Beat Cop to Top Cop: A Tale of Three Cities

1. Getting on the Job

1 GettingontheJob Jesus, Mary, and holy St. Joseph, he wants to be a cop. —CAT H ER I N E T I MON EY S ometimes, when a chief of police or other high-ranking police official is interviewed regarding his career, he will say that he always wanted to be a police officer. Not me. I never gave much thought to becoming a cop. In fact, I was not very fond of police officers while I was growing up in Washington Heights, a working-class neighborhood in northern Manhattan. Police officers, like parents or teachers, told you all the things you couldn’t do. Police officers and their authority were resented and to be avoided. However, just as I was getting ready to graduate from Cardinal Hayes High School in the summer of 1967, one of my childhood friends, Brian Nicholson, convinced me and about six other guys to take the police officer exam one Saturday morning. Back then, the NYPD gave “walkin ” exams; no prefiling was required. You just walked into a local high school, filled out some papers, took the exam, and went home. After partying the night before (typical Friday night partying back then was drinking beer in Highbridge Park, hopefully out of sight of the local police), we all got up early and took the downtown A train to lower Manhattan to the exam site. After a few hours, with the exam complete, we took the uptown A train back to Washington Heights and 10 New yORk CI T y bragged to the rest of our friends that we were all going to become cops! One minor detail remained, however: Did we pass the exam? No problem. We could just tune in to WOR AM radio on Saturday night when an announcer would read out the “official answer key” to the various civil-service exams that had been administered earlier in the day. That afternoon I had announced to my mother that I had taken the police officer exam and was going to be a cop. First, she looked at me in disbelief, then bewilderment, then amusement, then finally with maternal support. We sat at the kitchen table that night and listened to the announcer read off the answers in an unemotional, matter-of-fact manner: (1) a, (5) c, (17) d, (89) b, and so on. Before I knew it, all of the one hundred answers had been given. I needed to score a 75 to pass. I added up the score as my mother watched over my shoulder. Yep, I passed! I scored a 76, which was more reflective of the Friday night beer drinking and lack of sleep that it was of my mental acumen. Or so I convinced myself. My father had passed away a year before, but I am sure he would have been proud of his son becoming a New York City police officer. A month after I graduated from high school, my mother and sister, Marie, moved back to Ireland. We had come to the United States in 1961, but my mother never adjusted to the fast pace of New York City, even though we had grown up in Dublin, not exactly farmers. My mother had begged my younger brother, Ciaran, and me to return with her, but he and I were having none of that. While I had just graduated high school, Ciaran was only beginning his junior year at Cardinal Hayes High School. So he and I stayed together in the same apartment, and I worked numerous jobs while he attended high school and worked after school in a butcher shop. Things were just fine, if precarious. Three months after graduating high school, I entered the NYPD as a police trainee, since I was not twenty-one yet, the required age to be a full-fledged police officer. Police trainees wore gray uniforms and did clerical and administrative work throughout the seventy-six police precincts and at other administrative offices, including police headquarters. But these were not nine-to-five jobs. Just like regular GeTTING ON The JOb 11 police officers, we worked “around the clock”—one week of 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., followed by a week of 4:00 p.m. to midnight, and then a week of midnight to 8:00 a.m. This shift work was actually beneficial to me since it allowed me to work...