 |
|
|
  |
||
By Donald Dewey |
Photos by William Baker |
|
There’s no denying 112 Pct. police officers spend a lot of time being what one of them calls “silly busy.” In the central eastern Queens command that embraces more than 115,000 inhabitants, car and house alarms go off at a symphonic rate, pets slip out back doors into an endless game of hide-and-seek, and SUVs are constantly squeezing themselves into streets wide enough for them but not always for both them and other SUVs parked along the sidewalks. Keeping up with such calls may produce mountains of reports for every patrol team in every sector to eclipse, but nobody is going to confuse the normal 112 Pct. shift with a daily tour for, say, the 75 Pct. in East New York. |
Then there’s the other side of the coin. The 112’s field of operations is three square miles of upscale Forest Hills and the upwardly mobile Rego Park, so it’s not as if there aren’t tempting pickings for somebody dropping in on a house or an apartment when the occupant isn’t around. As patrol officer Warren Duryea puts it: “Whenever you have a neighborhood with mainly nine-to-fivers who are off to work in Manhattan all day, you also have nine-to-five burglars. They have their routines as much as the commuters going down to the subway or catching the LIRR into the city. That’s why we spend a lot of time every tour checking out alarms. It’s not always cats or batteries or some wire foul-up that sets the things off.” |
It’s not always just breaking into homes, either. Situated within an all-access circle from the Long Island Expressway, Grand Central Parkway, Jackie Robinson Parkway, and a slew of boulevards that seem to extend to the Los Angeles Freeway, the neighborhood is ideal terrain for car heists — for years the command’s number one felony problem. “We haven’t even gotten the report,” shrugs Erik DePasquale, “and they’re already taking the exit ramp somewhere in Nassau or Suffolk. You have to be lucky to grab thieves taking a car, and most of that luck is timing, getting them before they hit one of the highways around here. There’s no substitute for being nearby when the car is being lifted.” |
|
|
|
|
