The good news on this dreary Friday is that there are quieter than usual streets in the crowded square-mile of the 23 Pct. in Spanish Harlem. With schools closed and shoppers looking decidedly sluggish along the commercial strips of Second and Third Avenues, there’s a feeling that whatever’s happening is happening somewhere else — behind closed doors, in front of television sets, in church pews. For at least one day, that’s the mood that has settled over the command running between Fifth Avenue and the FDR Drive, East 96th and 115th Streets. The bad news is that the marks, the victims, and the hustled in such an atmosphere seem to have been picked out because they were the only targets available, making them doubly injured.

Police Officers Manuel Cumba (l) and Miguel Murphy check precinct priority trouble spots.

Working the day shift, Police Officers Mo Rosales and Vincent Murphy start off with a robbery call to a Second Avenue Mexican grocery. Finding the store locked, they are directed to a Citibank branch a couple of blocks north, where the owner has reportedly retreated after calling 911. There are too many stores and phone booths between the grocery and the bank for the dispatcher’s information to make sense. An armed robbery and the victim runs to the bank? And sure enough, the story that awaits Rosales and Murphy is not of some skell cleaning out a cash register.

As the shaking woman who runs the grocery tells it, she opened up for business half an hour earlier after getting cash from the bank. Her first “customer” was somebody passing himself off as a city inspector who insisted that the sidewalk in front of her store was dirty and required immediate sweeping. With the so-called inspector supervising her, she tells the cops, she whisked the pavement clean, was told she had saved herself a summons, then returned inside to find $1,200 missing from the bag she had left behind the counter. She had run back to the bank to describe the phony inspector to a manager and had received confirmation that she had been followed back up to the grocery by two men who had seen her make the withdrawal.

Rosales and Murphy take down the particulars. The woman is less than ecstatic with their reassurances that there is “every chance” the thieves will be grabbed. But for Murphy, at least, they weren’t just giving her the routine hang-in-there speech. “This sounds like the kind of scam they’ve pulled before,” the Greenpoint native says afterward. “One guy plays the inspector, the other waits till she’s out there sweeping, then sneaks into the store. And if they’ve done it twice, they’re sure to do it three times, and that betters the odds on nabbing them.”

	On E. 108th St. Officers Manuel Cumba and Miguel Murphy look up at top-floor window where debris is being thrown from.

“Which doesn’t mean she’s going to get her money back,” Rosales reminds him. “That she can probably kiss off right now.”

Murphy doesn’t disagree. The father of four boys ranging in age from 7 to 20, he has been responding to calls in the 23 Pct. for some 14 years. A report of an attempted car theft reminds him of his hairiest moment on the Upper East Side streets  “It was back in ‘91. We were on a car stop looking for a Ford that had been used in a lot of robberies. We stop one car, but he turns out only to be an illegal livery driver. Just as we begin doing the paper work on him, here comes this other car barreling down toward us. It’s another livery driver, and this one is screaming that the guy in the back is robbing him. The second driver brakes and ducks, and the guy in back starts shooting at us. I don’t know to this day if his gun jammed, but he stopped as fast as he started and we managed to get him without anybody being hurt.”

Arriving at Fifth and 103rd, outside the New York Academy of Medicine, Rosales and Murphy find a blue Toyota with a smashed driver’s side window, a sprung trunk door, and not even a spare tire in the back. It isn’t the car the thieves were after, but what was in it. What exactly that was, however, is not immediately clear. None of the people standing outside the academy know anything. A computer trace of the plates connects the license to somebody in Woodside, but the doormen around the corner on Fifth have never heard of the owner and have barely heard of Woodside. (“Somewhere in Queens, right?” one of them asks.)

Twenty, even ten, years ago, most of the 60,000 residents within the confines of the 23 were Puerto Rican or African American. In recent years, though, there has been a steady influx of Mexicans. At the same time, the neighborhood is beginning to show the first signs of gentrification. As Murphy puts it: “Not too long ago, you could have said 96th Street was the exact border between Spanish Harlem and white money. But that’s been slipping lately. Give it two or three years, with all this development moving uptown, and the frontier’s going to be 103rd Street or even further north.”

The next call is to back up a fire alert on First Avenue. Two engines are already on the scene to investigate suspicious smoke coming out of a ninth-floor apartment in a low-income project. It turns out to be from an untended pot on the stove. “Not much pot left,” one of the firemen laughs to Rosales, trudging back to his engine, “but the apartment’s still there.”

Above: Officers Cumba and Murphy search roof and inspect airshaft (below) of building where missing man lives.

While Rosales and Murphy are providing general CFI sector cover for the tour, Police Officers Manuel Cumba and Miguel Murphy are taking advantage of what is shaping up as a slow day to work down a checklist of precinct priority spots. One of the first is the Islamic Cultural Center of New York, at 96th and Third, which has drawn extra police security since the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. The center and its adjoining mosque, one of the city’s busiest for local Muslims, have been bothered only once in the wake of the attacks — by a burglar who was caught on a surveillance camera and arrested shortly afterward.

The imam greets Cumba and Murphy cordially, assuring them he has nothing to report and is grateful for their concern. “Let me keep saying the same thing to you every time you come by, and we will both be happy, yes?”

The cops agree, and get back to their car just in time for a call over to Third Avenue, where a robbery is reported in progress. All the way over, Cumba says “something isn’t right about that address.” What’s wrong, it turns out, is that it’s a firehouse, where the last robbery was at a gin rummy game among the firefighters 10 years ago. Cumba checks back with the dispatcher to make sure she hadn’t meant to say Second or First Avenue, but gets the Third Avenue address confirmed.

A Brooklyn native now living in Throggs Neck, Cumba has been in the command for about nine years. “Even in that little time, I’ve seen some pretty big changes up here,” he says. “The 23 is still pretty much about drugs — crack, heroin, marijuana, name it. But nothing at all like it was in the ‘90s. We’ve really slipped down in the standings from an A house.”

Like the imam, Cumba is only too glad to deliver that report, and to get over to the next location on his checklist — the Museo del Barrio on Fifth Avenue. One of the city’s lesser known museums, it has been open since 1969, offering the public a graphic record of Hispanic life in the city. Today, though, it is all but deserted because of Good Friday devotions being held in neighborhood churches. “Quiet as a mouse,” a burly security man tells the cops.

On his way back out, Murphy lingers for a moment before a blown-up photograph of Spanish Harlem from the early 20th century. A native of the Dominican Republic, he regards it as curiously as any tourist from Des Moines. “Couldn’t have been easy back then,” he says, then heads on out.

The next call leads to a Second Avenue elevator building. A squat Hispanic in her 40s greets them in the hallway and leads them down to her apartment, where a tall, bald man her age sits before a soap opera. He barely acknowledges the cops other than to turn up the sound on the TV because their conversation with his wife is interfering with his understanding of who has one day to live. Clearly, he could have done without the call to the precinct.

	P.O. Miguel Murphy

As the woman explains it, she obtained a protection order some months before against her daughter’s boyfriend because she didn’t want him coming to the house. Despite that, she says indignantly, she has seen the boyfriend hanging around the front of the house. At Cumba’s suggestion, the mother gets the daughter from a back room. The heavyset, tattooed girl comes reluctantly, but once Cumba asks her about the boyfriend, she turns into a fierce defender. “I love him and he loves me,” she says, “and no piece of paper is going to keep us apart.”

The mother interrupts to list what she doesn’t like about the guy. This covers everything from how much older than the daughter he is to a star tattoo on one of his ears. (At mention of the tattoo, the father on the couch grunts.) The newest addition to her list is that he “doesn’t respect the law.” If he did, she reasons, he would have obeyed the protection order to stay away from her apartment. It goes on like that for about 10 minutes, with both the mother and daughter talking through Cumba and the TV soap. Finally, the daughter, after asking for permission, goes back to her bedroom. The father grunts goodbye.

The calls start coming more rapidly. The next one is from an enraged super on 108th Street. When the cops drive up, he is standing in the middle of a small sidewalk mound of used diapers, toilet paper rolls, and plastic skin cream bottles, shrieking, “The *#@8#’s are gonna kill somebody!” The source of the trouble is a top-floor window from which the sidewalk items and, apparently, many others have been flying for several days. “The other day,” the super screams, “there was a *#@8# battery that almost killed this woman walking along here. What would that look like — getting killed by a battery in front of the house here?”

Cumba and Murphy postpone their question about why it took him so long to report the barrage, and go upstairs. A young Mexican mother doesn’t look all that surprised that the police should be knocking on her door. “The things on the street?”

Murphy says yes, but that does it for conversation until an infant starts wailing in another room. He asks the woman to show him the diapers she is using, and she comes out of a closet with unused versions of what is lying downstairs on the sidewalk. The cops don’t have to ask the next, obvious question. A girl of about three or four sidles into the kitchen with a coy smile on her face. The mother gets to the punch- line before the cops. “You’ve been throwing things out the window?” The girl doesn’t say yes and doesn’t say no, but she slides her back up and down against the refrigerator in full yes.

The super tries to look mollified at the identification of the culprit. “So why didn’t the *#@8# mother stop her? That’s what I want to know! Didn’t she notice the garbage didn’t stink or the toilet didn’t flush or anything like that?”

Cumba can’t resist. “And what about you? You didn’t think it was important until an hour ago that this stuff is flying out the window, that somebody gets hit on the head with a battery?”

Except for more paperwork, it’s a wash.

On their way over to the next item on their checklist, Mount Sinai Hospital, Cumba and Murphy are detoured twice. The first call is from somebody furious that rap music would be playing loudly from a parked car on Good Friday. The driver apologizes, says he didn’t notice how loud his radio was playing. The second call is from a project security guard reporting two kids trapped in an elevator. By the time the cops arrive on the scene, the kids have risked prying open the landing door several feet above them and have climbed to safety. “How many times is that going to happen before somebody gets killed?” a tenant asks Murphy.

Extravagant murals adorn building exteriors in the 23 Pct.

The abundance of low-income projects and commercial strips would make the 23 command look like one of a couple of dozen city neighborhoods if not for the elaborate street murals of an artist signing himself as de la Vega. Done in meticulous reds, blues, and grays, the artist’s scenes are an outdoor Museo del Barrio. Since he operates an art supplies store in the neighborhood, de la Vega is also vigilant about his work — personally dealing with any graffiti by repainting ruined sections or, more ironically, covering them over with smiling faces. As Cumba puts it, “The guy is upbeat and he wants the neighborhood to be.”

The cops are called over to Second Avenue for a vertical in a six-floor apartment building. The situation is not promising. As he had done every evening exactly at 11:30, a security guard called his wife the night before to say he was on his way home. Not only hasn’t he shown up, but also six different ATM machines around Manhattan recorded withdrawals from his account during the early morning hours. “One or two,” Murphy says, “and you could say he ran into a good time on his way home. But six? I don’t think so.”

They start with the roof and work their way down through every maintenance closet and supply room. All the neighbors recognize the missing man in the picture given to them by the wife, but none of them has seen him for at least two days. There is no immediate reason to doubt the wife’s story — or to think that anything good has happened to the security guard. Cumba and Murphy don’t mind turning this one over to detectives. As Murphy puts it, “I don’t see a happy ending here.”

The last call of the tour is to a Lexington Avenue walkup, where a woman has reported receiving a “suspicious package.” A 35ish advertising agency worker off for the day opens the door and points to an opened manila envelope on the coffee table. She doesn’t want the envelope, but she doesn’t look particularly terrified by it, either.

“You opened it?” Murphy asks.

“Yes, it’s a videotape.”

Which, in fact, is what it is, a videotape already half-played. Murphy tries again. “So what makes this a ‘suspicious package’?”

She doesn’t understand. “It came without a return address. Don’t you think that’s suspicious?”

He gives her a half-point for evasiveness and a full one for lying when she says she has no idea what is on the video. “You’re saying you haven’t played this?” he says, flashing the unwound reels to give her another chance at candor.

“Why should I play something without a return address? Just get it out of here, please.”

Cumba starts to object that they have no reason to take it with them. “You’ve touched it,” she anticipates him, “so it’s yours now.” The elevator in this woman’s mind obviously doesn’t go all the way up to the top. They just shrug their shoulders and leave her with the “suspicious” tape.

— Donald Dewey’s most recently published book is "The New Biographical History of Baseball."