"You here to make us look bad?" one of the officers asked me, while I took pictures.
"When do we made you look bad?" I asked.
"Every day," he said, smiling. We all stood around, shifting our weight from foot to foot.
"It's funny you say that," I said, "a lot of reporters and photographers, and, when I think about it, editors too, are ex-PD."
"Really?" his partner asked.
"Yeah. But maybe that's it," I said, thinking out loud. "Do you know a cop who doesn't complain about the job?"
"That's different," the second one said. "You can criticize the department all you want. They're a bunch of fucking assholes. But you go after the cops. You never go after a fellow cop."
Another pause.
"Like all that news about how many shots were fired," he said.
"You mean Sean Bell?" I asked.
"Yeah, Bell. Or that other guy. Before. You know," he turned to his partner.
"Diallo," I said.
"Right. Him. If I'm shooting at a guy, and ricochets are bouncing back and I think I'm getting shot at, I'm going to shoot everything. Fifteen bullets, that's my whole clip. Four cops, four guns, shooting. Fifty shots means that they didn't shoot their whole clips. But that's all we hear about. Fifty shots, fifty shots."
"How long does it take to shoot all fifteen bullets? Four seconds?" I asked.
"Less," he said.
A Crime Scene Unit detective came out of the van and walked over to us. The officers left.
"So this was what, a block party?" I asked.
"Seems so," he said, nudging some plastic wrappers with his foot.
We discussed the scene, and how it compared to others. I asked if he'd heard about the shooting on East 93rd Street the weekend before.
"Yeah, I heard about it. Glad I didn't have that one," he said. I mentioned that CSU didn't arrive there until after 2:00 p.m.
"We have three teams at night," he said. "You get a shooting in the Bronx, one in Queens, one in Harlem, all before nine. The rest just add up, and we haven't got the people to match it. But that's the motto these days. Do more with less. Tell me how this makes sense. Six teams during the day, but three at night when the murder happens."
I asked a question I'd been mulling since taking this overnight position and hearing gloomy stories of the depth of this recession. Were there people in the department preparing for a crime wave?
"Probably not," he answered. "Everybody's just focused on today. Get your CompStat numbers looking good. Look good yourself. That's why I don't ever want to take that sergeant's exam. Drink the Kool-Aid."
He went on to say that most of the commanding officers he saw didn't seem to have ever done a day of patrol work. "I like patrol," he said. "They did it once, but they forgot."
"When the white shirts show up at a crime scene they try to tell us how to do our jobs," the detective went on. "'Oh look, you got a shell casing over here, better take of that.' Thank you, but I do things in order. But they don't care. They come marching through evidence like they're important, wanting to look sharp. Especially if the press are here," he said.
"I've had white shirts show up at a scene, see the photographers, and tell us to put more evidence markers down on the street, so it looks like we're really working this one hard or something. So we do that. And you take your pictures. Then we put the markers back and properly mark the scene and take our own photos. But it happens that when the case goes to court, a defense attorney will show the newspaper pictures don't match our pictures, and ask who tampered with the crime scene? And I'm on the stand, and all I can do is testify that our photos are the right ones."
(Photo: Officers at the scene where Vance Rock and Darrian Delk were shot Saturday night. By Zachary Goelman)
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