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The 35-year-old Reyes can’t say he didn’t know what to expect when he went on the job. Born within the shadow of the 44 Pct., he has been attached to the Bronx command since graduating from the Academy in April 1999. The father of a boy and girl and now a resident of Queens Village, he admits to deep Bronx roots. “You don’t shake a neighborhood like this,” he says. “It’s had some rough times, especially back in the 1980s and early 1990s, but it gets into your blood. Even the soot from the Number 5 train gets in it!” There’s no question the clattering Number 5 will shake something down into your blood if you drive under it long enough. Certainly, for a neighborhood that alternates Smalltime Industrial, Slapdash Prefab, and Once-Upon-a-Time Irish-andJewish New York, its most distinctive feature might be the various elevations crowding its skyline. In addition to the Number 5 train, the horizon is spotted with the GW, High Bridge (the oldest span in the city), the Metro North track, and the present and future upper decks of Yankee Stadium. And this is without counting some of the steepest streets outside of San Francisco. In some NYPD commands things are looking up; in the 44 Pct. the people do.
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Like his partner, Delio, who has spent most of his 37 years in Putnam County, has worked the area exclusively since getting out of the Academy, in his case since March 1996. “I got in just when things were starting to cool down around here,” the father of two boys says. “Back in the 1980s you had more than a hundred killings a year. When I got here it was down to the forties. Now it’s about 25.” The command has also undergone manpower cutbacks and now has about 300 officers covering the command’s 1.97 square miles. The biggest crime problem? “Nothing you don’t get in other precincts,” Delio replies. “Cocaine is still around. Gun a kid in some people’s eyes, so no big deal. And sure enough, calls are pretty common. And wherever you have so many he says he was about to put his key in the lock and he hears all apartment houses in a lower middle-class neighborhood you’re going to have family disputes, a lot of them started by arguments over money. The stress just gets to people after a while, and they explode.” |
