New York City is simply too big. I have lived in it for too long to hate it, but I know it too well to love it. I am still a part of it, yet I feel removed, like a broken jockey who grooms horses. I earn my living caring for it, but I feel helpless because I know that I can’t train it, or ride it, or make it win.
DENNIS SMITH, REPORT FROM ENGINE CO. 82 (1972)
OFFICER Wilton Sekzer, a broad, mustachioed man, about five feet ten, with jowly cheeks and rheumy hazel eyes, was in the living room of his apartment in Sunnyside, Queens, when the lights went out. On the way into the kitchen to check his fuse box, he peeked out the window. The whole block was dark. Sekzer ran up three flights and swung open the metal door to his roof. The whole neighborhood was dark. He looked to the west, across the East River, to Manhattan. The familiar shapes of the world’s most famous skyline all were blotted out by darkness. “Holy shit,” Sekzer muttered to himself. “There’s no lights on anywhere.” Minutes later he was in his car and heading for work.
Sekzer’s command, the Eighty-third Precinct in the bowels of Bushwick, Brooklyn, was exactly 5.3 miles away from the quiet, cheerful streets of Sunnyside. Driving through the blackness, the heavy air pushing through the open windows of his gold Chrysler Cordova, he remembered where he had been twelve years earlier, the last time New York was blacked out: the Mekong Delta, as a twenty-one-year-old helicopter door gunner. Now he was well into his thirties and married, with a boy of seven.
The Victorian-era station house of the Eighty-third Precinct was surrounded by buckling tenements and bodegas, its red- and yellow-brick façade buried beneath layers of grime. It was a beautiful building, though, one that recalled a distant era when constables patrolled New York’s neighborhoods on horseback The station house even
bore its original City of Brooklyn seal. Turreted, with a corner tower and crenellated parapets, it looked almost like a medieval castle in miniature. Adjacent to it was a smaller building with big, rickety barn doors and a hayloft, the stable that once housed the police horses and now housed the commanding officer’s car. A few doors down, on the corner, was the B&G, a seedy bar where the cops of the Eight-Three would get drunk and swap stories.
Sekzer had been sent to the Eighty-third Precinct from Emergency Services in the summer of ’75, when the city’s fiscal crisis forced the Police Department to lay off five thousand officers. Sekzer had only narrowly escaped himself. The list of “indefinitely furloughed” officers had clanked over the teletype machine, after a cacophony of bells indicating that an urgent message from the commissioner was forthcoming. Sekzer’s captain proceeded to read all five thousand names in alphabetical order. The layoffs were based strictly on seniority. Most of Sekzer’s classmates from the academy were sacked, but he was saved by his eighteen months of military service, which were considered time on the job. He was reassigned, though, as were most cops working in specialty crime divisions like Emergency Services. Down five thousand men at a time of soaring crime, the city’s depleted precincts were going to need all the beat cops the department could muster.
Sekzer walked up the slate steps of the Eighty-third Precinct and checked in with the desk officer, who was still waiting for a call back from police headquarters about whether off-duty cops were going to be activated. Sekzer went down to the basement to the “lounge,” a couple of ratty sofas and a silent black-and-white TV set, to kill time. When he came back upstairs a few minutes later, the word had come down: All active officers were to report for duty. Sekzer was officially on the clock. The desk officer told him to stay loose; he might be going over to Manhattan to “protect the big money.”
A few minutes later the owner of a big furniture store in Bushwick burst through the station house doors in a rage. “What the fuck
is going on? They’re looting my business on Broadway, and you motherfuckers are standing here?”
“The duty captain walks up right behind him,” Sekzer says. “This guy is screaming and screaming, and I don’t blame him. And the captain says, ‘All right, everybody in four-man cars. Go forth and do good.’”
The Eighty-third Precinct was not exactly a desirable assignment in 1977. The prior year it had confronted more criminal activity than any other precinct in central Brooklyn. Many truck drivers insisted on police escorts when making deliveries in the neighborhood. Some store owners had taken to wearing firearms on their hips. One block, Gates between Broadway and Bushwick, was so bad that two radio cars were required to respond to any call there. Three cops would enter the building in question while the remaining officer would stay behind to protect the squad cars.
One cop remembers being transferred from the Eight-Three into Manhattan in the 1980s. His new partner told him he had unholstered his gun six times in ten years. “Six times?” he replied, incredulous. “That was a good hour in Bushwick.”
In 1977 the Eight-Three was predominantly white. The neighborhood it policed was overwhelmingly black and Hispanic, with a narrow strip of Italians along its western edge. “Our job was about arresting minorities,” says one veteran of the Eight-Three. “That’s what it was about.”
About 130 officers called the Eighty-third Precinct home, meaning that at any given moment there were maybe 34 on duty, not nearly enough to police this crime-infested area of roughly 100,000 people. Working regular eight-hour shifts for five-day stretches was unheard of. There were simply too many people to arrest. “If you weren’t doing at least a hundred twenty-five hours of overtime a month, don’t you dare call yourself a collar man,” says Sekzer. “You are not a collar man.”
It didn’t help that the fiscal crisis had virtually eliminated Police
Department support staff. It took anywhere from ten to fourteen hours for a cop to process a single perp. An officer first had to take his prisoner back to the precinct for fingerprinting, which had to be done by a detective. After filling out the arrest paperwork, he’d wait for a paddy wagon to take him and his prisoner to Brooklyn headquarters, where he’d give the fingerprints—and a buck for “expeditious service”—to another detective, who would hand them off to a clerk for processing. Mug shots were taken. Now it was off to the courthouse in downtown Brooklyn. While the prisoner was locked up downstairs, the arresting officer was up on the second floor at a bank of manual typewriters, most of which were broken or missing keys. He’d type out the official complaint with the help of the New York State Penal Code booklet attached to the typewriter. Finally, he took his paperwork down to the lounge and waited for the arraignment.
The Eight-Three’s reputation was well established within the department. When the precinct’s commanding officer first addressed his men a couple of years earlier, he had told them that his superiors described the precinct as a cross between a foreign legion outpost and a leper colony.
Rookies were taught a few important lessons when they reported for duty at the Eight-Three. Don’t walk too close to the buildings (someone might drop a brick on you). Don’t let neighborhood kids wear your hat (lice). Always check the earpiece on call boxes before using it (dog shit).