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ay Fontanarosa swears it really happened, that he’s not just passing along a chestnut of a story. “Woman says she saw a robbery going on in front of her house, ran over to the phone to call 911, but couldn’t find any 11 on the dial!”

So what did he say?

“After I got up off the floor? I told her to think next time. She should punch out 9, then any numbers that add up to 11. Six and five, seven and four — any one of them will get through, I told her. And she smacked her head. Of course! Why hadn’t she thought of that?”

Don’t believe that one? How about the time a few years ago when the 120 pct. community policing officer was working out of the 7th pct. on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and pulled over a car for going through a stop sign? As the 40-year-old Staten Island native tells it:

“I signal for the guy to roll down his window, but he’s turning and turning and nothing’s happening. He starts making hand gestures that he can’t open it, so I wave for him to get out of the car. That opens the door fast enough, and I see a gun. I get the guy up against the car without much problem, then take a look in the back. On the floor there’s a second guy all cuffed and gagged and squirming around. Seems the driver dropped in on his girl friend and found her with the guy tied up. Out comes the gun, he pistol whips the guy in the back seat, then ties him up to drive him somewhere where he can dump him in the East River. I guess you could call the driver something of a jealous type.”

As Fontanarosa talks, a pattern emerges: His funniest stories relate to his eight-odd years in Manhattan, his biggest satisfactions to moving back home to the 120 pct. in the mid-nineties. On the Island, he has done a little bit of everything — burglary detective, youth officer, community patrol. The last two are where his heart is. “I think of them as being related, really,” he says. “With the kids, you’re always encountering new things, you’re always hoping this one’s going to work out, that one’s not going to end up jammed up with drugs or something else. Community patrol, you’re on the street not knowing what’s around the corner. In a patrol car, you’re subject to the radio. You’re always chasing after things that’ve already happened instead of maybe getting into something before it happens.”

According to the married father of three (daughters, 14 and 9, and a son, 4), he’s probably had an advantage working with kids because of his own fondness for sports; among other things, he has played shortstop and defensive back for police clubs. “As a youth officer, I’ve run softball leagues and really got the kids going. I’ve also gotten a lot of them into the Explorer programs, an offshoot of the Boy Scouts. As long as you’re doing it, in the middle of it, nothing seems impossible.”

But when you’re not doing it?

Fontanarosa shakes his head. “The environment’s just too strong for so many. Nothing breaks your heart more than some 16-year-old being booked for crack dealing and he looks up and says, ‘Hey, Officer Jay, remember me? I used to play third base for you!’ What’re you supposed to say? I haven’t figured out an answer to that kind of thing yet.”

Maybe it’s the distance and the time, but there’s so such melancholy, even fleeting, when it comes to some of the characters Fontanarosa encountered in Manhattan. “One guy,” he recalls enthusiastically, “he was a genius in ripping off shoe stores. Trouble was, he’d always rip off two left shoes or two right shoes, and he’d try to wear them anyway. We used to say he was a great thief, but not much of a dancer.”

Lower Manhattan scam artists are another source of nostalgia. “Anybody who buys VCRs out a car window before crossing the bridge or going through the tunnel, deserves what he gets,” he says. “All you needed was a black box that you stuffed with Chinese newspapers. ‘Here, here you go, Mister, a brand new Sony! For you, 50 bucks, but give it to me before the light changes.’ I mean, what kind of people swallow that line?”

As for the job in general, Fontanarosa’s greatest lament is that there aren’t enough cops on the job. “Nobody regrets more than I do that, say, a PAL center needs a cop there every day,” he says. “It’s a goddam shame you need one in a place like that. But if you do need one, you should have one. And multiply that by a hundred other places.”

The places, he emphasizes, don’t have to be individual buildings. “It’s the cop as an essential part of the neighborhood. Stores, schools, what-have-you, they get used to a police presence only if they see cops. I don’t call seeing a patrol car whisking by every couple of hours the same thing. But even then, you get people, especially kids, waving to the cars. I mean, shouldn’t that be telling us something? It’s much easier being the enemy if you’re not around. You can imagine whatever you want. But if you’re there, maybe you’re not such a monster all the time and maybe that makes it less tempting for someone to do something where we have to be the enemy.”

— Donald Dewey

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