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erry Grayson may be the ultimate insider in the NYPD. Most immediately, he is the plant manager of the 34 Pct. in the Washington Heights area of upper Manhattan. This hasn’t made for many radio calls since taking on the maintenance and administrative job in 1990, but it has given him an expert’s knowledge in what the walls, floors, ceilings, pipes, and garbage cans of the command will bear. The answer is as much as possible, at least if he can help it.

But beyond the title he has been wearing for almost two decades, the 55-year-old Grayson’s perspective on what goes on inside the NYPD has been seasoned by experiences that predate his assignment to the 34 and even his own graduation from the Academy. In fact, the Manhattan native has directly or indirectly been involved with just about every organizational arm of the department.

“I guess you could say it started with my mother. She was on the job for the full 20 — in the days when they didn’t want women out on patrol, but always found a desk for them. Between 1955 and 1975 she worked at NYPD headquarters, then at the 28 Pct.”

Then there was an uncle in Housing who gave him insights into what people sometimes did to each other within the walls of their own apartments. “I can’t say I was ever pressured into going on the job,” Grayson says, “but cop talk was never a rare thing around the house. One of those deals where you’re picking up things without realizing you’re picking them up.”

For all that, it took a few years to pick up the idea of wearing blue. There were several other jobs first, most conspicuously with the Transit Authority and the Post Office. But then in 1982 he joined the Transit Police, and two years later, in the pre-merger days, graduated from the NYPD Academy. “The Transit job itself was okay. I worked out of District Three. But it became pretty clear pretty fast that you couldn’t make any move there without losing your seniority. With every new assignment I was given, I was starting off from scratch again, the newest kid on the block. I’d like to say I had more heroic reasons for moving over to the NYPD, but it was basically because of that feeling of never being able to get anywhere in Transit.”

Assigned to the 34 Pct. in July 1984, Grayson went on patrol in some of the worst days in Washington Heights. “You got less than 25 or 30 calls on a tour,” he laughs, “you thought you were taking the day off. Absolutely everything was going down, and not much of it was good. Guns, drugs, domestic beefs — just name it.”

By the veteran’s own admission, the incessant grind of running from river to river began to wear him down. “You had this constant stress, and it wasn’t just because of the perps you had to deal with. There seemed to be this built-in thing with the bosses who’d arrive on the scene, listen to what you reported, then go on as if you were a liar or at least not telling them the whole truth. After awhile, you started wondering why they put you out on the street in the first place, if they didn’t trust what you told them. And the record seemed to mean nothing. Your story ends up checking out down to the smallest detail, but the next time you have an arrest, they come around with the same skepticism about what you’re telling them. It was that Transit feeling all over again — no matter how good you were at your job, you always seemed to be starting from scratch.”

If some cops worn to that edge might have decided to choose a different line of work altogether, Grayson fell into his plant manager’s position. “You had houses that looked on the verge of collapse because of bad maintenance. Sometimes they make it sound like all the new houses built in the 1990s was part of some great plan. The fact is, too many of them were ready to crumble on their own. They had to replace them, before somebody got hurt. You’d walk into the 34 Pct. and think the walls had been painted brown because of all the tobacco smoke on them. I’d hear a pipe go clink and wonder where the eruption was going to come from. The lights would blink out, the radios or phones would go off. Maybe I didn’t know how everything was supposed to work at the beginning, but I knew how it shouldn’t have been working, and that was what you had.”

The worst scenes since he has been managing the building on Broadway between 182nd and 183rd streets? “A couple of floods. One was water in the basement — almost regulation. But the other was three inches of gasoline. That was tricky — very tricky — to clean up.”

As the precinct’s jack-of-all-trades, Grayson has seen legions of officers come and go, and recent trends haven’t exactly delighted him. “I’m from the city, so right away when I went on the job, there were fewer surprises than you’d get with some kid from the Island or Rockland or some other suburb. I’m from the generation that still remembers when the subways were called the IND, IRT, and BMT, not all these numbers and letters. And that’s not just nostalgia. When I tell one of the kids involved in some subway call that the newer trains need more stopping time than the older ones or make a point about the differences in walking the tracks between an IRT or BMT train, they shake their heads like so what, what difference does that make? Well, it sure as hell does make a difference if you don’t watch where you’re stepping. It’s not just that they don’t think what I’m telling them is important, it’s that they can’t imagine the city as a whole has these little peculiarities that make it different from where they grew up and that they better learn about them if they intend surviving as real city cops.”

Which leads Grayson to one of his peeves about the Academy. “They do their job there, I’m not saying they don’t. But that doesn’t mean they can’t do it better. We can all do better at what we’re doing. And when you get these raw recruits in there either already with the attitude that they know everything or developing that attitude at the end of their training, well, seems to me that’s the right time to pull them closer and say, ‘Hold on, now. You’re about to go out on the city streets. You don’t know everything and whatever you’ve learned here shouldn’t get you thinking that way.’”

Another gripe is how some of the numbers issued by Police Plaza end up being the cart leading the horse. “Anybody out on the street knows there’s as much unreported crime as there is reported crime. You also don’t have to be a genius to see how on paper some felonies get massaged into misdemeanors or are made to look like nothing at all in the name of bragging about lower crime statistics. The upshot is you get cutbacks on sector cars because who needs too many if nothing’s happening? You saw the latest crime stats, didn’t you?”

In his 27th year on the job, Grayson sees no need to think about other horizons. “I like what I’m doing,” he says simply. “And when it gets to be a little too much, I get into my van and go off somewhere for supper. The crab cakes in Baltimore, for example. I really like them.”

He goes to Baltimore for supper?

“Sometimes,” he nods as though talking about Brooklyn. “Once I’m in that van, I’m stress-free. You let the stress get to you, it’s your own fault.”