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The next five minutes are a ride past three separate camera teams. First there’s a crew from a record label scouting locations for a music video. Then there’s Fox-Five news shooting a firehouse at the center of a black fireman’s lawsuit charging the FDNY with racial discrimination. Then a “Law and Order” contingent pops up for some background shots. Greenpoint may not be show business, but not for lack of trying.

Somebody who wouldn’t be featured in any movie outside 7 waits for Steckiewicz and Barbara with the next call at Lorimer and Driggs. He’s a bald 50ish man, with a hairy chest about half as hairy as his hairy paunch and a pair of khaki shorts that are on the verge of retreating to his knees. He kneads away at great handfuls of stomach as he tells the cops about the homeless man he spotted sitting on his front stoop.

When Barbara notes that there’s no one sitting there at the moment, the man complains: “Yeah, sure, because you guys gave him plenty of time to get away. Or maybe you think I’m makin’ it up. Maybe you think I got nothin’ better to do than imagine bums sittin’ on my stoop and callin’ you guys to get rid of him?”

The question hangs in the air inviting an obvious answer as the cops go back to their car with a promise to keep an eye out for a homeless man with signs of having recently taken a breather on a stoop. When last seen, the man is tapping out a number on his cell phone with the other to share his morning adventure with somebody.

What turns out to be the last call of the tour is a fire at Berry and North Seventh. The engines are already at the scene — a three-story red-brick corner building with smoke pouring from a top-floor window.

While two firefighters climb a ladder to the roof to measure the extent of the blaze, Steckiewicz and Barbara lay out traffic cones to keep matters as uncongested as possible. The trouble turns out to be a distracted cook: While he was answering his telephone, the pot he left on the stove boiled out, setting off sparks that caught some nearby paper. A disgruntled firefighter allows as how “we got engines and ladders and the whole city of New York for a pot with a hole in the bottom and some charred wallpaper.”

As he climbs back into the RMP, Barbara is told to return to the precinct to officialize the arrest of the marijuana grower who has turned himself in. “See that?” he laughs. “No big deal around here about the number of cars we send out. Even the perps sympathize. They come to us!”

Donald Dewey’s latest book, published this spring, is True and False: The Story of American Political Cartoons.

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