If Anthony (“Sly”) Sylvester had his preference, you wouldn’t be reading about him here. As far as he’s concerned, the Most Valuable Vet of the 111 Pct. should be Ronald Freeman, who was felled by cancer in 2003 after 23 years in uniform. “Ronnie defined what valuable is, both as a cop and as a human being,” declares Sylvester. “I have to admit, I’m a little uncomfortable talking about me when you had such a cop’s cop in this command for so long. Anybody who knew him will say the same thing.”

Many would also define Sylvester himself as that cop’s cop and would have the Brooklyn native’s solid resume in blue to back up their argument. An early 1989 Academy graduate, the 39-year-old Sylvester patrolled some of the busiest commands in East New York and Bushwick before moving over to the 111 in the late nineties. Along the way, there have been assignments to plainclothes and the robbery division. There was, in fact, so much action during his Brooklyn days that working the so-called Candyland streets of Bayside, Douglaston, and Little Neck in Queens took some major reorientation.

“The first day I’m here,” Sylvester recalls, “I go out with my partner. We’re driving around looking at the nice houses and the quiet streets. She keeps driving and driving. Trees and country roads and parks where you can’t hear a single traffic horn, and I’m thinking to myself, ‘Just how big is this sector we’re covering? How can two people be expected to cover it all?’ But I don’t say anything because I don’t want to sound like I’m shaky or something. More driving and driving and we end up next to this huge expanse of water and she’s pointing out the sailboats in the bay and how nice the sun shines off the water and all that. This, after years on Brooklyn streets where the only water you see is a puddle in the gutter because a sewer’s backed up! Finally, I can’t hold it in anymore. I said, ‘Look, I know we’re not the first ones to drive out of an assigned sector. But isn’t this pushing it a little too much — out of the whole borough, out of the whole damned city?’ And she looks at me like I have two heads. ‘Sly, this is our sector,’ she says.”

Sylvester admits not all of that first-tour astonishment has worn off to this day. “Sometimes we can go through an entire shift without a call. Even on busy days, it’s mostly more jobs than crime — car accidents, false alarms, that kind of thing. I can’t help comparing that to the years in Brooklyn, when you were ahead of the game if you got through a four-to-midnight without gunplay.”

The commendations on the PBA delegate’s uniform attest to his role in some of the relentless Brooklyn calls, but to hear him, he wouldn’t be wearing the decorations if not for his mother. “I’ve always thought of myself as a grunt, and grunts don’t go around with a lot of colors on their chests. But then one day, my mother sees all these commendations on the uniform of another cop and asks why he has them and I don’t. I tell her I have a lot of them at home in the drawer, and she just gives me a blanket order — ‘Wear them.’ Like she doesn’t want to have to explain to her friends and neighbors why her son doesn’t have what other cops have. So I put a couple of them on before she did.”

Sylvester’s casual attitude toward wearing honors is merely the surface of a nonchalant attitude about getting them in the first place. “One day on the midnight shift I was involved in a fire on Knickerbocker Avenue not too long after I was assigned to Bushwick,” he recalls. “For some reason, I got there even before the Fire Department and managed to get four families out of this inferno. The commander on the scene said I had commendations coming, but somehow they got lost in paperwork or something. In all honesty, though, anybody who’s doing the job for that kind of payoff shouldn’t be doing the job. The people you help know what you did. Other cops know what you did. And you yourself know what you did. Do you really need ribbons to make it a reality? They’re always nice, but I really don’t think so.”

A more unpleasant kind of recognition came to him in the midst of some narcotics collars in the early nineties. “We were really beginning to cut into a couple of gangs, and they didn’t like it. I began getting so many death threats I had to take my name out of the phone book and also warn my father, who has the same name, to take his out, too. One night I got a call from a Bronx command saying it had reliable information a hit was coming and I should stay away from the windows and not answer the door until a radio car showed up. These gangs are organized and they’re coming after you.”

Even with those harrowing episodes, however, Sylvester can still point to two incidents involving children as his hairiest moments on the job. “One time we get a call in Brooklyn about a child bawling a lot and then suddenly not being heard at all. What we walked into was a chamber of horrors. Kids that hadn’t eaten for Christ knows how long, one four-year-old in a crib who was literally reduced to a skeleton, more teeth than jaw. I couldn’t wait to slap the cuffs on that mother. Then another time we knock on a door with our flashlights, and roaches actually fell down from the transom. We go inside to another scene out of Hell. Total darkness, just this big fat woman sprawled over a couch, barely able to open her eyes. She tells us to get the hell out, there’s nobody there but her. The Child Welfare people with us can’t find anybody, so we leave. But I just couldn’t shake the feeling we’d missed something, so I went back inside. Sure enough, in a closet under a mound of coats, there’s a kid. He’s so malnourished he can’t even walk straight, his feet are deformed. I never had more satisfaction in my life than locking up those two mothers.”

What is not at all gratifying to Sylvester, on the other hand, are the working conditions of NYPD cops in 2005. “Where it all starts is with the higher brass losing perspective on what the job is supposed to be,” he says. “What they’re doing for years now is breeding scared, summons-writing officers, not cop cops. Recently, I heard this chief from Police Plaza boasting to some reporter: ‘We have no trouble finding cops.’ That’s an absolute lie. In the past, you had people lined up around the block to take the exam. Now they’re waking up perps to take it. ‘Hey, don’t worry about that little thing, it won’t prevent you from wearing blue.’ People with medical problems that would have stopped them in the lobby of the Academy in the past? ‘Hey, right this way, don’t let that little physical problem intimidate you. We don’t care, so you shouldn’t.’ How can the quality of police work not go down when you have Police Plaza taking that attitude toward recruitment? Sometimes I think their goal is to have robots doing patrols, maybe keep around a couple of commanders to take credit for the collars.”

And once on the job? “It would seem hard to get worse, but it does. The most flagrant kind of violation — if the person doing it touches on any kind of political sensitivity, the brass says, ‘Whoa there, not so fast with the arrest.’ Once upon a time the reins might have been pulled on you for something involving the St. Patrick’s Day parade. Today it’s likely to be the West Indian Day parade. Tomorrow, who knows? The Martian parade. But the dynamic is the same — Upstairs telling you you can’t do the job you’ve been on the street to do because politics trumps duty.”

And while he’s at it, what’s this business about cops being just another kind of city employee? “Hey, c’mon. Get real. Cops set the tone for the community because they’ve got the law on their side. They enforce what the community is supposed to be. I’m sorry to bruise some feelings, but that to me isn’t the same as picking up the garbage or shuffling paper in some office with the municipal seal on the wall. Without cops this city wouldn’t be what it is today.”

For his own part, Sylvester has some very precise ideas about what kind of cop he wants to be over his final three years toward retirement. “People’s mouths dropped open when I told them I intended taking the test for scuba divers. The average age of the guy taking it is 23 or 24, while I was 39. Well, ladies and gentlemen and all the fish in the harbor, it almost killed me, but I passed. I’m expecting to join the scuba unit sometime in the first part of the year.”

And beyond that?

“Well, for a few years now I’ve had a construction business, my second job which is going well, and I can see myself doing that full-time after taking off my uniform — or scuba mask.”

— Donald Dewey