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As job hardships go, it’s hardly the worst and ranks considerably below even false alarms for annoyance. But during a recent four-tomidnight with Police Officers Jeanne Sullivan and Jeffrey Mayo in the 102 Pct. in Richmond Hill, the stars seemed to be aligning for a special lesson on why reaching out to touch somebody in blue can be overdone.
The call to Jamaica Avenue and Dexter described a woman in a “serious dispute” with a retailer. When Sullivan and Mayo arrive, they find a woman, her teenage son, and a barber standing outside a place called The Clip Joint. Exhibit A is what the barber did to the teenager — an impeccably even cut of his raven black hair if you skipped over the two holes in the back big enough for planting trees. Clearly, the woman has come to the conclusion that the barbershop’s name isn’t just a pun; she insists on detailing every second of dialogue after she got a look at her son’s cut and dragged him back to the barber. “I told him I want my money back,” she tells the cops several times. “You don’t call this a haircut? I call this a butcher’s work. He tells me he won’t give me my money back because he had to cut those two holes. Why is that, I ask him. He says it’s because he found a fungus in those two places and had to cut them out altogether. I tell him there’s no fungus in my son’s hair, there’s just a barber who doesn’t know what he’s doing.” Sullivan and Mayo listen somberly. So do the barber and the teenager. No one contradicts anything the woman says. “So I tell him to give me back my money or I’ll call the police. He says to go ahead and call the police, so I do.” Throughout the narrative, the woman swings a fistful of bills up and down. When Sullivan gets a second, she asks why the woman is holding the money. Without missing a beat the woman says it’s the money the barber returned to her. “Excuse me, then,” Mayo chimes in. “So why did you call us if he gave you back your money?” “He wouldn’t have if I hadn’t called you.” |
The barber comes out of his daze long enough to smile and nod that the woman is right; he‘s not just a bad barber, he’s a happy one. The teenager continues staring at the traffic passing by along Jamaica Avenue, maybe wondering which car will take him to Oregon where he can grow back the hair in the holes. “Cop as club,” Mayo says a minute later in the patrol car. “You would think two grownups could work out something like that without calling in the cavalry, but sometimes it’s like a twitch.” Sullivan wonders aloud if the barber would have returned the money without the police threat. “Something we’ll never find out,” she answers herself. “Just like we’ll never find out if a call is really necessary unless we answer it. It’s the job.” The 27-year-old Sullivan, a resident of Sheepshead Bay, has been on it since getting out of the Academy in 2005. “A Sullivan tradition,” she laughs. “My father was a captain at the 101 Pct. And my uncle and cousin have been assigned to the 75 Pct. That’s no picnic.” While hardly ranking near the 75 Pct. in crime statistics, the 102 has its own problems, many of them in the category of car rip-offs. “It’s like a lot of other areas in Queens,” Mayo notes. “You’re usually only a couple of blocks away from some major highway, so it’s no great feat to break into a vehicle and be heading for another borough before the owner has even been able to raise the alarm.” Within that general context, though, the 102 has its peculiarities. Besides Richmond Hill, it covers significant parts of Kew Gardens, Woodhaven and Ozone Park, making for something of an economic and cultural hodgepodge. “On the one side, you’ve got a large Orthodox Jewish community. But then you’ve also got so many Guyanese that they call the area Little Guyana. Sprinkle in the usual pockets of African-Americans, Italians and Irish, and you have your usual urban mosaic. But if there‘s something that sticks out besides the grand larcenies, it’s the alcohol-related crime in the Guyanese community. We get an awful lot of family disputes and assaults triggered by the booze.”
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very NYPD patrol officer has been through it. The more calls a tour, the more likely a response to a situation that never needed a cop in the first place.
