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Near the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, a man and woman reporting the theft of his car wave the cops down. With the help of their computer, Farrell and Olivier confirm that the vehicle hasn’t simply been towed for illegal parking; a backup radio call establishes that it hasn’t been a tow not yet entered on the computer. The man tries to remain philosophical through all the paperwork while the woman, his sister, keeps peppering the process with cracks along the lines of “I thought this neighborhood was supposed to have gotten better. What? They don’t take your car and shoot you?” The brother listens to enough of this, finally snapping and telling her to shut up. “You can get your car stolen in front of City Hall,” he tells her. “What’s this got to do with the neighborhood?” “I’m just saying.” “Yeah, well, you’re saying too much. The officers here will tell you how it’s changed.”

If the cops had needed an argument about the changing climate in the command for the brother, they could have pointed to the 77 annex at Park and Grand. For years, the building was something of a public relations compromise for the largely elderly white residents near it who weren’t enthusiastic about having to trudge some distance to the central Utica Avenue house to file complaints. Whatever the merits of that diplomacy, the annex was allowed to crumble into torn up floors, rotting walls, and wobbly staircases, with the constant suggestion of rats partying in the rafters. If it hadn’t been taken over for a few weeks here and there for such Hollywood films as Serpico and Presumed Innocent, it might have been dark for decades. More recently, however, it has been spruced up for handling Borough Crime in Brooklyn North, with 17 cops, 4 sergeants and 8 detectives taking over from what was once not only a skeletal desk staff but also a staff that sometimes wondered how many skeletons were literally only another ripped up beam away.

“We’re not just here for public relations anymore,” says Brian Holland in between a steady stream of phone calls to his desk. “Centralizing things here has made a big difference.”

The biggest difference would appear to be on one of the annex’s walls: Polaroids of scores of weapons confiscated in Brooklyn North over recent months. “The Colt Museum doesn’t have that many pictures of guns,” Holland laughs.

Back on the streets, Farrell and Olivier respond to a store alarm on Nostrand and Park. An embarrassed owner is standing in front of his laundromat all but waving the cops on so he doesn’t have to explain himself. “I tripped it myself,” he says. “But thanks for coming by.”

A few blocks away, though, there are no apologies — just a van siren that would have cleared the streets of London during the Blitz. A half-dozen people are standing around listening to the piercing cacophony, one of them pretending to lead an orchestra. A woman three houses away is finally stirred by all the commotion to come down from her brownstone and cut off the noise. “There was nothing wrong with it when I parked,” she tells the cops. “Must be something wrong with the battery.”

One man isn’t so sure. “It’s the manufacturer,” he tells the woman and the cops. “A couple of years ago, I had a car — every time I’d come out of the house and zap open the doors, I’d zap open two other cars, too. One of the cars ended up getting stolen because it was wide open and I was the one who had to answer all the questions because they thought it was me! You want to save yourselves trouble every shift, go talk to the manufacturer. They may know how to build cars, but they sure as hell don’t know too much about electronics.”

The next call is to a school bus stalled in the middle of Sterling Place. When Farrell and Olivier arrive, they hear shouting going on inside the yellow vehicle. The characters inside seem to have been drawn from three different movies. First, there are two 13- or 14-year-olds jutting their jaws at one another in time-honored macho ways. Then there is the sad-faced bus driver who keeps staring out his windshield and murmuring, “I’m not moving another foot with them in here.” Then there is a close-to-hysterical middle-aged woman, apparently a teacher from the school, who is bellowing, “This isn’t my responsibility! This isn’t my responsibility! I didn’t hire on for this!”

What she didn’t hire on for was being a bus monitor for the teens, who had started a fight earlier in the school cafeteria and had continued it on the bus. Olivier is still ascertaining that there have been no weapons involved, just slaps on the head, when another teacher, this one built like an NFL lineman, pops into the bus. The woman spots him as the source of the trouble because the bus had just dropped him off in front of his apartment house and “they weren’t doing any of this while you were in here. You should’ve taken one of them off with you!”

The lineman has apparently dealt with his colleague before, so he ignores her and beckons one of the kids off the bus. Once that counseling session is over, he beckons the second one out. “Now I’m not riding all the way to Queens to keep you idiots away from one another,” he tells the second teen. “But when I go in tomorrow, I better not hear about any more crap. You got that?”

But that’s not good enough for either the driver or the woman teacher. Farrell finally has to state the obvious to the lineman: “They’re not moving unless the kids are separated. Only one of them can stay in the bus.”

The man nods reluctantly. “All right, you!” he says to one of the kids. “C’mon, you’re going to cost me some gas.”

Farrell and Olivier watch the lineman walk toward his car with the kid. The bus pulls away with the mollified driver and the calmed-down teacher. “Okay,” Farrell says. “Overreaction, maybe. Just kids doing their thing. But they are on a bus, and you don’t know what that could lead to sometimes....”

But?

“But no weapons,” she says. “I’d say that was a positive.”

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Donald Dewey’s latest books are The Tenth Man: The Fan in Baseball History and The Black Prince of Baseball: Hal Chase and the Mythology of the Game.

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