Jimmy Helliesen has a lot of history with the 79 Pct., and that’s fitting for more than one reason. Most obviously, the Manhattan native’s 23 years in uniform have included three different stints with the Brooklyn North command, the first dating from his initial NSU assignment after graduating from the Academy in 1984, the latest now in its fifteenth year. Then there is his passion for history with a capital H — the kind we all learned sitting at elementary school desks but that has taken up much of Helliesen’s adult free time through the historical reenactment movement that has been in full bloom around the country. How many other NYPD officers do you know who not only wear moccasins and leggings on weekends, but sew them together from scratch?

Especially in light of his avocation, the 45-year-old Helliesen has more than a passing appreciation of the changes that have come over the 79 since he first walked into the Tompkins Avenue stationhouse as a rookie. “It’s not quite night and day,” he says, “but it’s damn close. When I came on the job here, you had up to 70 homicides a year. Now you get a fraction of that. Most of them were drug-related, but even that’s changed a little. Now it’s usually crack behind the shootings and knifings we have. Back in the 1980s and early 1990s it was almost always heroin. I don’t know if that makes for a quality-of-life change, but the body count at the end of every year is much, much less.”

For Helliesen, one of the primary factors in the change has been the increased property values. “Some neighborhoods, they go from seedy to seedier and it never gets better because there’s nothing particularly attractive underneath all the eyesores. But around here, like around lots of places in Brooklyn, you’ve got these very attractive, structurally sound houses that really just need an overhauling, not even a full gutting sometimes, to be appealing to people. The realtors certainly haven’t missed that. You got some of them even selling the neighborhood now as South Williamsburg instead of Bed-Stuy. A lot of young people with money are buying that pitch and moving in. The area isn’t going to be transformed overnight, but it’s on its way to even bigger changes.”

But, as Helliesen is also the first to concede, that is still the future, not the present, and “people are still afraid to come out of their houses in some sections.” According to the veteran, “it’s not even always about some fear of being the target of an assault or a robbery, just about turning the wrong corner at the wrong time and getting caught up in some gunplay between two characters who couldn’t care less about who else is on the street.”

But sometimes locking yourself up in an apartment isn’t the answer, either. “Let’s just say you don’t get all that surprised when you’re called to an apartment and you find a corpse that’s been rotting there a few days. The neighbors don’t think it’s odd that somebody hasn’t come out the door for a week, so they don’t call us. In a way, that kind of death is just a different type of casualty of the streets.”

Helliesen himself has had his share of grim moments while on patrol. “Maybe the worst,” he recalls, “was back in the bad old days when my partner and I got a call about somebody getting into a cab with a shotgun. We only found out about it later, but the perp suddenly asks the cab driver what his birthday was. The driver goes, ‘Huh?’ The perp says, ‘I’m the Zodiac Man. Let’s see if you’re going to have a good day or a bad day. When’s your birthday?’ Somehow the cabbie gets out from behind the wheel and runs off. When we arrive on the scene, the perp is just walking down the street with his shotgun. We yell for him to stop. He aims his shotgun at my partner. We both fire, hitting the guy three times. He was dead before he hit the sidewalk.”

But as harrowing as that experience was, Helliesen admits to worse emotional hangovers from the numerous times he has been called on to administer CPR. “I know every cop in the city has probably had to do it,” he says, “but I’ve done it six times already. The first time was a six-week-old baby who was just about gone when I got there. Another time, a four-year-old rolled over on his three-month-old brother. Then there was a baby born prematurely in a shower. I had to cut the umbilical cord that time. A little while after that, a guy collapsed of a heart attack on the street. I got him back, but he ended up living only another couple of weeks. They start adding up after awhile, and especially when they die despite all you’ve done, it can be a heavy feeling.”

Given the steady action in his command even in light of the radical reduction in felonies in recent years, Helliesen is at a loss to explain some attitudes from the Police Plaza brass. “Sometimes we have to get along with just three sector cars at night because of some administrative priority in the city that has more to do with paperwork than real need. That’s not making safety the priority it has to be.”

And the reason for such attitudes? “As far as I’m concerned, you have no emphasis on patrol because the people who should be emphasizing it have very little experience in it. They don’t realize how important it is because they themselves have done it for maybe 10 minutes before being moved to some desk job. I guess you could say that in an ideal NYPD they would be forced to do some sensitivity training in that area.”

The Woodmere resident sees that same perspective leaking down in the training of new officers. “When I came on the job, you had people with fifteen years-plus around. They had been on the streets a long time, knew the ins and outs. Now you get some of these coddled college graduates who are in uniform a few minutes and right away they get assigned to unmarked cars. The traditional rookie ropes are a thing of the past. It used to be a given, for example, that if you were a new face, you’d draw all the dog duties for a while — sitting on rotting DOAs until they were removed from the scene, keeping watch on some burgled premises, that kind of thing. But the new guys, they can’t be touched.”

One of the improvements he says he has witnessed in the 79 and elsewhere in the department, however, has been the quality of union leadership. “Brooklyn North Trustee Ralph Tomeo and the other members of the PBA team looking out for us from 40 Fulton St. are working hard on our behalf and we appreciate it,” he said.

Although he says he personally couldn’t imagine working any other tour after 15 years of doing nights, Helliesen acknowledges the cost of fixed shifts. “I don’t think it’s any secret by now — you end up with three commands within every command. I don’t know three-quarters of the people in here anymore. The fixed tours have been devastating socially. Maybe the tradeoff is that you get even closer to the people always working your schedule. The midnight people, especially, seem pretty close.”

Helliesen isn’t without his extracurricular options, either. As vice-president of the Viking Association, he has been active in the group’s monthly meetings and the organization of such activities as the annual Norwegian Independence Day parade in Bay Ridge. He also has an 11-year-old daughter he spends “every minute I can with.”

And then there is his very physical embrace of American history.

“I was always interested in history, and the reenactment movement can be both instructive and fun. I guess the term Living History covers most of what we do. We have historical camping and hunting outings. It could be the French-and-Indian-War period or the fur-trade era, the Old West, the American Revolution, you name it.”

But it’s not exactly like a vacation trip to traditional Williamsburg, either. “If you really want to get the most out of it, you should try to do as much as you can the way people used to do it. I’ve made moccasins and leggings, done forge work, crewed on replicas of Henry Hudson’s Half Moon. I just did a trade scenario, for instance, showing how the Senecas used to barter. That’s really not something you’d understand fully unless you were standing there and doing it, imagining how people had once had to do it to survive. Short of that, just standing around and looking at glass cases or something, you might as well be at the movies. Living history means not just dressing up and playing, but getting a real sense of what it meant to live in another time. It’s history because it happened a long time ago. It’s living because it’s happening again through you.”

And when the 79 Pct. stops happening through him?

Helliesen laughs. “What else? A farm in Pennsylvania if I’m lucky. I can be the first to see the Indians coming.”

— Donald Dewey