By Donald Dewey
Photos by William Baker
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it or not, it usually takes something like a ferry boat crash for the rest of
New York City to pay attention to Staten Island. It’s over there, and whatever
the city charter says, over there seems much farther away than out there (Long
Island) or up there (Westchester). But around the 120 pct., at least, there’s
little sense of exclusion. There isn’t much room for it, given the command’s
recently high city-wide ranking in shootings.
“Almost always because of drugs,” says P.O. George Buonocore. “Throw in domestic violence scenes and robberies gone bad, but the overwhelming majority are crack shootings. This guy didn’t deliver when he should have. That guy moved into turf he shouldn’t have. People always doing what they shouldn’t have.”
The 40-year-old Brooklyn native smiles sardonically, but his eyes are elsewhere. For five minutes now, he has been watching a nervous man who has come to the station house on Richmond Terrace for more information on an automobile accident he caused the day before. First with the receptionist, then with Buonocore’s partner Jim Cantore, the man has narrated every second of the mishap that has left a pregnant woman in the hospital. Clearly, he has also narrated it to himself a few hundred times since he was questioned by the two cops at the crash scene. The bewilderment that keeps coming out of all the tellings is: “first time…driving since 1964...never even had a ticket before this.”
Buonocore finally decides to go over to the man, who is looking around anxiously for another pair of ears. “You gotta relax, sir,” he says. “Worrying about it here isn’t going to help things.”
The man is not only reading between the lines, he’s reading between the letters. “You mean she’s worse than she was this morning?”
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