It isn’t easy having 25 years come tumbling down into one final roll call. As long as she can, Suzanne Johnson stays away from the muster room at the 75 Pct. in Brooklyn North. The eggs, sausages, pastries, and bagels being laid out there are an unmistakable sign that today is a different kind of day, for her and her fellow officers in this, one of the city’s toughest commands. She also knows that the cops filling the room in expectation of her arrival are making as bad a job of it as she is in telling themselves that the catered breakfast will be merely an abnormal start to a normal day on the job. For starters, for the first time in a quarter-century, she won’t be hitting the streets to patrol with them.

By the time she arrives, the room is packed. She seems to shrink twice over — within the uniform she’ll be wearing for the last time and within the physical ranks of blue around her. While waiting for the roll call to begin, she and everyone else prefer to talk about a sendoff dinner that evening as a further postponement of definitive good-byes. Why get overly dramatic about the roll call if there will be another, if less official one over beers and steaks some hours later?

It doesn’t quite work. When she is called up to the lectern to do the honors for her last roll call, Johnson moves reluctantly. There is no surprise in the ritual. She herself has attended more than one precinct retirement ceremony over the years. But it also suddenly seems to dawn on her that her reading of the tour assignments represents her last patrol obligation. The awareness clouds her vision of the duty sheet, making it necessary for a sergeant to point out exactly where she should start reading. There are none of the usual remarks and whispers as she fits names to sector beats. Everyone is having a hard enough time adjusting to the strange voice doling out the assignments. Wisecracks can wait.

Once the roll call has been taken care of, Johnson slips into the unusual role (for her) of pure recipient. First up is PBA President Pat Lynch, who says he’s “in awe” of the Howard Beach native and her 25-year record of more than 400 felony arrests. In presenting Johnson with a PBA plaque, Lynch assures her that she will “always be a cop at heart.”

Johnson was drawn to the department at the relatively late age of 28, after driving athletes around for the ABC TV network, handling cargo at Kennedy Airport, and coming and going from a series of other jobs. Her first assignment upon graduation from the Academy in April 1980 was NSU 11 in Brooklyn South, moving over to the 75 in January 1981. Although she did stints as a property clerk and as a detective, she says she always regarded patrol as her true calling. “It’s the people, what else? Patrol lets you feel you’re part of the community. You know them, they know you. Sometimes they even know you better than you realize.”

She laughs at a not-so-distant memory. “A while back, when they knocked me off midnights, I said I’d rather do foot patrol than car patrol in the mornings. So there I am walking the streets and people are always yelling out, ‘Hey, Suzie, get back in a car where you belong!’ Some of them were people I’d arrested! A couple of months later, I’m back in a car and they’re yelling out, ‘Hey, Suzie, now that’s where you belong!’”

Some of her recollections, however, are much grimmer. In June 1996, she was one of the command’s numerous officers who took shots from Heriberto Seda, the hostage-taker who turned out to be an East Coast copycat of San Francisco’s never-apprehended Zodiac Killer. Although Seda eventually surrendered with no casualties, Johnson wasn’t so lucky in October 2001. As she recounts it:

“It was a really bad time. I’d lost some friends in the Twin Towers, and this wasn’t even a month later. We’re out on patrol, and I see these Ohio plates I remembered from a flyer several weeks before. Somebody wanted for murder. I called it in, asking for backup. I really didn’t know if the car was still being sought."

"When we stop the car, I go over to the passenger side while my partner goes up to the driver. There are kids in the back. Suddenly, the guy guns his engine at the same time as he reaches down to the floor for something. I start being dragged along the street. Then I see him coming up with a gun. I got off a shot first, killing him.”

According to Johnson, that was the first and only time she had to fire her gun on duty. “You gotta do what you gotta do,” she says, clearly preferring to close the subject on that note.

As for the changes she’s witnessed in the 75 over 25 years, the mother of a 26-year-old son and grandmother of a 4-year-old girl agrees the command isn’t as wild as it was back in the mid-1990s when homicide was a routine tour problem. “But the crack is still out there,” she warns, “and as long as it is, you’re going to have major problems. Nobody’s going to confuse this house with a kindergarten.”

Perhaps more dramatic than changes in the north Brooklyn neighborhood, Johnson says, have been those within the 75 itself. “Again, this is nothing unique to us. But when I first came on, there was a lot more respect for the older cops around. You practically didn’t open your mouth unless they spoke to you first. Most of the rookies who come in now are cocky. They know it all. A senior guy to them is just somebody who hasn’t moved on. This hasn’t done anything for the kind of tightness we used to have around here. There used to be more of a sense of everybody depending on one another. I’ve said it a million times: Anybody can be a police officer, but that doesn’t make them cops in the real sense.”

If she had her way giving cops the three things they needed most urgently, what would they be?

“Number one would be CPR. It would be nice to have commanders who don’t believe that any monkey can be trained to do patrol, who understand the people skills involved, let alone the front-line dangers attached to the job. Number two would be better pay. How ridiculous is it that, for instance, there’s one cop in this command who’s had to take his car off the road because he can’t afford both auto insurance and the mortgage on his home? Then you got these death traps they call patrol cars. If they don’t have 80,000 miles on them, you think of them as fresh from the showroom. Broken seats and windows — it’s a disgrace.”

As for her greatest satisfaction on the job, Johnson points to a memorial garden that has replaced an eyesore of a dump on the precinct corner of Sutter and Essex. “People used to walk by and throw cigarette wrappers and candy papers into the lot. Then Tom O’Rourke, a retired 75 cop, got the idea to transform the place into a garden for those connected to the command who died on 9/11.

There were four of them. It took us some months to do it, but the sense of teamwork and the purpose behind it — well, I just can’t tell you, it was really something. You got the feeling that you’d think should be a constant goal around here — everyone working with everyone else, not getting hung up on petty agendas.”

The 75 command’s newest pensioner says she has no immediate projects for her retirement “outside of going to Atlantic City now and then and seeing my granddaughter.” For somebody who grew up as one of six children without any police background in the family, she has made up for it within her own household. Not only is her son a cop, but also her husband is a retired sergeant. Add to that her estimate that “about 90 percent” of her friends are cops. “Maybe it’s just because we understand each other,” she says. “When people have the same assumptions about each other, it’s easier.”

And if she had to squeeze her time on the job down into a single sentence?

“That’s easy,” she laughs. “She was a good cop.”