doing some more cop anthropology

would it surprise you to learn that this guy has a psychotic hatred of the Black Panthers and the Puerto Rican independence movement

hmm

this guy has some fascinatingly weird politics. this is how he writes about getting transferred out of the 81st precinct to SWAT

he also talks about getting beaten with nightsticks by his colleagues because he arrested a black man instead of killing him, but like, he just kind of shrugs that off

he says he was never himself corrupt but the entire precinct pushed you to go along with corruption and threatened you about ever snitching, but again is like, yeah it’s better now probably I guess

what’s fascinating is that this guy probably should have been a firefighter - by his telling he gets into ESU for the heavy rescue stuff rather than the tactical side - he wants to climb up bridges and construction cranes to stop people jumping off and such

he sees all of the evil shit that cops do and is indifferent to it because he has decided this is how he’s going to help people and it’s just a vehicle to get him there

he went to Vietnam and hated it but he hates antiwar protestors more, he hates corrupt and racist cops but he hates the Black Panthers more, and so on and so on. I don’t get this guy

fun side note: in the NYPD, having a friendly superior who can get you the assignment you want, or out of trouble, and so on, is or was called having a ‘rabbi’. interesting!

oh by the way, this guy made detective because while he was still in the academy he agreed to spy on the left and they promoted him to detective when he graduated. he also says he refused to do some things on ethical grounds and they got very mad at him for that

his ethics seem to be entirely personal rather than structural. so long as he himself isn’t corrupt or brutal, the corruption or brutality of others does not concern him, but he’s still convinced that he is doing good and the NYPD is the best police department in the world

he dismissively quotes one cop telling him ESU are ‘firemen with guns’ but that’s all the work he seems to actually enjoy or be proud of - right now he’s extracting an injured electrical worker from a manhole lined in broken live wires and he’s absolutely thriving on it

BRO JUST BE A FIREFIGHTER

He says the Brooklyn Bridge is the most common for suicide attempts, and ascribes this to the aesthetic fitting that kind of a grand gesture

That and it apparently being very easy to climb out onto

He has climbed the Brooklyn Bridge 50 times. He likes the view better than the Verrazano Narrows, the one they train on most often, because that’s higher and longer and ‘gives more of a feeling of being out in the wild country’

This is what he’s here for. He very much likes being on Truck 1, Lower Manhattan, ‘the Hollywood truck’

If you ever try to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, it may edify you to know that you have personally caused a pissing match between ESU Truck 1, in Manhattan, and Truck 8, in Brooklyn, because they both want you to be their problem

Final Destination shit

The only thing that bothers him about bridge rescues is drivers yelling for them to jump because they’re holding up traffic, which is apparently every time

Most jumpers around Christmas

He describes his technique for talking people down as just talking to them until they get bored. Another guy puts on an Irish accent

He describes a guy who climbed up the side of the George Washington bridge and when he had nagged him enough that he stopped wanting to kill himself, the guy looks around like, ‘how the fuck did I get all the way up here, how am I even going to get down’

Oh this one sucks. He climbs up the Williamsburg Bridge after a guy, successfully grabs him and brings him back down. A week later the guy climbs up again and jumps

He talks about how all the jumpers just kind of blend together, how they almost never find out anything else about them or their lives or how they got there or what they do afterwards. I’m still not sure why he needs to be a cop to do this

Well, that’s his answer

He says some cops are no better than the worst people they arrested, and some are worse than that, and they should get all the jail time they deserve

???

yeah?

He saves a guy from an apartment fire and is almost killed by his neckwear. Safety first, man

I mean, that’s just trauma, right, but also, WHY ARE YOU A COP

Somebody calls in a guy hanging off the roof of a ten-story Con Edison generator building. The only way to get up there is to free-climb a ladder up the side. So he does that and scares the shit out of an electric worker who is just sitting up there having lunch

lmao the one thing be absolutely hates is elevators

this middle paragraph is my favourite sentence I’ve read this year

why are you a cop why are you a cop why are you a cop

he hates elevators so much man

they basically try everything before they try walking out on the top of the elevator and popping the trapdoor, because the top is always covered in grease and oil and shit and you can fall off really easily

the only bad thing he has to say about the fire department is that they would just demolish the elevator doors in ten minutes while the cops would spend an hour painstakingly trying to dismantle shit

little bitchy there

ah and now we’re back to racism

freedom fighters, you see

he is burning out. this hits him when he starts his shift, the first call is a guy jumping under a train, and his response is that he doesn’t want to have to change uniforms that early, because when they jack up the train you always get intestines sprayed on you

he says he has placed his love of his job over his family and he still regrets it

Jesus dude no wonder you’re traumatised