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Limbo, on the other hand, is a guy sauntering down the street, catching sight of the patrol car and meandering over to Olivier’s window with what is clearly some on-the-spot inspiration. “Hey, you guys have any juice with the rent people?” he asks casually.

“What rent people?” Olivier asks.

“The man! The landlord! I got a wife with diabetes at home and a landlord that’s trying to kick us out. He don’t care that’s just going to make her sicker. Maybe you can handle that for us, what do you think?”

“That’s a landlord-tenant thing, sir. Not a police matter,” Olivier responds.

The man takes it in for another Lotto number that didn’t hit. “Yeah, well, just a thought,” he says, resuming his saunter down the street.

The next call is for a suspicious car on Prospect and Classon. According to an unidentified neighbor, the vehicle has been sitting in the same space for weeks. Farrell and Olivier find the van with Virginia plates without much trouble; it is packed in the back with a junk store of boxes. But what they also find are two neighbors tending to gardens nearby and wondering why all the commotion. “I don’t know why anybody called you,” one of them says. “That guy comes out and moves the thing twice a day. He’s always on the correct side of the street.”

The second neighbor nods agreement. “If I’m a betting man, you got the call from an old lady across the street. She called in my car last year, too. Guess she’s got higher standards than the Sanitation Department.”

Once the computer tells Farrell the van belongs to somebody indeed living on Prospect, the cops write off another false alarm. In exchange, they raise an alarm of their own a few blocks away on St. John’s where a school bus is parked practically in the middle of the street in front of a Jewish kindergarten. The driver doesn’t understand how they could find anything wrong in having the kids walk a car-width into the street to board the bus. “I’m watching them when they step off the sidewalk,” he reassures them.

They aren’t reassured, and the driver reluctantly pulls closer to the sidewalk. Just like the owner of the Volvo in front of the church, he mutters about the new priorities of the 77 cops.

However improved things might be within the command, there are constant reminders that harder realities haven’t been completely exiled to other precincts. As in some of the city’s other tough areas, there are memorial walls naming the victims of one act of violence or another with the date when they were killed by dealers, muggers and other criminals. The bright side of the story, Farrell points out, is that most of the street casualties listed date back to the 1990s. Then, too, there are the other names — Michael Griffith, Wesley Holder, and Anna Marie Blinn — attached to street signs as a tribute to some departed community activist or emblem. “They’re all over the street signs,” Olivier points out, “and I don’t know who most of them are. But they reflect a community feel — people the residents now want to identify with.”

As in many residential neighborhoods, the command’s activities get into higher gear when the schools let out for the afternoon. The 77 includes 24 elementary schools, two junior highs and two four-year highs. There too, though, there have been fewer incidents in recent years, most of them involving truancy or fist-fights. “You don’t want to sound simplistic,” says Farrell, “but when you don’t have as many problems at home, you’re probably not going to have as many in school.”

Farrell herself knows something about the street’s relations to the home. When she was first on the job, she had a small daughter whom she’d had to entrust to her mother while she was on patrol. Now she and her firefighter husband have a 14-month-old son in Ridgewood around whom they arrange their shifts. “My daughter’s 18 and at the University of Albany,” she says, “and thank God, all that worked out. But I’d never want to see her on this job. The bottom line is, this job controls you, you never control it. And I don’t think any of us want to wish that kind of thing on our kids.”

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