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By Donald Dewey
“Are there more glamorous jobs?” Farrell laughs, knowing the answer. “Sure. But you’ve also got to protect the quality of street life. If you pay enough attention to the small and unpleasant and irritating, maybe you’ll end up cutting down on the number of those glamorous jobs that have to be dealt with.” There’s news in the fact that any cop working out of the 77 precinct has faulty alarms as a major problem because it wasn’t all that long ago that the Brooklyn command was one of the hottest in the city. Extending from the northern slice of Crown Heights through Prospect Heights and Weeksville to the edge of Park Slope, the precinct oversees 1.73 square miles of close to 100,000 residents. Throughout the 1980s and well into the 1990s, the commercial avenues of Nostrand, Franklin, and Washington were dingy processions of fast-food joints, bodegas and boarded-up storefronts, while such intersecting blocks as St. John’s, Sterling, and Park Places were often conspicuous only for their broad slashes of graffiti, gashes of exposed plaster, and sheets of emergency plywood. The overriding theme of the neighborhood was crack and more crack, with robberies and homicides almost always linked to trafficking. Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | Page 5  |
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olice
Officers Trisha Jones Farrell and Kertis Olivier, working out of the
77 Pct., respond to alarms all day long on some day tours. Apartments,
stores, cars, vans, buses — if something inside them shrieks,
trills, moans, buzzes, or goes whomp-whomp-whomp when it shouldn’t,
Farrell and Olivier figure to be on the scene eventually to turn it
off. Call it combating noise pollution, call it heading off some neighbor
about to take rocks into his own hands, but be sure to call it a job,
too.