ene Jackson would argue with people who think being a cop is the hardest job in the city. Then again, most people haven’t had his experience driving the #44 bus from Jamaica to the Bronx Zoo for a few years. “That was the real hell,” the 39-year-old Auxiliary Coordinator for the 115 Pct. laughs. “Between the traffic and the passengers, there were days when I thought I was going to be on Main Street for the rest of my life.”

Jackson’s avowal that he “can’t think of a better job in the world” than working out of the 115 is not entirely based, however, on his once-upon-a-time travails with the MTA. He has also had a more positive standard of comparison in following his father into the interior decoration trade, studying at the Fashion Institute of Technology and working, among other places, at the Javits Center as an upholsterer. What makes the Woodside native glow about policing is his present position supervising the command’s 102-strong auxiliary force.

“You get all these pictures of auxiliary cops — wannabes who want to be more cop than the NYPD. And I’ll admit you can run across the occasional gung-ho guy who goes too far and has to be reminded that he’s not always the best judge of what’s a potential felony and what’s completely harmless. But the other side of it is that these guys give you so much energy. We have one guy who’s a banker, for god sake. Another one is 73 years old, but he’s there every day just like the younger guys. You spend enough time with that kind of person and you wonder why so many other commands have problems with their communities. If the objective is to have the command be the community, I think the 115 does a helluva job.”

Jackson moved to the command immediately upon graduating from the Academy in 1991. Even during his earlier C-Pop days, he says, he knew his best talents in blue would involve regular relations with community leaders. “It didn’t take me long to know all the leaders and the association people and the politicians in the neighborhood,” he says. “When I come into work, I usually have a mountain of call slips waiting for me and I’m on the phone more than an hour. I think it’s really important that you answer every call personally. They called you, they didn’t just call the precinct. You don’t return a call like that, you’re basically telling them you don’t want to know them personally, go get somebody else in a uniform.”

Along the line, Jackson has picked up a few honors to attest to his success. In 1993, he took down a prestigious Cop of the Year citation for his role in formulating a plan to put an end to the activities of a gang of pickpockets. “There was this bank on Junction Boulevard,” he recalls, “and there were so many calls to the ATM machine lobby about pickpockets that we could have reported in there every day instead of to the station house. Anyway, I worked out a plan with three undercover people inside. I couldn’t work the inside because they knew me from the streets, but the undercovers would just line up in front of the machines and keep going ‘round and ‘round until the pickpockets hit. We got them without much trouble, and that’s what led to the Cop-of-the-Year citation.”

For all his satisfaction with his job, Jackson is no Pollyanna when it comes to some of the working conditions where the police officer is concerned:

“You always start off with the salary. The pay levels for New York City are ridiculous, with or without comparisons with how much they’re making on Long Island, up in Westchester, or out in Hong Kong. We just deserve a big boost, over and out. I also don’t understand why they won’t buy a longer daily schedule so we can have an extra day off. The only thing close to an objection I’ve heard is that the extra hour every day means a cop who’s an hour more tired. But is that really more of a stress than the guy who has to drive back and forth to work that extra day? You throw in that extra day, you get a fresher cop when he does report in.”

Jackson himself is looking at longer nights with the birth of his first child sometime during the summer. Married in 2002, he now lives in Astoria with his Greek wife Jasmin. On the drawing boards is a vacation in Greece during the 2004 Olympics. “I’ve been already a couple of times, and I love it. Some people say Athens can be an inferno where traffic is concerned. Oh, yeah, sure. Let them take a bus down Main Street when every car in Queens is out and every school kid with a four-letter vocabulary has just been let out to stand behind you.”

In short, just leave the driving to others. — Donald Dewey