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	P.O. George Buonocore in the passenger seat of the RMP.
	P.O. Jim Cantore talks to man involved in auto accident.
	One boat in the Staten Island Ferry fleet, at the terminal in St. George.
	P.O. John Fontanarosa at a car stop.

o, I didn’t say that,” Buonocore says. “All I said was, you’re not doing yourself any good by getting worked up. Go home. Call up, get your number...”

“But I wrote my name so crooked yesterday! You probably couldn’t make it out and didn’t pass it on the right way. So I’m calling up looking for a number and they don’t know who I’m talking about!”

Suddenly, the man is shaking so much Buonocore has to sit him down in the doorway to the station house. He tries once again, the way Cantore and the receptionist did. “Think about it this way,” he says. “They’re called accidents because that’s all they are — accidents. You didn’t mean to do any harm...”

“Jesus, no!”

“Your foot fell off the brake, right?”

“Absolutely! I didn’t hit her deliberately! You can’t think that of me. I’m not that kind of person.”

“Nobody’s thinking anything like that. You had an accident. I have accidents. My partner there has accidents. There’s nobody in this whole precinct who doesn’t have accidents. That’s why they’re called accidents. Things you don’t want to happen but that happen anyway.”

“I know that, I know that. In my head, anyway. But it’s such a bad feeling, know what I’m saying?”

It goes on like this for another couple of minutes. Finally, the man agrees he needs a cup of coffee and heads out to a doughnut shop. Cantore shakes his head. “Let’s hope nothing does happen to that woman,” he says lowly, as the man closes the front door behind him.

As he goes out to his RMP, Buonocore isn’t too happy with himself. “I didn’t handle that as well as I could have,” he says ruefully.

“What the hell you talking about?” Cantore objects. “He’s gone off for the coffee, hasn’t he?”

“Yeah, but...”

The but is Buonocore’s personal standard for dealing with people with frayed nerves. As Cantore explains it: “He’s the best I’ve ever seen at it. Once a cop gets on a scene, he has the uniform and all the rest of it going for him. But that’s still not always going to calm down things, especially when you got two people so hating one another, we had to be called in the first place. From then on, it’s the mouth, and George plays it like a musical instrument. ‘Here, don’t look at him,’ he’s always saying, ‘look at me.’ And then he changes the subject. Absolutely changes the subject. The guy wants to talk about how his fender got smashed up, flames in his eyes, so George asks him instead about the make of car he’s got and why he picked that one instead of some other. It can take a few minutes, but he usually calms the guy down and only then goes back to the reason for the call.”

So why the disgruntlement now?

Cantore laughs. “He got the guy to go off for his coffee. But he probably expected him to go off and open his own coffee shop.”

Buonocore overhears the last crack, starts to make a comeback, then just waves his hand in mock surrender, and heads off for morning sector duty. He doesn’t get two blocks before there’s a call to Jersey Street in New Brighton, where a fire has gotten out of hand and brought the whole block out on the street. When Buonocore and Cantore arrive, they see dozens of people keeping their distance from a three-floor building swathed in smoke. They also see a precinct car with no cops. A woman fills in the details: She called for the Fire Department, then ran out to inform the first cops to arrive that people were still inside the building on the top floor. “They just ran inside like they were firemen or somethin’!” she says, her tone an odd mixture of indignation and bafflement. “Isn’t that supposed to be the Fire Department’s job?”

Before Buonocore or Cantore can reply, P.O. Mark DiPilato and Sgt. Scott Nicholls appear in the doorway ushering out half the cast from The Towering Inferno. The woman’s information had been accurate: Three teenagers and three adults had been sleeping on the third floor, blissfully unaware their building was turning into kindling under them. “We were lucky,” says DiPilato between coughs and deep inhales. “The fire hadn’t hit the stairs yet, so we got up there and busted down the door. They didn’t know what the hell was happening, they were really asleep. We got them down through all the smoke, and they were really disoriented. I bet you they thought it was all just a bad dream.”

Buonocore and Cantore hang around for a few minutes of crowd control. Firefighters smother the blaze without any nasty surprises and the block residents gradually fade back into their own houses. The cause of the fire will have to wait another day.

As they resume their patrol, Buonocore and Cantore tick off their points in common. Both are 40 years old. Both were born in Brooklyn (Buonocore in Red Hook, Cantore in Borough Park) and moved to Staten Island. Both are married with working wives. And both come from Italian families. “You got to be Italian to work in Staten Island, right?” Cantore laughs.

Not as much as once upon a time. In fact, the 120 has been paying host to an increasing number of Latinos and Middle Easterners. One indication of the changing population is the five mosques within the command’s 14 square miles.

The cops are summoned to Metcalfe Street; a caller has complained about a hooker patrolling the residential street. The woman in question looks the part: hot pants, thigh-high boots, a fur stole over her shoulders. The one discordant note is a slush she’s sipping loudly through a straw as the patrol car pulls up alongside her. “We’re not hanging around here today, are we, love?” Buonocore asks.

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