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For the last three weeks I’ve been writing about old times in the Bronx until I’ve almost come to be a ‘laudator temporis acti’, that is, one living in the past, which is a bad thing to be, as I learned in my Latin class in school. (I wish I’d learned it better; it took me an hour to dredge it up and get it right. But I had the bit in my teeth and couldn’t let go).
Actually today I’ll be continuing as before, except for the fact that I’m switching from my neighborhood past to my police past. Today I have the story of a wild ride taken by an off-duty cop in Queens some years ago, which I see by my papers I reported on. At the end there’s a twist to it that still makes me shake my head when I recall it, But that comes later. The story itself goes as follows:
One August day at about noon, a young woman walking on 73rd Avenue, a few blocks from the 107th Pct. station house on 73rd, had her shoulder bag snatched by a black man who escaped in a car that had been waiting for him. An easy score, except for the fact that an off-duty cop from a Brooklyn precinct was driving by in a Cadillac and saw it all. He made an immediate U-turn and started after the two robbers as they turned south at high speed and crashed through stop signs and red lights with Officer Kenny in hot pursuit. He caught up to them a few blocks away, pulling abreast of them on their passenger side. That was when he saw the purse snatcher, the passenger, leaning out the side window aiming a rifle at him.
His answer to this was to fire a shot left-handed at the pair from his pistol, which drove the rifleman down in his seat, but caused Kenny to fall behind in the chase. Even so he closed the distance to ten feet or so and blasted at them some more with his revolver. Again they extended the gap between the two cars and again he began to close it with the idea of ramming them. Just as he was about to overtake them, they made a sudden swerve left, forcing him to follow suit, but causing him to lose control and spin into a utility pole. Kenny still didn’t give up. He flagged down a civilian car and got the driver to take him to a nearby highway entrance, the bandits’ probable destination. He was too late however, and the chase was over.
Now it was wrap-up time. Kenny was brought back to the place where he’d abandoned his car and my investigation began. Luckily for him, the purse snatch victim had called 911 to report the crime and the chase, and even better had identified herself so she could be questioned. He was looking good, in other words. Otherwise the question I’d be asking might have been, “What’d you mean by drag racing through the streets of Queens firing a pistol in the air? " Explain yourself, Officer. You say someone got mugged? Where is she? How many men did you say were in the car? One of them had a rifle? How do you know? Where’d they go? You mean you don’t know?
That was the proper attitude for an investigator. Don’t take anything for granted. Just because it didn’t seem sensible for a cop to suddenly start car racing and shooting at citizens without having a reason for the same, didn’t mean that he might not have had a surprise brain lesion and lost control of his actions. You can never be too careful about these things.
None of this pertained to the present case. The cop had obviously acted properly and even beyond the call of duty. It looked like he deserved a citation. That was how I concluded my report that evening. The only question about him that had even a remote justification was that of his judgment in pushing on with a car chase which might have unnecessarily endangered innocent bystanders. But nobody got hurt, so maybe he knew what he was doing. I made that presumption in the report.
(In a similar case, involving several on-duty men, the Chief of Patrol had answered the report with a quotation. They should have “looked before they leaped” he said. Again, no one had been hurt, so I got ready to answer by saying “The proof of the pudding is in the eating” and besides “All’s well that ends well”, but decided against this in the end. I had thought of yet another cliché, something about discretion being the better part of valor or words to that effect).
Since shooting was involved a follow-up report had also to be written by another captain, supplementing mine. I saw it. Apparently this man’s nerves had collapsed under the strain. He had decided that an important question hadn’t been answered by me “What was this cop doing driving a Cadillac?” He had actually asked the man where he got it and who owned it. The cop, instead of telling him to go to hell, told him, I think, that it belonged to his aunt, or had belonged to his aunt, or in any case was legitimately in his possession and would not bring scandal down on the Police Dept.
There could hardly be a better illustration of the kind of paranoia that flourished in the P.D. in those days. In their panic over the political investigations and media inventions that were a feature of the times, the police brass had begun flailing out in all directions to convince the right people that their integrity was beyond reproach and they would go to any lengths to deal with corruption in the ranks. The sight of a cop driving a Cadillac brought fear to their hearts. So what if he’d wrecked it pursuing armed criminals. Couldn’t he have used a Ford instead? Well, at least one commanding officer was going to show that he had his priorities right and no murders or robberies in his shop were going to be broken up by no cops driving fancy cars. Belonged to their aunts, did they? We’ll see about that. Bring in the aunt maybe. Well maybe not. That might be going too far.
Headquarters agreed. It appeared that there were still one or two individuals there who retained their common sense. The Cadillac report, as I called it, was returned with a notice to the author that he was exceeding his authority in demanding this kind of personal information without any grounds for suspicion, and the report should be rewritten omitting the extraneous material. One for our side.
This story isn’t told to defame the reputation of the Police Dept. It’s told because it happened and because it goes to show that our public pronouncements that we were the world’s greatest cops were often more in the nature of whistling in the dark than of telling scientific truth. Things did improve, but after I left. There is no connection.
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