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By Donald Dewey
Photos by William Baker
There's a lot of 43 Pct. in the southeast Bronx — 4.34 square miles of it to be exact. At the start of a frigid February 4-12 tour, Dan O'Hanlon and partner Dean DeMartino are responsible for both E and F sectors. O'Hanlon, a 37-year-old Putnam County native, notes that it was in those 4.34 square miles that the most murders in the entire city were registered in 2002.
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| The inside of an RMP in the 43 Pct. |
And that, the officers say, is one of the many things that make patrolling the 43 often such a frenetic exercise.
"I'm from Rockland County," the 27-year-old DeMartino says, "and if there's one thing that jumps out at you as a difference down here, it's that you don't have time to follow through on cases. Upstate, the cops have the time and space to follow an investigation through from A to Z. Down here it's hurry, hurry, okay, now get over to the next call."
The first call is for a fender bender on Bruckner Boulevard. Cars figure prominently in the average 43 Pct. tour. For starters, the Bruckner Expressway, the Bronx River Parkway and the Cross Bronx Expressway make for three convenient tracks for the car thief in a hurry to drive his loot out of the borough. Then there’s Zerega Avenue, where drag races have become a regular form of entertainment.
The two motorists involved in the fender bender couldn’t be friendlier. They exchange cards, reassurances they’re all right, and their insurers’ names. The only thing is, one of them wants a police report; actually, he insists on it; coming right down to it, he’s going to sue the city if he doesn’t get one. DeMartino wastes a good part of his 27th year before finally completing the report.
“What’s to complain?” he shrugs. “Better I’m doing this than some other scenes I’ve already been involved in. Couple of weeks ago, I got my first look at brains splattered over a wall. I really hadn’t missed seeing something like that.”
Asked about his hairiest moment on the job, O’Hanlon doesn’t hesitate in recalling the evening he and another partner approached two idlers in Rosedale Park.” At first, there’s no problem. But then as we’re talking to one guy, the other one suddenly darts behind a tree. I go over and ask him what he’s doing. He comes out from behind the tree and says ‘Nothing.’ I go around behind the tree expecting to find some grass or something like that, but it’s a big knife. I draw my gun and call my partner over and we get the guy down on the ground and handcuff him. That’s when the trouble started. He suddenly raises himself off the ground, cuffs and all, picking me up with him. I’m riding him like he’s a horse, my partner is trying to work the cuffs tighter, but the guy doesn’t feel anything. He’s just numb to everything but twisting us off him. I really was afraid we were going to lose him, and how embarrassing would that have been when you’ve already got him cuffed! The funniest thing was, we were sure his numbness to the cuff pain was because he was on something. But he wasn’t. He just didn’t feel things the way most people do.”
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| The Zarega Zoomers strike again. |
The Zarega Zoomers have struck again, and that’s the second call. When they arrive at the scene, O’Hanlon and DeMartino find the EMT already at work immobilizing the neck and head of the driver of a green Civic. A red Cadillac parked at the curb in front of the Civic has a heap of smashed up metal where a trunk had been. The Caddy driver gets out the story that he had been pushing along (“normal speed”) when the Civic suddenly pulled out of a parking space into his path. Bump, smash, grind. But that still doesn’t explain too much about the trunk. “Oh, no, that wasn’t today,” the driver says blithely, “that was the other night. Guy was tailgating me and couldn’t stop.”
O’Hanlon and DeMartino refrain from asking how fast the tailgater had been going. They get the answer indirectly after collecting all the statements, watching the EMS vehicle go off with its patient, and listening to the Cadillac pull away from the curb with an engine so souped up it would have answered to the name Campbell.
Much of the 43 Pct.’s pasture is 20 housing developments, including the Bronxdale Houses, the Bronx River Houses, and the Castle Hill Houses. Rivalries between Bloods and Crips course through the developments as nonchalantly as in several other neighborhoods, with the occasional fatality landing in an areaway or hall corridor. Still, to the surprise of O’Hanlon, neither the gang activity nor drugs account completely for the 2002 murder primacy. “Some of them you can attribute to those things,” he says, “but if there’s one category in first place, it’s probably domestic disputes. People living on the edge economically and a lot of other ways. They get into a fight, a knife is around, and you have a statistic.”
The dispatcher sends an unclear message about a stolen car on Beach Avenue. When O’Hanlon and DeMartino arrive on the scene, they find not a car newly stolen, but a woman whose auto had been lifted several days before and who has finally finished filling out her report on the loss. “They said to call you and you’d take this down to the station house,” she says, shoving the papers through DeMartino’s window. “Thanks a lot.” And then she’s scurrying back into her two-family house out of the frigid night air.
The cops perform their postal service, then head off for Westchester Avenue in search of somebody described as “a male Hispanic in a wheelchair with a gun.” Given the dispatcher’s intelligibility on previous calls, they wonder whether they shouldn’t be looking for a female Korean on roller blades with a balloon. Nobody on Westchester has seen a gun or even a wheelchair.
“They may be coming out for the night,” DeMartino says. “Yeah,” O’Hanlon nods.
“The practical jokers,” DeMartino explains. “At least that’s what some of them are. They’re at home keeping warm, so why not a call to 911 to get the cops going out in the cold? Others, they might have a concrete reason for getting us someplace — like as long as we’re at Point B, we can’t be at Point A where they’re doing whatever they’re doing.” But both cops also discount the possibility that the thinner patrols being turned out have also been a factor behind the false reports. “It wouldn’t take all that much doing,” O’Hanlon concedes. “Just stand around the house and watch how many cars are going out. We’d be stretched beyond the limit. But that would take too much foresight and planning, and that’s not what these clowns are about. They’re making the calls five minutes after they thought of making them.”
The next report cites a woman and her two children being threatened by a knife-wielding boyfriend in her apartment in the Castle Hill Houses. Halfway over to the scene, O’Hanlon and DeMartino receive the additional information that the woman has locked herself into her bedroom with the children and has been able to call out on a cell phone to say the boyfriend isn’t alone, there’s an equally armed neighborhood crony with him. The cops arrive at the right wing within the Castle Hill complex with little trouble, but find a department store line waiting for the elevator ahead of them. They solve this problem easily enough with their badges and enter a car that has brought a pregnant woman up from the basement. They press for the tenth floor behind demands from the woman that they not stand too close to her. At the second floor, a woman with a baby carriage gets in. At the third floor, a woman with a wide-eyed infant over her shoulder enters. An exasperated DeMartino asks if the woman is sure she wants to go up, and she smiles pleasantly, maybe having understood the question, maybe not. The pregnant woman warns the one with the carriage not to get too near her. At the fifth floor, a squat gentleman with a bottle of wine gets on, evidently heading for a dinner upstairs. He greets everybody robustly, but gets an answer only from the woman with the carriage. At the seventh floor, two teenagers provoke a groan from O’Hanlon by taking an endless look inside the car, then finally deciding the company isn’t to their liking, so they’ll wait for the next car up. For some reason, the elevator doesn’t stop at the eighth or ninth floor to admit the Marx Brothers. By way of compensation, though, as O’Hanlon and DeMartino hurry out of the car, there is still time enough for the pregnant woman to warn them again not to get too close to her.
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| Officers O'Hanlon and DeMartino question potential witnesses at unfounded call. |
The cops knock on the door of the apartment specified by the dispatcher. A woman in her 60s opens up and looks baffled. She doesn’t have children, doesn’t have a boyfriend, and nobody has been threatening her with a knife. O’Hanlon double-checks with the dispatcher. The tenant grasps enough from the scratchy radio to c onfirm that everyone is standing in the apartment indicated by the report. “Must be a false alarm,” she says. “Can’t you do anything about them?”
One answer that occurs to O’Hanlon is to “go on to the next one.” But the next one turns out not to be a false alarm — not a crime, either, but at least not a false alarm. The landlord of a pocket apartment house on Watson Avenue is standing on the front stoop, arms crossed and looking stern about life. The cause of his distress is a vestibule door that has lost one of its panes, leaving glass shards all over the lobby. “He’s moving tires out of the place and he breaks this glass,” he says of a tenant. “Doesn’t sweep up or nothin’. Just goes off.”
It takes O’Hanlon only two questions to ascertain that the breaking of the glass was an accident but almost 15 minutes to get it across that, because no crime was committed, there is nothing the police can do. “You think it’s right for him to act the way he did?” the landlord keeps asking. “You think it’s right this mess he’s made here? You think an accident is right?”
The metaphysical questions keep coming, and O’Hanlon and DeMartino handle them affably. By the time they leave, the landlord has committed himself to a “serious conversation” with the tenant about breaking vestibule windows. Only when the cops have driven away a couple of blocks does it occur to DeMartino to wonder, “What the hell was this guy doing with automobile tires in his apartment, anyway?” He is saved from further musings by a call to Noble Avenue for an apparent knifing in a home. It might have been a daughter knifing a father, a father knifing a daughter, or some third party knifing a fourth. “I know who it is,” O’Hanlon says, making as much time as he can through ice-patched streets. “It’s the guy who had the mother and the children cornered in the bedroom at Castle Hill.”
This time there’s a sign of seriousness. Instead of the elevator line at Castle Hill, an ambulance arrives at the same time as O’Hanlon and DeMartino. The EMT confirms receiving the same report about the knifing. More confirmation comes upstairs in the apartment, where there is indeed a teenager sitting in a darkened room with a bloodied handkerchief over her hand.
But that’s it. The mother of the girl is indignant that anybody had some idea of an attack, when her daughter was just “stupid about slicing up some bananas.” She is even more indignant about the suggestion from the EMT that she had been the one to make up the knifing story to get the emergency medical team to give the girl a ride to the hospital. A half-dozen neighbors or relatives sitting around the room nod in solidarity with the mother’s outrage. Again, it wasn’t a completely false alarm. O’Hanlon and DeMartino play out the tour answering what turns out to be literally a false alarm — a siren set off on a Westchester Avenue junk shop by a cat or some other creature of the night. “Of course it could be worse,” O’Hanlon says, seeming to remind himself as much as anybody else. “They could have all been genuine calls, and we would have had more murders in the command. What’s to complain about?”
Donald Dewey’s most recently published book is "The New Biographical History of Baseball."
