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Otero shakes his head as he and Brannon drive off. “It’s going to cost that store guy hundreds, not to mention the arrest, for those broken windows. And for what? A $20 chain you can pick up at any flea market!” Still, Otero also notes another moral of the story. “It’s what Ian said before about trusting your mouth. In this case, the guy talked himself into his trouble. We didn’t have to wrench anything out of him. Let your tongue do the talking. That’s what you still have to convince some guys on the job of. Anybody can be a tough guy. Where does it get you most of the time except for a civilian complaint? The key is managing a scene.” “Even when it looks impossible!” Brannon laughs, going on to tell one of the hairier moments he had while patrolling the projects by himself. “I get a domestic disturbance call, and there’s this guy waiting for me, he must have been 6’9” or 6’10”. Right out of some weightlifter’s gym or something. The first thing he says to me is, ‘Yeah, I beat her up.’ And the second thing is: ‘You better call more cops because I’m sure as hell not going with just you.’ The next 10 minutes were about the longest 10 minutes I’ve had on the job. I tell him he’s better off talking to me before anybody else shows up. He wants to know why. I tell him it’s because I’m a nice guy and everybody likes talking to me. He gives me a smile, and we go from there. He doesn’t give it up right away, but finally he agrees to be cuffed.” Although that incident ended without violence, both Brannon and Otero have had their close calls with weapons pointed in their direction. For the Belizean, it was when he answered a domestic disturbance call to the 16th floor of a project, apparently only brief minutes after a knife-wielding thug ran off from threatening a girl friend. But even as Brannon was questioning the woman, he became more and more aware of sounds behind a hall door that led to a building terrace. Sure enough, his quarry was waiting behind the door with his blade. “I don’t know how we managed it, but we got the knife away from him and put him in cuffs without firing a shot.” Otero’s chilling moment came when he and a partner responded to a gun call in one of the projects. Just as they came on the scene, they saw three teenagers dropping their hardware in a dumpster and taking off into the bowels of the complex. Rather than pursue the unarmed trio who-knew-where, they waited them out in the hope the teens would think the cops hadn’t seen the gun dump and come back for the weapons. They did — sort of. When an elevator door opened some 40 minutes later, a fourth member of the band came out wielding a shotgun. “Lucky for us,” Otero shakes his head at the memory, “he was as surprised to see uniforms as we were to see the shotgun. He dropped it right away, and we got them all. It came out later they were getting ready for a shootout with another gang in the project.”
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Both cops admit their preference for midnight tours. In Otero’s words, “it’s usually a lot clearer at that hour what you’re up against. You see a guy running down the street at three in the afternoon, he might be trying to flag down a bus. If the same guy is running at three in the morning, you get a pretty good idea he hasn’t been up to the Lord’s work.” The next call, around seven in the evening, is no respecter of the clock — a street shooting at Home and Prospect with one reported victim. By the time Brannon and Otero get there, a fulldress crime scene is taking shape. What gets pieced together is that two joy boys cruised down Home opening up with .9mm Glocks and a woman went down with a shot in her foot. There was no evidence that the shooters were aiming at her or at anyone else specifically before speeding off again. Brannon and Otero join the police fan around the area. Their first task is a vertical through the adjoining Davidson Houses. This produces some nice rooftop views of the surrounding Bronx, but not much more. Like everyone else on patrol, their second task is to keep an eye out for the flimsily described shooters and their car. Along the way, they respond to a call to the Melrose Houses, where a group of teenagers jabbering aloud in a courtyard has induced a tenant to call 911 with a disorderly conduct complaint. Neither cop has much enthusiasm for what turns out to be less than the crime of the century, and they are saved by a radio call alerting them to the possible discovery of the drive-by shooting car from Home and Prospect. Another patrol on the scene of what matches the description of the shooters’ car points off toward the commercial area where the vehicle’s two occupants were last seen fleeing. Brannon and Otero head off after them with the slim hope that anybody seen running won’t just be chasing a bus. “Too many people at this hour,” Brannon says. “You get too many houses, you get too many people,” Otero seconds. — Donald Dewey’s latest book is The Art of Ill Will: The Story of American Political Cartoons. |
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Above: A rooftop view of the shooting scene responded to by Officers Otero and Brannon.
Above: The shooting scene, viewed horizontally and vertically. 