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For the moment, though, it’s drivers more than tenants who are triggering the radio calls. The next summons is also to a vehicular accident, this time at 165th Street and the Grand Concourse. Contributing to the smashup between a green Explorer and blue Fusion were the orange traffic cones spread around the street like wild chess pieces to keep traffic away from a building under construction. “We just went for the same narrow strip they left us,” the Fusion driver says with the air of somebody who’s been up against lousy ground rules before. “What’re you going to do?” The answer is another round of licenses and insurance cards. And like the drivers in the middle of the Cross Bronx Expressway, these two also do a good job of suppressing any irritation with each other. Reyes is impressed. “It’s like there’s a keep-calm spray or something in the air today,” he says, as they move on to the next call. But perhaps he spoke too soon: The dispatcher announces an EDP in action on Jerome Avenue. But when Delio and Reyes arrive at the first-floor apartment where the trouble has been reported, there is no one inside. Only then does the dispatcher clarify that the call had actually been from a psychiatric ward reporting that an outpatient had not shown up for his meds for more than a week. As Delio puts it, “I don’t know if that call should have been 311, 411, 511, or 811, but it shouldn’t have been 911.” For Reyes, the false alarm is a reminder of the most embarrassing bum steer he ever got from his radio.
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“It wasn’t too long after I got here in 1999, and the call says a kid has reported a burglary in progress in his apartment. We get on the scene, and I suppose the first surprise I had was that the kid wasn’t some 10-year-old, but a guy close to 20. Okay, he’s still a kid in some peoiple's eyes, so no big deal. And sure enough, he says he was about to put his key in the lock and he hears all this scuffling around inside. Since his mother is off at work and his father left the family years before, it’s got to be a burglar, right? Guns drawn, we inch open the door. We see nothing, but behind the bedroom door on the other side of the living room there’s some noise. We tiptoe over. I throw open the door — and see the mother and father completely naked making it on the bed! She sees the guns, starts shrieking. He looks like we’re there to rob him or something! It was probably only seconds, but it seemed to go on forever — her running around the bedroom naked, him staring at us like we’re the Second Coming, and us standing there trying to make sense of this great burglary!” On-the-job laughs prompt Delio to shake his head at some of the changes beyond those relating to crime he has seen since first reporting to the 44 Pct. “The most obvious one has been in the neighborhood itself,” he says. “Where once you had Irish and Jews and then you had African-Americans and Puerto Ricans, now you probably have Dominicans as the single largest group with the African-Americans second.” “Not to mention African-Africans,” Reyes puts in. Delio nods. “Right. There’re a couple of blocks here with African stores, mostly Ghanaians and Nigerians.” |
