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When CBS canceled its “Beauty and the Beast” series in 1990, it also deposed the monster Vincent as the chief expert on the lowest regions of upper Manhattan. Ronnie Arlotta has tried to fill the vacuum. With the exception of one year of Tactical Patrol Force duty, in fact, the 40-year-old Queens native has been working Transit from District Three since graduating from the Academy in June 1986. It has been a swath of time measured by more than the paint jobs on the No. 1 train.
“To me, the main difference between today and when I first started working here,” he says, “is that there’s less violence now — apparently around the city as a whole, but certainly in Transit. The perps are less violent, the cops are less violent. We’ve become something of the thinking man’s force.”
Arlotta can cite more than one personal experience as a basis for his comparison. In his early years, for example, there was the day he came upon a robbery-assault on a woman in a station plaza. “This guy was just yelling and whacking away at her, trying to grab her bag. When he saw me, he turned around with a gun in his hand. I was too close for anything else so I grabbed his wrist. The two of us go tumbling down a staircase with me holding on to his gun hand. The weapon finally got loose, and I was able to cuff him at the bottom of the stairs. Recommendation: Use the banister going down. It’s easier.”
And now?
“You still have your robberies and occasional guns and knives. That’s especially true in the mid-afternoons. People associate subway crime with the after-midnight hours. It happens, sure, but you’re just as likely to have a cop more conspicuous in subway cars at that hour. It’s when the schools get out that we see a lot of the action. Kids going at one another or sometimes trying to make up for a bad math class by relieving passengers of their wallets. Otherwise, pick-pocketing and grand larceny covers most of it.”
According to Arlotta, there have been other differences over the last 17 years, and not all of them unalloyed improvements. “At the risk of sounding like Father Time,” he smiles, “I think cops were a lot closer when I came on the job. There wasn’t a person in your command you didn’t walk with at one time or another. With set tours today, you can be working with somebody out of the same command for years and really not know much more than his name. People are more — what’s the word? — diplomatic with each other these days. I guess that’s inevitable when you don’t have that one-hundred-percent familiarity.”
Another change requiring adjustment, he says, came in the wake of the merger of the city’s police forces. “You can look back on it now and say it wasn’t that bad, it’s worked out for the best, et cetera, et cetera. But I thought it was a pretty rough transition for Transit. We were treated as stepchildren, not only by the department but within the PBA, too. It was like anything we had done before the amalgamation hadn’t really been police work. What, we’d been subway conductors? Obviously, we’ve smoothed that over with time, but anybody who says the merger was an immediate honeymoon has a very short memory. Just bringing our collars to the local precinct, when that regulation was in force, could be absolutely humiliating.”
Himself now a PBA delegate, Arlotta is proud of the fact that other District Three cops think of him as a “go-to guy.” At the same time, he laughs wearily at the thought of some of the bureaucratic journeys he has had to endure on behalf of some claim or another. “Is it a thankless job? Not when it works out for the people you’re trying to help. Let’s just say it’s the most hateful job you’ll ever love.”
And suppose he was to become an omnipotent mayor-commissioner?
What are the first three changes he would implement on the NYPD?
“Without question, number one would be about pay,” he says without hesitation. “We’re not asking to be overpaid. Whatever some people like to say for their own interests, we’re not intent on raping the city. All we’re asking for is what the politicians always like to point to as a divine standard when it suits them — fair market value. We do this, so it’s only fair we get paid that. I don’t think anybody with any conscience at all can claim that’s what we have right now in the city.
“The second thing would be to reform promotion opportunities. The way things are now, even to move from one Transit district to another, you’d have to speed up to go slow. I’ve stopped counting the number of people who’ve left the job because they’ve gotten the message early on there’s nowhere to climb, the rung they have now is what they’ll always have.
“Number three? Get me the first two and I won’t worry about a third. But it wouldn’t hurt, either, to have sharper uniforms, something that reminds you of one of the last two centuries we’ve lived in.”
Where pay is concerned, Arlotta is speaking from more than a political stance. Like so many other officers, the married father of two small children has had to supplement his income working other jobs. Although that has meant some inevitable security work, it has primarily meant picking up a trade as an exterminator.
“It started the worst way possible — termites attacking my house. When I found out how much it would cost me, I started taking classes to get a license. Well, that turned out to be an endless experience. First, you need a license for this, then for that. Basically, every bug and type of vermin requires another piece of paper. Then I apprenticed for a couple of years. Finally, I was able to set up my own company. In fact, I just sold it off. It began taking up too much time with everything else I had to do.”
Oddly, though, Arlotta doesn’t see himself returning to full-time extermination work when he retires in less than two years. “My father had a hardware store, so maybe there’s that retail gene somewhere in me. A gas station — yeah, I could see that.”
When he’s not spending time with his two-year-old son and infant daughter in his Fresh Meadows home, Arlotta is planning his next trip to a major league park. “I’ve seen about half of them,” he says, “and I guess I agree with the traditionalists that Wrigley Field in Chicago was the best. But right after that I’d have to put Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Most houses I’ve been in aren’t that clean!”
Asked if he could sum up in a single sentence how Transit differs from other patrol jobs in the city, the 18-year veteran nods immediately. “When you’re working the subways, you run into things more than up on the street. And I know what I’m talking about because I even met my wife while I was on the job!”
— Donald Dewey
