What a Cop says and how he says it can matter more than his stick or his gun

By Marcus Laffey (from the New Yorker, August 10, 1998)

We say "K." It means that a radio transmission is over.The military---and just about everyone else-says "Over," and I don't know if the N.Y.RD. has any argument for the difference except difference's sake.  I'm a patrolman, so I do what I'm told.  "You O.K.? K." "A-O.K., K." It is a code, after all, and a code communicates confidentially, which is to say that it's supposed to mean nothing to most people: codes, like good children, don't talk to strangers.  But talk they do --so much so that here, behind the vaunted "blue wall of silence," it's often hard to get a word in edgewise.

If the N.Y.P.D. is becoming less and less of a fraternity, it will remain a kind of ethnicity, because ethnicity" is defined by language.  An arrest is a "Collar," but also a "pinch"; a perp can be a "skell" or a ”mope," depending on whether he's a bum or a thug.  A D.O.A. is someone who's gone E.O.T, end of tour.  "Two under" or "Ten under" is an accounting of collars, but in Transit a "man under" is not uinder arrest but under a train.  The police department, perhaps because of its paramilitary nature, has a fondness for acronyms, winch vary from the flat-footedly functional to the downright cool: the Robbery Apprehension Module descended from the Robberv Identification Program, which broadened the range of the Senior Citizens Robbery Unit.  And thus SCRU begat RIP, and RIP begat RAM, with a certain loss of panache.

    There's an odditv to cop talk, coming as it does from the shotgun marriage of street slang and legalese. The raw talk of criminals, victims, and the cops themselves is framed in the jury-rigged particularity of statutory phrases: "The alleged perpetrator called him a 'bitch-ass punk' and mooshed him, causing annoyance and alarm." To moosh is to shove in the face, and is almost  more demeaning than a slap, because of the suggestion that there is no need to add injury to insult.  Naturally, cops pick up a lot of criminal vocabulary, especially in the drug trade, where the criminal words for things are the only words there are; you can say, "He was holding a deck," or you can say, "He was holding a glassine envelope of a white powdery substance... alleged and believed to be heroin." Crack isn't usually packaged in vials anvmore but in miniature heatsealed plastic bags, which the dealers call "slabs." The official and legal term for them is "slabs" as well. To make a rule of this kind of exception would lead to indictments that read, "To wit, defendant did possess one mad fat rock of yayo."

     New York cops and robbers used to sound more like James Cagney or the Bowery Boys.  In recent decades, the accent has grown softer, but the dialect has got bigger, blockbusted with words and  rhythms from the barrio and the 'hood,' so that you can hear "Yo!  Yo!  Yo!" and "Fuhgeddaboudit!" not only in the same conversation but from the same mouth.  And the accent is by no means gone.  I recently overheard a two-minute conversation between cops which looped around one word:

     "He robbed a pawn store."
     "A porn store?"
     "Yeah, a pawn store."
     "Right, porn."
     "Pawn."
     "Porn ... o?"'

     Usually, though, the babel of the city just mixes with police jargon in striking ways as we all strive to express ourselves with bits of a hand-me-down language which don't always fit.  I was once working with an informant to obtain a search warrant for a drug dealer's house.  She was a strange crearure, a dedicated and unapologetic crackhead who now and then felt the inclination to turn in a dealer "for the mood of it." One day when she strolled into the precinct another cop alerted me to her arrival, calling out, "HEY, your girlfriend's here." She then remarked, with neither pride nor shame in the fact that her better days were behind her, "He don't want this twisted ass." And so this confidential informant, or C.I., or Charlie Ida, became known as  Twisted Ass, and the successful warrant we executed was dubbed Operation Twisted Ass.  There are also times, though, when the clipped neutrality of police jargon sounds weirdly euphemistic, as if the speaker were keeping a lifted-pinky distance from lurid circumstances.  I heard a dispatcher revise an assignment for a patrol car: "Be advised, unit, that domestic dispute is now coming over as a severed limb." And I overheard a cop recall, brightly, "Oh, sure, I was the first nonfatal shooting of 1994!  In the keister!"

Some cop talk, of course, is too colorful.  At the police academy, an instructor once told us, "There's one word that, if cops never used it at all, would do away with eighty per cent of civilian complaints." He paused for a response, and we shouted in cheerful unison, "Asshole!" He smiled.  "Correct."

     The department now trains its members in "verbal judo," a daylong course in how certain phrases and attitudes can shape interactions with the public. (A cop I know made a happy slip of the tongue, calling it "gerbil voodoo.") Although there shouldn't be any need to tell cops not to be rude, the program expounds on the strategic asset of good manners, advising a conversational stance that is plain, even obvious, and relentlessly polite.  You talk through everything, explaining who you are and what you're doing and, when faced with some form of noncompliance, you lay out the good and bad options available to both of you:

     "Good afternoon, sir.  I'm P.O. Laffey of the N.Y.PD. I'm stopping you for running a red light.  Is there any reason I should know ...

     "I understand you pay my salary, sir, but I still need to see your license…

     "Sir, if you give me your license you can be on your way in a minute, but if you don't I'll have to bring you in."

     The protocol  does work to reduce the stress of such enccounters, even if its Robocop Berlitz seems more suited to traffic stops than to heated domestic disputes.  You obviously don't begin a car stop with the phrase "Where's the fire, Grampa?" But you also don't say "You know why I pulled you over, right?" because the driver might think it has something to do with the bank he's just robbed, resulting in an exchange of gunfire instead of information.

     If you can talk a good game as a cop, you're halfway there.  The police work of action--of confrontation and force, of roundhouse punches and highspeed chases--is what makes the movies and the news, and both civilian lives and our own sometimes depend on it.  But what you say and how you say it come into play, far more than anything you do with your stick or your gun, and can even prevent the need for them.  I know cops who have talked would-be suicides down from rooftops and convinced raving gunmen to release child hostages.  More often, you talk people into talking-- just talking, instead of screaming and waving a two-by-four.  There are fighting words and the opposite: passswords that most people seem to have --some topic or tone that cuts them short or brings them down, reaches them through reason, decency, or shame.  I once watched an eight-year-old boy silence a foul-mouthed drunk in a pizza parlor by barking at him, like a headmaster, "Hey!  There's ladies here!"

     And talk tactics aren't confined to the street.  Most robberies and all drug deals are committed by members of a felony society, from suppliers and fences to all manner of partners in crime.  They know people, know things.  And, with every arrest, you make the time to persuade them to share that knowledge.  The classic interrogation, where the detectives sweet-talk, bluff, and browbeat the perp into an admission of guilt, is seldom a part of what a patrol cop does.  But when a perp wants to talk, naturally, you accommodate him.

     The first time I read someone the Miranda warnings, I had a hard time keeping a straight face; it sounded like a Joe Friday impersonation.  More to the point, in my cases, self-incrimination is rarely an issue.  As I tell them, "I don't need anything out of you, I already have you.  If you don't want to be had anvmore, give me someone better.  You're not going anywhere." The methods of persuasionare varied in style and efficiency, as any adman, poetician, or whiny child can attest.  You might try to create an intense emotional climate that permits a moment of surrender; more frequently, you gain cooperation thruough the opposite means, by presenting it as the rational choice.  You wheedle, enlighten. repeat.  I've heard the sum of these techniques referred to as "jerkology."

     When I tried to flip Anna (all the names in this piece, including my own, have been changed), a heroin dealer I had arrested, the first ten minutes brought nothing.  She was a hard-core junkie, an operator with such mileage on her that the first word that came to me when I saw her was "survivor," though it should have been the last.  She didn't look just dirty but dusty, as if she'd been left in an attic, and she had ulcerated limbs that looked as if someone had taken bites out of them.  On being questioned about whether she knew anyone who had guns or was doing robberies, she offered a bored denial, and when she was asked about the heroin spot where she worked she just shook her head.  I knew she had done state time, and I also knew a bit about the setup where she worked-- the brands, the players, the hours.  Debriefings are like poker: you have to get the perp to stay in the game, even though it's clear that you're the better player, with the better hand.  It's also unlike poker, in that if you play well you both win.

     "Anna, there's only one way you can make this go away.  You know that, right?  It's through us, right?  Talking, helping us out?  It's not through J.J.  We know him, too, and know you work for him.  Today, he was hanging on the corner while you were running your ass ragged taking money and handing out bags of dope.  And you're in cuffs and he's home, watching 'Oprah.'Yeah, Anna, it's four o'clock already!  You moved a couple hundred decks this morning for J.J.-ten bucks each, that's a couple grand.  How much did he pay you, fifty bucks?  Or did he just throw you a couple of bags for yourself?  Is he gonna send a lawyer down for you, is he gonna water your plants whlle you're away?"

     But she didn't reply.  I asked her about prison, and she said she didn't like it much.  She still owed time for parole, and she'd have to do that even before she did what she'd get for today.  She knew that, she told me, but she told me nothing else.  My mistake with Anna was to keep pitching appeals to her freedom.  She was an addict, whose life was a closed circuit of having it and needing it, and nothing I could offer would affect her truly solitary confinement.  But she'd been talking, and I wanted to keep her talking.  I asked if she had kids.  She flinched, and asked for another cigarette.  She nodded.

     I changed the subject back to her dealing that day, describing customers, lookouts, and so on --authoritative blather to lead her to believe we had her down.  Then I asked her what her kids' names were.  As she said them --"Fernando and Lucy"-it was as if she were watching them sleep.  Then she breathed deeply, and softly began, "J.J. keeps it in the corner building, on the second floor, the first door on the right.  He brings enough for the day, from another stash house in the middle of the block." At that moment, I felt that I had jerkologically arrived.

     Often the problem isn't getting to people to talk but getting them to tell the truth: cops hear lies so often that they're almost background noise --an aggravating fact of the real estate, as if you lived next to the subway or the airport.  I've seen liar prodigies, virtuoso liars, thinking man's liars, lowdown liars, and liars from the heart.  One enormous woman bellowed at me as I took a crack vial from her open hand, "You planted that there!," which reminded me of the Richard Pryor line about,a man whose wife caught him in bed with another woman: "You gonna believe me, or your lying eyes?" (My liar followed up with at least one unassailable truth: "You can't take me to jail, I don't have a bra on.  Look!") My favorites are the liars who can provide limitlessly elastic explanations for whv things are not the way they seem.  When I arrested a heroin dealer named Ray, he explained to me that he was in the building only because he was waiting for his aunt, and that he let serial junkies in because they might know where she was, and that the reason he had more than six hundred dollars in his pocket was, obviously, that his wife just had a baby shower and it was money for a crib.... In another instance, a would-be informant confessed, in persuasive detail, to a spree of violent felonies, but my initial thrill at his capture melted away as hours of research failed to produce a scrap of documentary evidence of these crimes.  I took consolation in considering the little miracle of his halfdozen putative victims suddenly restored to health and safety, unrobbed, unstabbed, unshot.

     Most people who call the police are credible, because their reasons for doing so are obvious: they are hurt, or sick, or have had something stolen.  And you encourage them to talk --to ventilate or rant in case they come up with some vital detail (my favorite witness: "He was tall!  Five-ten!  Maybe even five-twelve!") or, sometimes, give themselves enough rope.  Everyone has the right to be heard, but no one has an absolute right to be believed. When a robbery victim told me that three white men in white suits broke into her apartment, locked her in the bathroom, and made off with her cigarettes, I felt that I had to question her further before I put out an A.P.B. for the Bee Gees.  When I first suggested calling for an ambulance, she shook her head.

     "Sometimes you don't know if you're hurt right away," I continued.  "With the shock of it, and all, it's best to be safe and check.  Are you under any kind of treatment right now, do you take any medicine?"

     She nodded, and I asked what for.
     "For the voices."

     You have to ask.  The quality of the information you get is only as good as what you ask for, vetted through repetition and playback, prodded along for further detail, probed for the soft spots in the story as if for dry rot in a wall.  Even so, you should still expect to get it wrong sometimes.  On patrol, you can find yourself embroiled in plotlines that if you saw them in a movie would have you flinging popcorn at the screen.  When I went to testify to the grand jury after a rape arrest, I was greeted by the A.D.A. with the eight words I least expected, or wanted, to hear: "You know he has an identical twin, right?" The technical term for that kind of situation is "cluster fuck."

     There's a biting old adage favored by cops which I admire, not least because it advises a guarded appraisal of the saying itself.  "Believe half of what you see, and none of what you hear." Like a lot of cop talk, its sardonic double meaning says something and denies it at the same time.  I don't mean the way cops misspeak to each other for a purpose, like when P.O. Tony tells his partner, P.O. Mike, "Hey, Pete, this guy's O.K." and he's really telling Mike that he isn't--that he has a weapon.  You might better understand this ambiguity by looking at the word "buff," which can convey several shades of insult.  A buff is a green idealist, and it suits a rookie to be a kind of buff, to have more heart than brains.  A buff can also be a too serious type who looks in the mirror arid sees Eliot Ness, and whose ego makes him difficult, and occasionally dangerous, to work with.  To say that a veteran cop is a buff can be a compliment --though one best made behind his back-- because it means he's found a way to take things seriously and lightly in turn that still allows him to do good and have fun.  Or it means he's a bit demented.  But if the fact that it's a dig, however affectionate (a cop is entitled to buff out a little after a good collar), seems to say something cynical about cop culture, consider that the opposite of "buff " is "hairbag," which is straightforwardly bad, and means a bitter and burned-out complainer.  A possible inference is that faith and doubt can be equally blind.  Or you could say, "My advice is, Don't take my advice."

     In this complex private language, a handful of statements remain unambiguous, however, and the radio code "10-13"--for "Officer needs assistance' --is both the plainest speech and the most forceful.  Since the code "10-85" is also a call for aid, ranging from administrative assistance ("I need a unit to eighty-five me with an accident report, Central") to certain high levels of urgency ("Eighty-five, Central, forthwith, large crowd with baseball bats, be advised this is a solo unit"), there's an etiquette to calling a 10-13 --respect for its authority of last resort.  It has elements of both shouting "Fire!" and saying the Hail Marv. When you hear it oil the radio it shuts you up and raises vour heart rate: the air clears, the white noise turns church-quiet, and it's as if the hundreds of cops in a division, in all the precincts and cars and street corners for a few square miles, have gone into a sprinter's crouch.  The voice that calls it can be nearly breathless with terror, and the background noise can tell of gunshots or a raving mob, but the number itself, no matter how it's spoken, has an autonomous and radical power.

     I would have guessed that this particillar code came from misfortune --the superstitions about the number itself --and there's a logic to that, for no one calls a 10-13 on a lucky day.  But its association with disaster has given it an equallv strong sense of rescue --a "10-13" is also the name for the benefit parties that cops throw for other cops, usually to help with a medical expense, therebv defining it as both the call for help and the help itself.  And so I was glad to hear (from a non-cop friend, who is a bit of a buff himself) that the code has its source in a Biblical phrase.  Chapter ten, verse thirteen (10:13) of the Epistle of Paul to the Romans reads, "For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved." The thought of old commissioners slyly encrypting police codes with heavenly messages is hard to resist.  But I take it the way I take most everything cops say and hear --that is, everything below the level of lawful orders and sworn testimony, everything that needs to be interpreted instead of obeyed.  You believe it if you like, ignore it at your risk, but listen, always, if you hope to understand.