We Are the Cops (6 page)

We were out on foot – me and my dog – and we see this car go by. It was a four-way stop and this car just goes right through the intersection. I was going to go stop that car but then this other car behind it goes rippin’ right through the intersection as I’m getting in to my car to go and stop the first car. So this other officer tells me to go stop the second car, which had a white male driver and a black male passenger.

As I go by this street, I see ‘em but I didn’t have time to stop, so I had to go one block over and come around and now I’m on a one-way street. By this point, when I pull up, the passenger’s gone and the driver is out of the car – I’ve got my lights on – and he’s at the trunk of the car.

So I get on my PA and I’m like, ‘Yo, man, get back into your car.’

Then suddenly he takes off running down the street. I didn’t get a chance to run the car to see if it was stolen or anything like that because I’m in my car and I’m driving down the street after him.

We get down the block and I guess he must have thought that he could dip in behind a church but it’s all fenced, so he stops there and I tell this guy, ‘Don’t you fuckin’ move or I’m going to send in the dog.’

Well, he kind of like… looks at me. I’m getting the dog out and I’ve got him by his collar when all of a sudden this guy starts
running again. I’m running down the street with the dog and now he’s getting back into his car. So I let the dog go and the dog is charging after him and he’s looking back and he’s screaming, ‘AAAARRGGHHH!’

He gets the door open, jumps in and slams the door shut, so the dog doesn’t get him. As I run up, he’s got the key in the ignition and he’s starting to turn over the car. I hope that he didn’t lock it and I swing the door open – he’s putting it in gear at this point – and I get him right before he gets it out of park and drives away.

And I’m like, ‘Raider, come!’

Raider was my dogs name; or street name, ‘Killer’. I call him Raider because I’m a big Oakland Raiders fan. His name was originally ‘Chico’ when I got him but half the population in the city was Hispanic, so I didn’t want to be yellin’, ‘Chico, come!’ like that, and the next thing you know there’re racial discrimination complaints or some shit like that. So I changed his name to Raider.

So anyway, as I’m pulling him out the car, the door’s open and Raider comes rippin’ around the front of the car, underneath the door – because he was so small – and gets the guy right in the calf. Beautiful! Beautiful bite.

So the guy’s like, ‘AAAAARRRRGGGHHH!’

I throw him to the ground and I kind of got saved tremendously because he ended up having nine warrants, because other than him running, I didn’t have anything.

The K-9’s in New Jersey, the way they fell in the force continuum was, if I could spray you, I could bite you. If I could hit you with my baton, I could spray you, I could bite you. But at the
same time you had to weigh it out because pepper-spray lasts a few hours – a day maybe – but bites and scars last forever.

But this guy didn’t fit the profile, so to speak, of the city. He was a white guy with a black male passenger, so the chances are – and as I found out were correct – number one, he was there to buy drugs and number two, he had nine warrants.

Now, he’s got this tattoo on his calf. He leans over and he goes, ‘Yo man, you fucked up my tattoo!’

And I just started laughin’. I was like, ‘Well, you should have “Raider was here” tattooed on your leg now, as your conversation piece. And then you can say that you got bit by a Camden K-9.’

But this guy didn’t care about the warrants. He didn’t care that he just got bit by a K-9. His whole thing was, ‘Wow! You just fucked up my tattoo.’

People hate you in the projects in Baltimore. And the people who do like you are never going to say anything – that’s dangerous for them.

People yell, ‘Five-O’, or they whistle. People stare at you; they hate you. But I have to tell you, my whole career I have been carrying a gun and people might not look at you, they might move away from you, they might give you an evil look or something. You could walk down the street and the reaction was pretty much the same; unless someone was running from you, you’d just get hard stares. Very few people would smile or talk or anything else. But being a K-9 cop, you got that dog out of the car and people were running! Like, running away from you. Crossing to the other side of the street to get away from you. In those neighbourhoods,
people feared the dogs. People would run up onto their porches and then they still wouldn’t be far enough away and then they’d run into their house to get away from you.

My opinion is, that the concept was that they know you can’t just walk down the street and shoot them. They’re very aware of the fact that we can’t just start taking people randomly off the street by shooting them but they’re not exactly sure what you can do with that dog, and when, and what the circumstances have to be.

I think part of that is cultural – with the race riots and dogs being used – people grew up seeing that and they were taught to be afraid of the dogs. And then in other respects, I think with the ‘use of force’ continuum, they weren’t really sure when you could use the dog. So rather than stick around and find out, they would literally vacate the streets. And I’m walking down the street everyday with a gun on my hip and people aren’t running away from me. But you get a dog out of the car and walk that dog down the street and people are just losing their minds. It’s hysterical.

I worked downtown sometimes – when we had special events – and people would let their kids come up and grab my attack-trained German Shepherd. Who in their right mind thinks that that is a good idea?

People would sometimes say, ‘Can I pet your dog?’

And I’d say, ‘No, you can’t. He’s a working dog.’ But they would do it anyway.

I mean, seriously, what part of ‘attack-trained German Shepherd’ makes you want to throw your hand in its face?

A
lmost all of the officers that I spoke to for this book were total strangers to me; only very, very few had I met before. For this reason, it was important to gain their trust and to ‘warm them up’, so to speak. Asking them to simply start talking about their experiences without any kind of lead-in could risk officers becoming closed and would certainly make it harder to get the best out of our meeting. For this reason I would often start a conversation with a light-hearted subject to get the conversation going. Death, I found, was a great subject to get the antidotes and hilarity flowing and conversations would more often than not, start like this: ‘So, got any good death stories?’

As odd – and perhaps awful – as it sounds, police officers, for the most part (but not always), find talking about their experiences to do with dead bodies an easy subject to open up about. No matter where a cop works, death will always be part of the job – natural deaths, vehicle accidents, homicides, suicides, bones in the woods, decomposed, maggot infested bodies – and usually a cop will always have a story
(or many) to tell about death. So for this reason it was always a great way to break the ice.

Officers would almost relish trying to shock me with their stories about the rotten body found in the attic or remembering the very first time that their department sent them on a death call. For many officers, it would be the first time in their lives that they saw a dead person and that’s something you don’t forget, particularly if the brains are dripping off the ceiling and the people around you are expecting you to act like it’s the most normal thing in the world.

For most people, there is nothing normal about seeing a dead body, so the very fact that death is an almost daily part of a police officer’s life – part of their actual ‘job’ – makes it perhaps understandable that they want to tell you about it, if only to help them comprehend it themselves, talking about it and sharing the experience being a way of coping. Certainly, there is something peculiar about listening to a person recalling a truly horrific scene of death, whilst they rock back in laughter; but when something like that becomes ‘ordinary’ and ‘routine’, it can do strange things to a person. Not all officers were laughing though – some found it distressing or were sombre – they just had their own ways of dealing with it.

The work is kind of surreal. I thought that death was the one thing that would bother me when I came onto the department. I didn’t know how I would deal with dead people. I’d only seen one dead person before in my life; it was in a coffin at a viewing. And then after you get on the job, you see a dead person, you do your
thing and then go to lunch. You don’t even think twice about it.

My first dead body on the job was a guy in the Bronx. This guy, he was dead for so long that his body had turned completely black and was five times its normal size. It was the middle of summer, it was hot and this guy was completely bloated and he looked like an aborigine. He had straight white hair, but if you looked at him you would have thought that he was a black guy. I mean, the pictures in the house clearly indicated that he was a white guy but he had been dead for so long. God it was horrible.

It was fucking hot and I just had to sit on him until the fucking ME’s [Medical Examiner’s] office arrived, put him in a bag and popped him. Literally popped him. They put him in a body bag but they couldn’t move him the way he was … they fucking had to let the gas out. They fucking popped him with a poker to let the gas out so that he didn’t explode. It was really, really hot and that’s what happens. It’s like when a watermelon gets over ripe and this stuff inside starts to boil because it’s really freaking hot and this gas builds up and they explode and their seeds go flying all over the place.

Same thing happens to human bodies if the conditions are right. The gas just keeps building and building and the skin keeps stretching and stretching and then there could be a big explosion or there could be a little explosion.

I’ve seen dead bodies before. In fact some guy once died on my front lawn. He had a heart attack on his bicycle and died on
my front lawn. Other than that I had never seen anything gory, although they did take us to the morgue during our training at the police academy. It was so gross. The smell was worse than anything. There were even a couple of bodies that moved on their own and that kind of flipped everybody out. There was a woman – a crackhead – who died from a drug overdose and her body had been opened up in the morgue, you know? She looked like a lobster opened up there. But then her head moved – literally – from left to right on its own. Everybody freaked out.

We were like, ‘How did that happen? Oh my God she’s alive!’

It’s disgusting when you’re looking at her, because it’s this disgusting crack head. Imagine some druggie from the street – you know how bad they already look – but now they’re dead and they’re moving! Their parts are actually moving!

So, we got a dead body in the alley and we go over there. We’re in this alley and it’s full of garbage and we’re looking for this body. So, here we find it and there’s some guy laying on top of the dead guy and we’re like, ‘What are you doing?’

He’s having anal sex with this guy – this dead guy.

He goes, ‘He was my friend. We used to do this all the time.’ He says, ‘I thought he wouldn’t mind, one last time.’

And really, you’re just like…‘What?’

The only death that I’ve ever been on that bothered me was the death of a child and I’m not even sure what happened. I was the second or third unit to show up on a ‘child who is deceased’ call.
Any time that that happens, we have to go to it because people that are young just don’t die – so it automatically becomes sort of suspicious.

I remember walking up to the door of the house. You’re so used to seeing bags and stuff come out but they have little body bags for children. And I’d never really thought about that before. I remember the coroner, the investigator or whoever it was, bringing out this little body bag. I didn’t even see the child but just knowing that it was in this little tiny bag, I mean, that was probably one of the most horrible things I have ever seen. And I don’t even know what happened on that call.

I spent all of probably fifteen minutes on that call and just that one moment of him walking out with that little tiny body bag… it just wasn’t right.

The worst call I’ve ever been on was a death notification. What sucks about working in a small community is that you kind of know everyone. You watch these kids grow up. You know who they are and you often know who the parents are as well.

We had two kids who got killed a number of years ago, right before their graduation. They were good kids, they were popular kids and I knew the parents. These kids were racing down the road, they’d been drinking on the beach and they’d deflated their car tires down so that they could get out of the sand. The thing is, they never re-inflated them. So now they’re driving down the road doing fifty to sixty miles an hour and they were fucking around. One kid went to pass the other one, pulled back into the
lane, over corrected and rolled out. Neither one was wearing a seatbelt. They both got ejected with the car on top of them.

I remember getting the call telling me to go to the family home to tell the parents that their son wasn’t coming home. And I’d known the father. I was field training that night with a new cop and I told him that we had the worst assignment you could ever get. I told the new cop to take the other kids upstairs so that I could talk to the parents.

I said, ‘Hi, can I come in?’

They said, ‘Sure. How are you?’

‘Can we sit down? I need to talk to you. There’s no easy way for me to say this but there’s been a car accident tonight. Your son was very badly hurt.’

They were like, ‘No, no. That can’t be right.’

‘It is and actually your son is dead.’

‘No, no. That can’t be right. I just talked to my son. That can’t be right.’

Then you have to watch the different stages of grief kick in.

They say, ‘You’ve got to be mistaken. It’s not my son.’

‘Yeah, it is and I’m very sorry.’

‘No, no. This is a training exercise for you guys, right?’

The reality of the situation kicks in and we spent the next, I don’t know, maybe three hours with them, trying to help them find a babysitter so that they could go to the funeral home.

Then they wanted to see the body and I’m saying, ‘Let the funeral home have until the morning. You don’t want to see your son like this. Let them at least clean him up a little bit and make
him presentable.’

I didn’t want them to see their son in the state he was in but they were adamant that they wanted to see him and get some closure.

We don’t have the physical danger that a city police officer does but the emotional danger of this job is twice as bad in a small community because you know everybody. You’re anonymous in a city like New York with ten million people because there are very remote odds that you are going to deal with somebody you know. Down here, everyone you deal with, you know.

I didn’t sleep well for a month. It’s awful. It’s an absolute finality. You’re telling a parent that their child is never going to come home again, yet they just saw them forty minutes ago. I watched this kid grow up. He was seventeen when he died and I had watched him since he was two years old. I watched the kid riding around the neighbourhood on a bike, I saw him doing sports, watched him walk to grade school, then high school. And now he’s dead, on a slab.

On the transit system, we usually average one death every week or two weeks. Sometimes it’s accidental but a lot of the time it’s suicide. Probably the goriest one that I was at was a fifteen-year-old kid who was on the wrong side of the commuter rail tracks. His mum was picking him up and the kid went across the tracks to meet her. I don’t know why he did it but he ended up trying to hop the fence. He didn’t make it; there was a train going about 130 miles an hour through the station and it just nailed
him. That was probably the goriest one I’ve been to. Half of his brain was in a different parking lot. It landed like a hundred yards away. People freaked out. When I got there the kids books were all neatly stacked up, so you just knew that somebody flipped out and took this kid’s schoolbooks and made them into a nice pile. That’s probably one of the grossest I’ve ever been to.

All the cops go to these calls. In fact, most of the guys
want
to go. Everybody wants to go see the dead body. It sounds disgusting but it’s part of the job. We’re morbid and we like seeing weird stuff that we don’t normally get to see. It sounds really bad but everybody will go to look, usually.

We got called once to an odour complaint. It was a house that sat just off State Street. It was a two or three storey home and some of the residents complained about this terrible smell that was coming from the house. I mean, I could stand on State Street and literally smell it and I knew right away that there was a dead guy there because you know what the smell of death is. Once you get that in your nose you never get it out again – you know it right away, anytime you smell it, driving down the street, you know what it is. Especially in the summer and this
was
summer.

So we went up to the person that called and she said, ‘Yeah, I’ve noticed this smell in the house.’

She lived up on the second floor and the smell was overpowering. I don’t know how someone can live like that.

She said, ‘I noticed it a couple of weeks ago and it wasn’t that bad but it’s been getting worse and worse.’ Then she says,
‘There’s also a stain up on my ceiling.’

And sure enough there’s a brown, reddish, dark coloured stain that was dripping right through her ceiling and down her wall. So we went up into the attic and it turns out that there’s a homeless guy there who had somehow gotten access to her attic and he’s laying there, dead. His body had basically liquefied. I remember that his eyes were gone and it was like a horror movie - there were maggots crawling out of his eye sockets. And I remember his shirt – he still had his clothes on – he was on his back and his shirt looked like it was moving and it was because his entire body was nothing but maggots. So all of his clothes were just, you know, moving!

I remember I had to help one of the body recovery people pick up his body and put him in a body bag. His scalp was still attached but as soon as we picked him up the scalp and everything fell right off. All his hair was laying there, just a pile of maggots. The smell up there was ungodly bad, just ungodly bad. I think I went outside and actually puked. And that’s what the stain was, leaking through her ceiling – it was his body. His body juices were leaking through her ceiling. They all freaked when they found out.

I can’t believe no one had smelt that guy before. And there was virtually nothing left of him, so we never found out what had actually killed him. I’m sure it was probably natural causes – he was a homeless guy, there were beer cans all around him up in the attic – but he had been dead for weeks and it was hot. It was probably ninety-something degrees up in that attic. It was nasty.