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arry Thompson wonders why cops can’t be victims of their own success. He’s hardly the only one to ask that, but he puts the question more succinctly than most. “It’s like Police Plaza has lost all sense of everyday reality and passes along that mindset to every boss in the five boroughs,” he says. “You have, say, 10 of something. Your patrols go out and eliminate, say, eight of those 10. Big slaps on the back, congratulations all around. Until the next reporting period when you can’t duplicate eliminating eight because there aren’t eight to be eliminated anymore. ‘Oh, well, we don’t want to hear any excuses,’ they say. ‘If you eliminated eight one period, you should be able to eliminate at least that same number the next time. We have to show consistent progress with our numbers.’ It’s like they’re operating in this big nonsensical void. The more successful the cop on patrol is, the more irritated they are because the numbers are going to have go down next period. Sometimes you wonder if these numbers maestros wouldn’t prefer the crime rate to keep going up every time we do something to lower it. At least then they might get this paper consistency they’re always crying about.”

A PBA delegate since 1993, the 43-year-old Thompson has viewed the numbers mania promoted by Compstat from PSA 7, the Housing unit he joined directly from the Academy in 1987. After spending most of his years on patrol, he moved to Crime Analysis in 2006. “My wife just had enough of me out in the streets,” laughs the father of a teenage son and the step-father of three other youngsters in their twenties. “She especially hated me doing midnights. So after 17 years of that, she said enough was enough, I should get to know other parts of the clock every day.”

Thompson concedes that his wife’s apprehensions weren’t completely out of order. “I’ve had a few incidents I could have done without,” he says. “One time I got shot by what they call friendly fire. Another time I was sitting in my car when some genius sharpshooter decided to see how much damage he could do to my turret lights. He wasn’t all that bad.”

His single worst moment on the job, though, was a third occasion. “The friendly fire and the turret lights, they kind of penetrated after they had already happened. But back in 1993, it was all out in front. A couple of characters rob a drug den, and they’re making their getaway as we arrive on the scene. One runs down the street, the other into a building. I go after the guy in the building. I see his gun, but when I’d been up against anything like that before, the perp usually got rid of the gun, wanted to put some distance from the possession rap. This one, though, no way. He turns back and gets off three shots. We go back and forth until we get him trapped in a courtyard, then he finally surrenders. I was still thinking about how else that might have ended weeks later.”

Like other PSA 7 cops, Thompson notes the steep drop in the command’s crime figures over the last decade. “We still have a little bit of everything, but that’s better than a lot of everything,” he says. “In so many cases you get to thinking, ‘Well, it could be a lot worse — and in fact was worse.’

“One good example is the gangs around the projects. Sure, we have Bloods and Crips, but we probably spend more time with locals like the Johnson Avenue Gunners. They’re really homemade gangs, trying to style themselves into neighborhood importance. When they get tired just strutting around in front of the people they’re trying to impress, they’ll pull off a lowlevel robbery here and there. I’m not saying they can’t be dangerous, but they’re not exactly what you would call major league, either.”

Talk of what is and what isn’t major league gets the Bethpage native around to the image of the Housing police within the NYPD. “It’s no secret that the merger hasn’t changed some minds about us within the traditional NYPD. I can’t tell you how often you come across this attitude of ‘Well, if they were serious cops, they wouldn’t be in Housing.’ Over the radio the word Housing sometimes comes across as the next worst thing to a sneer. ‘Well, if Housing’s reported it, how important can it be?’ For want of a better word, let’s just call that attitude naïve. The fact of the matter is with a command like ours, 22 housing projects within our sectors, we have to deal with more nuts and bolts than they do. We’re not out there for pickpockets or traffic accidents. When we get called to a project, there’s usually very little accidental about what went down.”

Doesn’t that sound a little tit for tat?

“I guess it does,” Thompson shrugs. “But sometimes you can get so tired of that superior attitude. And it’s not always the older, pre-merger guys you get it from. Some of the younger ones are barely out of the Academy and assigned to a precinct, and right away they’re in a more professional place than we are. There are people in PSA 7 who have had more street experiences than some of these guys will ever have.”

When push comes to shove, though, even Thompson would give a pass to Housing’s image among fellow cops in exchange for more honest and rational administration approaches for everybody. “When I have to think of the biggest disappointment I’ve had on the job, I’d have to say it’s seeing how little the brass backs you up when there’s anything remotely like controversy. Even when they’re the ones goading you into some course of action that might prompt a civilian complaint, they don’t want to hear about it once there actually is a complaint. You’re on modified duty or whatever, and that’s all there is to it. It’s not honest, and it does nothing at all for relations between the bosses and the rank and file.”

In one sense, though, such frictions don’t surprise the PBA delegate. “The longer you stay around, the more you have to wonder if anyone at Police Plaza has a long-term view of the job or even cares about having one. First, you get this obsession with numbers that always seems to be more about an accountant’s view of the last month than about the overall picture in a given command. Then you get this crazy practice lately of having the last previous class in a command being the teachers of the new one. Once upon a time you needed years to be given a field-training task. Does anybody upstairs really believe that’s the best way for breaking in people? Or haven’t they thought about it all? How can you not wonder if some of this stuff has been thought through?”

When Thompson isn’t thinking about what others might not have thought about, he says he is content at home relaxing and playing video games. “I’m no great vacationer. The Poconos sometimes, but I’m fine at home, especially with the last of the brood still around.”

Of course, there is always that state called Arizona or something like that. “I’ve been thinking about it a long time. Three more years here, and who knows? Is it a good thing or a bad thing that so much of it is desert after all my years here in this city beehive? I guess there’s only one way to find out.”