Arroyo and Gonzalez approach teenage couple hanging out on restricted rooftop.

These verticals Arroyo says, aren’t the worst that the 79’s daily grind churns out. “Every time you see something you wouldn’t have seen a few years back,” the 42-year-old East New York native says, “you get another quick reminder that we’re not in Brooklyn Heights or Park Slope yet, either. Drugs are still item-number-one around here. They generate most of the felonies. You rob or burgle to be able to buy them, you buy guns to protect your stash, and you might even kill someone in a fight over them. They’re like a currency around here for a lot of people.”

Arroyo’s introduction to drug busts took place quite a distance from Brooklyn North. “I was in the Army at Fort Reilly in Kansas. I knew I wanted to get into police work, so I ended up on the Topeka force for three years. People don’t usually associate Kansas with drugs, but Topeka is a big stopover for stuff coming up from the south or heading east.”

For his part, the 42-year-old Gonzalez made his way to the NYPD via the Navy and security jobs. Born in Manhattan and now living in Canarsie, he shares Arroyo’s view that “Brooklyn is where you can learn the most about police work because there are so many people doing so many different kinds of things you have to learn about them and that’s what it always seems to come back to — the people themselves.”

It’s hardly surprising the cops have matching opinions on Brooklyn: both graduates of the Academy in February 1994 and assigned immediately to the 79, they have been partners for some 14 years. They also have very similar stories when asked about their hairiest moment on the job.

Arroyo: “Nothing about guns or drugs. Just a DOA call a few years back. I thought I’d seen everything, but the body had been there for a week and you couldn’t tell where it left off and the maggots started. I didn’t think anything could upset me that much.”

Gonzalez on a comparable moment: “It was a woman, and she’d been hogtied, probably left for dead a week before by whoever killed her. The maggots were everywhere. I couldn’t look at it.”

For the next hour or so, the cops respond to annoyance calls. A homeless man has been spotted sitting alone in an empty school playground. Informed he can’t camp out in the yard if he’s not there to supervise a child, the man offers no resistance beyond a melancholy shake of the head. “Way back when,” he says, “I did watch my kid in a place like this. Haven’t seen him in years now.”

The owners of a Chinese beauty parlor on Fulton Street stand in the salon’s doorway angrily pointing to garbage piled up in front of the store. Since neither Arroyo nor Gonzalez knows Mandarin, it takes them some time to grasp that an anonymous neighbor has been cluttering the sidewalk in front of the salon for weeks, that the salon has already received a summons for the mess, and that complaints to the precinct haven’t managed to identify the culprit. Arroyo is in the midst of asking for the salon keepers to find somebody fluent in English to explain the situation to the Sanitation Department when a call comes in about a gun run over at St. Marks and Troy.

It turns out to be worse than that.

When Arroyo and Gonzalez arrive on the scene, there is no sign of a gunman, but there is a smashed-up patrol car and two officers pinned in the front seat. They took the hit into a parked car going after the gunman’s weaving moves in and out of traffic. The EMS needs 20 minutes to fit a neck brace around the driver and pry him out from behind the wheel and another 10 minutes to get his partner, with leg injuries, into a second ambulance. And the problems don’t end there. A detective from one of the three converging commands answering the call goes down with chest pains before all the chaos, so he too needs an ambulance.

With only the dubious facilities of Woodhull Hospital nearby, the decision is made to clear Atlantic Avenue all the way down to the Flatbush Avenue Extension so the ambulances can have a clear run over the bridge to Bellevue. It falls to Arroyo and Gonzalez to close off Washington Avenue until the ambulance motorcade goes shrieking past. An hour later, after a couple of false alarms, the hunt is still on for the suspect with the gun. “Even without firing the damn thing, he rolled up a pretty good count,” Arroyo notes bitterly.

For another 79 veteran, Chris Richards, the episode ending in the hospitalization of the three cops is a typical example of “how you never take any call for granted. You can start in one place and wind up somewhere else you wouldn’t have dreamed of.” For that reason, according to the 45-year-old Bay Shore native, “the job always offers surprises, but they’re not always the kind you’re happy to have.”

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