The typical NYPD career takes a well-trod course. You go to school, you get assigned to a random post somewhere in the five boroughs (unless you have friends higher up, in which case you get assigned wherever the hell you want), you do a few years there, then you make detective or take a civil service test and become a sergeant. You do that for a few years, then maybe take another civil service test and make lieutenant. (Some guys choose to not become a detective or a sarge, and they stay a “cop” cop for the full 20 years of the career.)

Soon after that, you retire as early as 40 years old and spend the rest of your life on a boat in Florida, or working for a private security firm if you get bored. That’s about it.

Oh, wait—there’s also the endless litany of traumas, frustrations, fights, arrests, dead bodies, vomiting junkies, piles of paperwork, Kafkaesque bureaucratic snags, and tons of laughing your ass off.

Over the next five days, real live NYPD cops are going to walk you through the stages of a New York cop’s life from start to finish. Please pay attention and be nice. They’re just as scared of you as you are of them. (OK, not really. They aren’t scared of you at all.)

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Illustration by Christy Karacas

Police academy is sort of like high school, EXCEPT there’s more guns.

NYPD recruits put up with petty indignities, like 50 lockers and ten showers for 75 people in the gym. You run around from class to class, get yelled at by instructors, cram for tests on stuff that you forget the minute you take them, and play pranks on other students. It doesn’t sound like it, but it’s pretty fun.

Academy lasts six to eight months, and then it’s Gun and Shield Day. They herd the graduating class to the basement, where a bored guy fishes a shield out of a shoe box, hands it to each new cop without looking up, and then calls the next name. After that it’s over to the academy range to receive and load your first NYPD gun. They could do with a little more pomp and circumstance, but whatever—everyone walks off that line thinking to himself, “Holy shit, I’m a cop!”

There are a few weeks of school left after that. The guys with “hooks” already know what precinct they’re going to, and everyone else sits and wonders. The NYPD is divided into eight patrol boroughs. Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn are divided into north and south, while the Bronx and Staten Island count as one each. Every patrol borough has its own quirks, and where you go first decides what kind of cop you’ll be.

Illustration by Christy Karacas

A COP’S LIFE: ACADEMY STORIES

Police Academy Was a Fucking Blast!

The academy was great. From day one, I was laughing my ass off.

Before I went in, I didn’t really know any cops so I had no idea what to expect. I was 25, so I was a little bit older. I’d been living in my car at one point, because I’d been married once before and got divorced. Times were tough. So I think I appreciated having a job and benefits and everything more than some others.

The general atmosphere was paramilitary. In the hallways, you do what everyone calls “playing the game.” You act super professional. When you get into a classroom and the doors are shut, things get a little more relaxed.

I went through there with a great group of cadets—a real cast of characters, from the most militant Marines to guys that didn’t really give a shit about anything. There was one kid who I never saw again after the academy. His father and grandfather were both cops, but he was kind of a sad sack. He ended up taking the brunt of a lot of jokes.

One time we were at the range doing this excercise where you have your gun at your side, draw fast, and use only one hand. It’s so if you get shot in the arm and can only use one hand, you know how. You get your elbow back, right up against your side. So this kid shoots his weapon and all of a sudden we hear him screaming, “Aaahhh!” We look over and this guy has shot a hole right through his tie. He looked down, saw a hole in it, and thought he’d shot himself. He fucking freaked out. We were all pissing ourselves. How the hell do you manage to blow a hole through your own tie at an indoor range with no wind? And if you do blow a hole through your tie, how the hell do you jump to the conclusion that you’ve shot yourself? Hilarious.

So this poor kid comes up to me one day at the academy and goes, “Hey, I gotta talk to you. You ever had a hemorrhoid?” And I actually had before, so I was like, “Yeah, and if you don’t take care of them properly it isn’t any fun.” I told him to do himself a favor, go to the store, and get some Preparation H. I also told him to be careful, because if it’s really bad, the Prep H will soften everything up and then it will pop and BOOM—hemorrhoid blood everywhere.

So a few days later, we go into gym and he’s taking his pants off to change, and he starts screaming again, just like at the range with the tie. I come running over like, “What’s the matter?” I look down and his underwear is just completely covered in blood. I started dying laughing. I had to take a step back and just consider the entire scene. I’m standing in this disgusting old locker room with mold everywhere. There’s guys walking around all over, there’s cocks everywhere. And I’m standing here, laughing at this guy with bloody underwear. I tell him to relax and that it’ll heal up.

A few days later, the guy comes up to me again and says it won’t stop bleeding. So I tell him to go to the goddamned doctor. He says, “Yeah, I better. My mother packs me extra pairs of underwear. I’m ruining like three pairs a day.” I’m already kind of laughing, but I’m like, “Well, what are you doing, just throwing out the dirty ones?” He goes, “No, I put them in my bag. I don’t want anyone here to find them in the trash.”

So then later we’re in class and I’m sitting behind him and I realize “Wait a minute. This kid has bloody underwear in his bag right now.” I had a brown paper bag that I had kept my lunch in. So I slide my foot over his bag and carefully pull it back to me. I open it up and start shuffling through his bag and there it is—a bloody pair of tighty-whities. I pick them up, put them in this empty lunch bag of mine, and tie it shut.

Next, I grab another guy’s backpack, slide it over, open it up, and stuff this little package of bloody underwear right in there. Luckily, I chose one of my buddies who still lived at home with his mother.
He calls me up that Sunday morning and the first thing he says is, “Are you fucking kidding me?!” I play it innocent: “What?” He tells me that his mother had come running in that morning holding a bloody pair of underwear, screaming, asking him if he needed to go to the hospital. Classic.

MIKE PAWLEWEICZ

All About the Boroughs

In the academy, I got to know the different reputations of all the city’s patrol boroughs. It’s like this…

Manhattan South: is called PBMS, which stands for Patrol Borough Manhattan South. The running joke is that PBMS really means, “Please Babysit My Son.” It’s derided as a borough full of “hook” boys, placed there by uncle inspectors and daddy chiefs. It’s a nice post if you want to study for sergeant, but it’s boring as hell if you spent your time in the academy dreaming of car chases and foot pursuits.

Manhattan North: My home borough. It’s considered a good mix—busy enough to be interesting, but not so bad that you’re wallowing in despair.

There’s still plenty of ghetto here, but gentrification and good police work have made this borough a lot safer. We did such a good job that we can no longer afford to live in the neighborhoods we helped to clean up!

Bronx: The Bronx can make a valid argument for being the busiest, most dangerous borough. Brooklyn logs more homicides, but there are precincts in both boroughs that will make cops raise their eyebrows if you tell them you work there. I believe that the best police officers come from the busiest precincts.

Queens: Aside from a handful of tough precincts, Queens is typically derided as soft suburbs. Now, all of my dealings with Queens cops have been positive. I’m just telling you how they’re generally perceived. Ask a Manhattan cop what a “Queens Marine” is. You’re guaranteed to get a laugh. (Just don’t ask a Queens guy!)

Staten Island: Like Queens, the perception is that S.I. cops are soft. Personally, I don’t know one cop from Staten Island. I do know that of the last few cops killed in the line of duty, several were from out there.

Brooklyn South: The one thing I know about Brooklyn South is that it ain’t Brooklyn North.

Brooklyn North: These cops are universally admired. Brooklyn North guys tend to stick together and back each other up, and are not going to be rattled easily.

I mean, come on—these guys had to create a special gun court just for all their gun cases!

STEVE HUNTER

A rookie cop is easy to spot: Everything is shiny and new. His clothes are pressed and neat (and everything still fits). He’s fresh-faced and eager to please: “The sarge wants five tags [summonses] today? Well, by God, I will give him six—I’ll probably make detective this way!” A rookie takes the late jobs, skips meals, and never stays out sick.

For a rookie, everything is new. They are really feeling, for the first time, what it is like to be a cop: The stares when they enter a location and the overt hostility of many people they’ve sworn to protect. Even their own friends sometimes regard them with suspicion, which they couch as lame jokes: “If I (insert semi-illegal behavior here), are you gonna lock me up?”

If, like many cops, a rookie grew up in a middle-class area and gets assigned to a less-than-middle-class area, he’ll experience a side of life that was heretofore hidden from him. Shootings, stabbings, dead bodies, and drunken family disputes… apartments so filthy and vermin-infested, it’ll make you dry heave… crackheads, junkies, whores, the mentally ill, drug dealers, and hustlers of every stripe. Welcome to the NYPD, rookie.

Rookies learn to do things like buy their pants a little bigger and their shirts a little looser so their gun fits in the waistband without too much of a bump. They also learn about the tedious parts of the job, like standing on a foot post at 1 AM on a cold winter’s night, when the only sound you can hear is the click of the traffic lights changing. Rookies go to large details, like New Year’s Eve or parades, and spend 80 percent of their time standing around and the rest getting yelled at by a succession of passing supervisors who feel the need to look useful.

New cops always get the same clichéd mottos thrown at them by older cops: “Hey kid, a good cop is never cold or hungry.” “Hey kid, always have an answer, good or bad.” “Hey kid, we don’t give up other cops.”

Rookies also learn how to speak to people: When to bully, when to cajole, and when it’s time to fight. And rookies definitely get into fights—they are often shocked to discover that lots of folks have no fucking problem with hitting a cop.

Rookies also get to see the rest of the criminal justice system: Judges and assistant district attorneys who are under the assumption that getting punched, kicked, and spit at are just parts of a cop’s job, and top brass who don’t support street cops when they come under fire from the public.

Rookies basically spend 90 percent of their time on the job taking in massive doses of heavy, heavy shit. Not to be a total bummer but the bitterness and the burnout starts here…

Illustration by Christy Karacas

A COP’S LIFE: ROOKIE STORIES

Meeting the Public

Strapping on Your Balls

Gross Out!

caked

At year five, a cop hits a massive milestone: top pay. All through the rookie years, every cop has told himself that life will get better once he reaches top pay. “I’ll be able to pay my bills once I reach top pay,” rookies repeat like a mantra. “Life will be all milk and honey once I reach top pay.”

At first, this seems true. The pay jump is fairly significant for year five, and for a few paychecks most guys feel like they’re doing great. Then reality sets in. They see that even at top pay they’re not making all that much money. For the first five years of the career they have put off a lot of stuff, and now it’s starting to show. They’re driving the same car they drove in the academy. A lot of cops want to start a family and buy a house by this point—you know, like grownups do. And guess what? It’s hard as fuck. Every cop eventually realizes that struggling for money is just part of being a cop.

If a cop is going to get promoted, that whole process begins in this stage of the career. Some guys sacrifice six months of their lives studying, and they get promoted to sergeant. Others have made good connections during their rookie time and get promoted to detective. After a promotion, everything is new again—it’s like rookie redux. But that soon wears off, and they realize: Same bullshit, different shield.

The cop learning curve, which is steep over the first few years of a career, slows down alarmingly at this point. A cop at this stage is the kind of cop he will be for the rest of his career. Even promotions won’t change that. A sergeant always gives preference to the cops who are most like he was at their age. If he was an active guy, he favors the gung-ho cops. After all, they do most of the work, and they should get something for it. If he was a zero, he’ll favor the young zeroes. After all, those guys are least likely to force him to make any type of decision. They probably won’t be involved in a shootout or anything that would end up in front of Internal Affairs.

The main thing about this stage, though, is that the excitement has worn off. A lot of cops start to feel like glorified civil servants at the whims of politicians. By this time, every cop has seen people’s lives and careers ruined for political gain. He’s seen fellow cops subjected to unjust discipline and miscarriages of justice.

Want me to sum up years five through ten with a good old cliché? No problem: You start out trying to change the world, but eventually the world just changes you.

Illustration by Christy Karacas

A COP’S LIFE: MID-CAREER STORIES

Armed to the Teeth

Tearjerkers

Bitter much? At this point, it’s all old hat. A veteran cop has seen the dead bodies, the mangled victims, and the filthy apartments a thousand times. He just wants to do his job and go home—and he knows the job like second nature now, too. He can set up the crime scene, get the witnesses together, bring the guy in off the ledge, and talk any perp into cuffs. In fact, at this point a cop knows the job better than many supervisors, some of whom were in elementary school when he was in the academy. The smart bosses use this knowledge and confer with their veteran officers. Vets have seniority, and their vacation picks and days off are usually honored. They might get the occasional asshole boss, but by year ten they know that the old saying, “This too shall pass,” applies to the NYPD more than any other job on earth.

Most veteran cops have a second gig somewhere. Maybe they do some carpentry, or a little mason work, or they install sprinkler systems. Whatever it is, they are likely to be more concerned with that on a day-to-day basis than with their NYPD career.

By year ten, most cops know where they’re going to be for the rest of their time on the force. With this knowledge comes freedom: If you aren’t trying to go anywhere, the bosses can’t hold anything over you. If you put your head down and do your job, you will steer clear of the brass—and that’s all a vet really wants.

One of the few things that can get still get a rise out of a vet is to start talking about the policymakers that control his life. Holy shit do they get mad. You should hear them talk about NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly. They call him Popeye and spend hours putting together jpegs of him in a sailor suit with a can of spinach. It sounds pretty comical, but deep down they’re really hurt by bosses like him. He’s forgotten what it’s like to be a cop in uniform, and the old guys hate that.

“The PD brass,” one vet told us, “is made up of yes men and political appointees. They could give a shit about the rest of us and it shows.”

Illustration by Christy Karacas

A COP’S LIFE: VETERAN’S STORIES

Been There, Done That

cop Birthing Babies and Busting Perps

This is it. The end of the road. The retiree buys a nice car, takes the family on a little vacation, then starts to focus on his second gig. Within a year all the memories of the bad things start to fade away: The petty annoyances, the pressures from both inside and outside the department, the harsh discipline, the holidays and family events spent chasing the radio instead of with loved ones. Suddenly, retirees remember only the camaraderie and the crazy things they saw and did with their partners and buddies.

A cop’s pension is 50 percent of his final average salary. The department takes your last three years on the job, averages those years’ pay and halves it. If you take the full 50-percent option, it goes on for the rest of your life. Your pension ends when you end.

There’s another pension option. It’s called the “death gamble.” If you die within five or six years of retiring, a big lump sum goes to your next of kin. That’s a good option for cops who’ve been behind a desk living on cheeseburgers and chocolate shakes for the last ten years of their career.

But cops don’t start collecting pension the day they retire. First they have the golden time known as “terminal leave.” For the first six months after retirement, you collect full salary. You get a grace period on the books, which would be well spent setting up a new source of full-time income.

Any retired cop still has friends on the force, so retirees are often stopping by the station house to shoot the shit, coming to cop parties, and hanging out in cop bars. But five years after retirement, a cop will find that all his old buddies are starting to retire, too. One day he’ll stop by the precinct to say hello and be like, “Who the hell are all these strangers in my house?”

A career as a cop is a weird thing. It’s a lot like childbirth—every second spent in it is a nightmare, but the second it’s over, you look back and see it as the greatest thing that ever happened to you. Ask any ex-cop how he likes retirement. He’ll say, “You know what? I kind of miss the job.”