It emerged subsequently that Jarmusik’s random wanderings on summons foot patrol played a big hand in the foiling of the robbers. “They cased the supermarket for a week, timed whatever car patrols went by, decided there would be no interference. What they hadn’t counted on was that it was the day we decided to take a closer look at the double parkers along Franklin Avenue.”

Given his length of time in the command, the father of a 32- year-old Corrections Officer (also named Robert) has become an expert on internal changes sheerly by default. “Some things you can’t help noticing,” he says. “When I took the test, it was a period when you’d get as many 45,000 people trying to get into the Department every year. They were working-class people attracted by the benefits. But now look at what you got! With the starting salary and the low top salary to look forward to, these people still have to live with their parents at home. What kind of incentive is that?”

And once the latest recruit has landed at the 71?

“Again, night and day. When I came on, you didn’t talk to the vets. You were seen and not heard. Today? There are no vets! These kids are being thrown into the water and told to learn how to swim. What makes it worse is that so many of them don’t even have a basic feel for the city when they first go out on patrol. That’s not a great formula for success.”

Jarmusik’s own formula for retirement is very simple. “Fishing and the Mets,” he laughs. “My wife’s a greeter for a Modell’s store. She can take care of the heavier stuff.”

— Donald Dewey

ow many ways can a cop measure his time on the job? Some mark their passage through commands and squads, others through their personal parade of commanding officers, still others through the months remaining before taking their pension. Then there’s Robert Jarmusik (“Bobby J” to his friends) who has been handing out summonses on foot for some 20 years. “I started calculating about 10 years ago,” he says, “and I figure in that time alone I’ve handed out 240,000 citations. Now you take a ballpark figure of fifteen dollars a ticket, multiply that by 240,000, and see how much money I’ve brought in for the city. And mind you, I’m not counting the summonses I handed out before I started calculating!”

The 62-year-old Jarmusik smiles at his math, and admits to doing a lot of both — smiling and math — since reporting to the 71 Pct. from the Academy in April 1970. “I’ve always been here and I’ve never regretted it,” he says. “When we were at the Academy, this command had a terrible reputation. ‘Don’t get assigned to the 71,’ they’d say. ‘Nothing good ever happens there.’And maybe back then there was some truth to it. You had guns everywhere. It was the rare tour you didn’t hear at least some guy going up to his roof to test-fire some new weapon in the air. But since then we’ve gone from an A house to a B house, and one of the things I’m most proud of is that I’m the only cop who’s been here for all three command citations. They had never gotten one before, now they have three.”

“Obviously,” he laughs to the suggestion that his arrival might account for the difference. “But in a way we’re like most other commands in the city that have seen the crime rates go down in recent years. If I knew why, I’d be selling my services to somebody instead of going out on summons patrol. But I think one factor in the 71 has to be the population shift over the last 20 years. You always had a lot of African-Americans and Hasidic Jews, and tensions between them could get really fierce. But the Caribbean immigrants who’ve come in have really gone out of their way to maintain good relations with the Hasidim.”

Jarmusik didn’t come by the ethnic politics of Brooklyn naturally. He was in fact born in Nanticoke (near Wilkes-Barre), Pennsylvania, where his father worked as a coal miner. Knowing only too well the long-range health and economic prospects in that field, the elder Jarmusik moved his wife, two sons, and daughter to Ocean Parkway, where he got a job as an apartment building superintendent.It proved to be a fateful career choice for one of his sons as much as for him. “My father died on Christmas in 1978,” Jarmusik recalls. “Part of the deal he had was that he didn’t have to pay rent as long as he was the super. So I went to the owner and said, look, I’ll take care of the building like my father did as long as you let my mother stay in the apartment. The guy agreed, and for the next 10 years I’d do a six-to-two tour here, then go be the building super for whatever needed to be done.”

Jarmusik notes (facetiously) that this routine made him a pioneer in NYPD fixed tours. “I couldn’t have done it without the C.O.s I had here. They all made sure I did the same tour so I could get to my other job. The PBA delegates were also great about it.”

But even with all that support, the veteran admits he was eventually worn down by his daily schedule. “There’s nothing mysterious about it. You just get damn tired after a while. My wife Katharine started looking at me like I had two heads trying to keep at it like that.”

If there was any blessing in the daily grind, it was that he seldom found himself policing more than illegally parked cars. “I guess the biggest exception was one day on Franklin Avenue when I was ticketing a car near a Key Food. A woman comes out and says five guys with guns are inside the supermarket robbing it. I radio for backup and get behind a parked car with my weapon waiting for them to come out. One guy does, but just then a mother and a child come down the street. The mother doesn’t see the guy with the gun, and there’s no way I can fire with her and the child there. The worst moment came when I was afraid the gunman was going to go for them, but he didn’t. The other four come running out, and they all take off down the street. We caught them all a couple of blocks away. Glad to say not a shot was fired.”