P.O. Lee McLean

Sometimes it's monitoring the radio calls to sector cars for potential backup need. Sometimes it's volunteering for picking up after other units are called away for more immediate priorities. On this particular 2-10 p.m. tour, the 113 Pct. team of Bob Weber, Lee McLean, and Mike Mazzella in Jamaica starts off by loading a prisoner into their van for the drive down to Central Booking on Queens Boulevard. It isn't their collar, just their task.

These three officers have been together for the better part of five years. As a group, they have some 30 years of experience operating out of the Baisley Boulevard station house, so there aren't too many stores, homes, or fire hydrants in the central Queens area unfamiliar to them.

	Officers Weber (left) and Mazzella pat down a suspected drug dealer.

The quiet, 40-year-old Weber is the senior man, having graduated from the Academy in 1986 and having mustered out of the 113 since 1988. Both McLean, 37, and Mazzella, 31, have been with the command since leaving the Academy in 1994. They don't hold Weber's seniority against him; in fact, without it they would probably be without wisecracks. "Old Grumpy Smurf," is how McLean insists on referring to his partner, whose blank stare through the windshield makes it clear that he has learned to tolerate such onslaughts with the humor he supposedly doesn't possess.

McLean, a native of the other Jamaica in the Caribbean who now lives in Rosedale, is just as casual with the cuffed prisoner in the back of the van. "What's the trouble this time?" he asks through his rearview mirror of the 16-year-old he has bagged in the past for street dealing.

The teenager mumbles a couple of times before admitting he is facing attempted murder charges stemming from gunplay over a nine-pound cache of marijuana. His story is that he was only trying to protect his 20-year-old brother, who was shot by the supplier and who had to be treated for knee wounds. To underline his point, he sees Jamaica Hospital passing by the window and shouts: "That's where I had to take my brother last night! Ask them who was hurt and who wasn't!"

McLean and the others won't have to ask. Once they have dropped the suspect off at Central Booking, he ceases to be their problem. On the other hand, the teenager is far too typical a youth in this neighborhood where shootings over drug deals (immediately followed by shootings for settling domestic disputes) have become the most common felonies. Weber measures it this way:

"You're usually talking to single mothers because the fathers have long gone. First, you warn the mothers their son is keeping bad company, and they're grateful for your concern. Then you get to stage two, where the kid has actually done something, and the mother goes into complete denial. She may or may not come around to seeing reality, but even if she does, the kid doesn't get any better. He gets jammed up in something serious, goes away. Then the same mother who couldn't thank you enough for warning her about the son really hates you."

Both Mazzella and Weber recall one especially bitter example of that progression. "We were wrong about one thing," Weber says. "We warned the mother her son was going to get himself killed dealing with the people he was. Same thing —thank you, then denial. We were wrong because it wasn't the kid who got killed, it was his brother for being on the edges of the scene. The mother hated us for that."

Certainly, the 113 has one of the highest incidences of shootings in the city. McLean needs to point no further than to Baisley Pond Park to demonstrate that. "A few years ago, they had a basketball game there," he says, "and one of the teams got so pissed off with the calls, they shot the ref. A couple of years go by, they decide to hold a game to honor the ref's memory. Before it was over, eight more people were shot."

His own worst moment on the job? McLean doesn't have to think twice. "Christmas 1996," he says. "Guy calls, warns he's got guns and is gonna start shooting. Whatever happened, we got to the block where he is, but not the exact address. So my partner and I start walking down the street seeing what's to see. Suddenly, a door pops open and this guy's blazing away with two guns. I go diving behind a parked car, and back and forth we go. We hit him three times but he survived. In fact, a little bit afterward he fractured the skull of another cop with a pipe." "Suicide by cop," Mazzella nods.

"One of the other things they don't pay us for," Weber gets in.

You don't have to dig deep to get a reading on the trio's greatest dissatisfaction with the job. "The double zeros," Mazzella says, referring to the failure of the last contracts to win significant raises. "They ask me what are the top three things I expect from the next contract, and my answer is money first, money second, and money third."

McLean couldn't agree more. "I'm not married, so that puts me up on cops with big families right there. And I also love carpentry. I worked at that for eight years. But the fact of the matter is, I've got to moonlight as a carpenter as much as I can because of what I'm not earning on the job." He has no doubts about one of the causes of the economic problem. "If I hadn’t been a cop, I might have loved Giuliani as a mayor. But he turned on us. He needed us when he was running, then as soon as he got into City Hall, he didn't want to know about cops. Politicians have short memories."

Police Plaza hypocrisy also rates a mention. "A few years ago, we had a number of cops committing suicide. So the Department gets this great idea of sending this video home to everyone, with the commissioner and other officials looking real sincere about telling us how important family values were and how we should stay home every minute we could when we weren't on the job. Right! Except for that other job you got to take to meet the bills and the hours your wife has to put in somewhere for the rent or mortgage or something. You wonder what kind of world they live in."

A fierce electric storm hits halfway through the tour, sending skittish house burglar alarms into panic and knocking out the power for several blocks around Rockaway Boulevard. For about half an hour, the three have to join sector cars in making sure that none of the alarms was sparked by more than lightning. The good news is that the rain stops almost as quickly as it began. The bad news is that they are then drafted into traffic detail when the signal lights at the dangerous intersection of Rockaway Boulevard, Sutphin Boulevard and 150th Street blink off. For the better part of an hour, they wave and halt until Con Edison finally appears on the scene.

Throughout the tour, the cops have to keep scattering a band of young dealers who have come to call a grocery at the corner of Foch Boulevard and 147th Street home. They have also come to call it a memorial — a collection of empty whiskey bottles and candles on the sidewalk commemorating the shooting death of the brother of the leader of the gang. The leader, a 21-year-old named Charlie already carrying the weight of too many french fries and too many hours on the street, barely moves along at the repeated order. "He's still annoyed about that collapse," McLean says, pointing out a building a block away that suddenly came down on its own a week earlier. "He told me he was sorry he wasn't under it because then he would have been able to sue somebody. Figure that one out." Near the end of the tour, Weber proposes one last pass to see how many inches Charlie has progressed up the block since last seen. Along the way, the van goes by some beautifully kept homes in a section that, at one time or another, housed the likes of Babe Ruth, Count Basie, and James Brown. "It's like everywhere else," he says. "Most of the neighborhood is hard-working people who go to work, come home, close the door and that's all we see of them except for community meetings. Then you get people like Charlie you can watch grow up in the streets until they're old enough for the system. It can get depressing —the predictability of it all."

Have they noticed any difference in the public attitude toward cops since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks? Weber and Mazzella agree that the loss of police lives and the Department's conspicuous presence in the recovery effort at Ground Zero brought out "more respect" for a uniform. They also believe that the greater public sympathy helped to brake a Department demoralization that has been under way for some time. "Obviously, the contract is the biggest part of that," says McLean. "But then you have all the little internal command issues that aggravate the situation. The main thing, though, is that 9/11 can't go on covering up everything forever."

Which is something that can't be said of Fat Charlie. As soon as he sees the van returning, the young dealer ducks behind a parked car. Then, taking advantage of the minute needed for a U-turn, he hurries into his favorite grocery store. By the time the officers are in his face in front of the store, he has already gotten rid of whatever he has to get rid of inside. Even then, there shouldn't be a problem since the grocery boasts four video surveillance cameras for catching exactly where Charlie disposed of his baggage. But the grocer, either in on Charlie's dealing or intimidated by the street gang, refuses to let the cops rewind the tapes without a warrant. Charlie saunters off — until stopped again an hour or a day later.

"You get him off the corner, he comes back to the corner," McLean says, shaking his head. "You put him in the system, he comes out of the system. Sometimes you get to thinking you're the one in the system."

— Donald Dewey's latest book is The New Biographical History of Baseball (Triumph).