Of Cops and Careers
My foot was staining the snow red with
blood when a lone police officer pulled up in his patrol car. It was
New Year's Eve in Park Slope and I had just been in an accident that
embedded a lot of glass in my right leg. The cop was gruff and not
very gentle as he tightened the sock I was using as a tourniquet. His
repeated radio calls for an ambulance got no reply. The snow was
coming down harder around us and the cop seemed worried. 
“Listen
you're losing a lot of blood, I gotta get you out of here, OK?” And
with that he scooped me up, placed me in the back of his car and
rushed me to a Methodist Hospital emergency room bursting with the
casualties of a wild Brooklyn night. 
The officer cornered a doctor he
apparently knew and I was prepped for surgery immediately. I remember
him walking away, his uniform drenched with my blood, and I never saw
him again. Prior to that incident the only cops I knew were the ones
who constantly rousted me and my brothers as teenagers, throwing us
against walls and seizing our beer.
So when my Wall Street job was
downsized a few months later, I applied to be a police officer. My
score on the civil service test wasn't exceptional, so it would be a
year before they reached me on the list. Then there would be medical
and psychological exams, physical endurance tests and a background
investigation.
In the meantime, I answered a small
newspaper ad for “federal public health investigators” in July
1972 and was quickly assigned to cover clinics in Central Harlem and
Washington Heights. My job was to draw blood from new arrivals
suffering from syphilis, wait for the diagnosis and treatment, and
then interview them to get names and locating information for their
sexual contacts. I then had to find those contacts and convince them
to come into the clinics to be examined. I wound up leaving a lot of
notices with bartenders and filling blood vials in locations that
were far from hygienic.
Decades later, at a party attended by
the Center for Disease Control executive who ran this program, I
learned that the decision to hire me and my fellow investigators was
based on only two qualifications: a bachelor's degree and former
employment as a cab driver. After suffering a year of very high
attrition among its new recruits, the CDC reasoned that if you could
drive a cab in New York, you could probably get people to talk and
had enough street smarts to survive the tough situations that would
inevitably occur. This executive called it “the conviviality
factor”.
When one of my convivial co-workers
told me the City was hiring probation officers, I figured a job in
the criminal justice system might speed up my entry into the NYPD. My
two years with the CDC was accepted as the social work experience
required for the position, perhaps because I worked in “Social
Disease” clinics, so I was appointed within weeks of applying.
It was January 1974. The law
enforcement veterans I began working with seemed a bit overwhelmed.
Over the previous decade, the murder rate had tripled, arrests
soared, court dockets became unmanageable, and probation caseloads
quadrupled as under-staffed crime fighters in crumbling
infrastructures tried to cope. Old timers would wistfully recall days
when order reigned supreme.
I was assigned a caseload consisting of
drug offenders receiving methadone who lived in Bushwick. I spent my
time visiting apartment houses along Knickerbocker Avenue,
testifying in Supreme Court, and interviewing inmates at the Brooklyn
House of Detention (Inmate: “I was just standing there cleaning my
nails with my knife when that fool just ran up and threw himself on
my knife” Me: “So he threw himself on your knife 19 times?”). I
also had to collect urine specimens for drug testing and took some
small satisfaction in perfecting ways of getting guys to fill the cup
(dipping fingertips in a cup of warm water proved very helpful).
In the Spring of 1975, after I had
finally satisfied all of the NYPD entry requirements, including
grueling physical tests that my right foot barely passed, I was
slated to enter the Police Academy. I was given a date in May to
report and started taking swimming lessons at night since I heard
swimming proficiency was a must. Then the City's fiscal crisis
reached full bloom and the Academy class was canceled. A month later
I was laid-off as a probation
officer. My career in law enforcement had suddenly come to a
screeching halt.
But it was to
resume a year later and last for decades, taking me from make-shift
classrooms on Rikers Island to pitch-black stairwells on the Lower
East Side and from rackets disguised as businesses, to corrupt
politicians slobbering at the trough of greed. I spent 20 years on
the line and 20 years in management. I testified against terrorists,
white collar bamboozlers and murderers. I watched policies get shaped
and abandoned and helped break some new ground. I got sued by
subordinates I fired and sweated out internal investigations for
bending some outdated rules. 
When I finally retired in 2014, I looked
back with fondness on all the hard-working detectives, probation
officers, special agents, prosecutors, analysts and technicians I had
worked with along the way. But I couldn't help but wonder how
everything would have turned out if long ago a cop whose name I never
caught had taken off on a snowy New Year's Eve. I can tell you one
thing – if he hadn't shown up, someone else would be typing this
sentence.
