What cops got to the scene first? How'd they get the word? Any statement from the father? Is that gun of his licensed? If not we'll probably have to bust him. The public won't like it. You know, guy's a hero, for crissake. Maybe the DA will give him a break and just have him report to the Grand Jury. Has the DA been notified? He'll probably roll on this one. The Daily News is on the wire? Okay, I'll talk to them.

Believe it or not, I enjoyed this kind of a ratrace. I had no checkoff list of what every cop should know about an investigation, but I didn't need one. I knew it already. The thing that gave most men trouble were the requirements for notifying specialized units for incidents that concerned them. I had studied this assiduously preparing for examinations. So I was able to say oh yeah, notify the Center for Disease Control on this one or the Child Welfare Bureau on something else. If in doubt leave it out? No way. That's for novels. Here we include the kitchen sink.

Now we come to an actual incident where no one died but I gave it the full treatment and got up a production that would have done honor to a political assassination. One reason for doing it was the fact that it involved an off-duty cop, meaning that he was one of those whose activities always got the full attention of Headquarters, which lived in fear of them lest by some impulsive act they tarnished the fair name of the Department and caused us to blush and hang our heads with shame and remorse.

With this guy it could have happened. When we looked at his work record later on it turned out that he had once been fined ten days pay for losing his revolver and twenty days pay for failure to follow an order. When we talked to him he was on disciplinary probation and enrolled in the department’s alcoholism program. One thing was sure: an investigation like we were doing on him was nothing new to him.

In spite of all the presumptions against him that his record created, for once it seemed the facts were in his favor. He had finished work at a Manhattan precinct at midnight and then drove to a bar -- he would -- in his Queens neighborhood. By some miracle of self--control he drank Coca-Cola only and left after half an hour of conversation with a (drinking buddy?) no, a pal.

When he got to his apartment on the first floor of a two-family house and opened the door there was an onrush of youths stampeding out of it. They had been burglarizing the place. The cop grabbed ahold of one of them and wrestled with him while his accomplices tried to pull him away. The cop finally got to his gun, but this enabled his prisoner to free himself as an accomplice hit the cop from behind. Sager, the prisoner, appeared to be going for a gun so the cop hit him first with his gun, breaking his jaw.

These proceedings were interrupted by the arrival of a uniformed cop who had seen everything from an elevated platform above the battlefield. Picking out the man with the gun as his first problem, he ordered the cop to drop it, so the assailants escaped while the cop was identifying himself. The ringleader was soon found, though, by cops answering an ambulance call at his home, whence they took him to Jamaica Hospital where his victim was waiting for him. Justice was served.

I’ve been raiding the files for these stories for five or more years now and I haven’t come to the end of them yet. Unlike Sherlock Holmes, who had a few he never would tell, like the one of the giant rat of Sumatra, I haven’t any that I’m holding back because the world is not ready for them. The world should get ready already.

P.S. I haven’t forgotten it was a bad week for cops in America. May justice really be done for them.