Making the public defender happy

 
 
 
I yank the kid up by the collar and demand to know his name.
We are in the stairway between the 341st and the 342nd floor of a 500-floor town on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
The boy’s shirt tears a little and an all-too-familiar alarm goes off in my head.
“Careful now, Brokowsky,” the imported thought tells me. “You know the rules about excessive force.”
The thought makes me angry and not only because I know how wrong it is in today’s law enforcement environment, but because I believe the concept of internal police affairs has gone too far with their God damn implants.
In my father’s day and his father’s before him, we relied on a cop’s integrity.
But these days people think we as much of an animal as the criminals we catch and watch us more because we carry and badge and a gun, and collect a paycheck paid for by taxpayers.
My fingers loosen on the boy’s collar.
The boy is 15 maybe younger.
Yet if my suspicions are correct, he’s already a big-time hoodlum in this building and is likely responsible for a string of burglaries and rapes around the senior citizen population a few dozen floors above where we are now.
Again, I demand to know the boy’s name, telling him I don’t want to have to use “the whip.”
The boy’s brown eyes grow wide with fear at the mention of the psychic whip.
But his lips press tighter to continue his silence.
I know who the boy is.
The confrontation monitor inside my helmet visor read it from his retinas the moment I spotted him.
I need him to confirm it for the video record.
The voices in my head – already buzzing over my use of excessive force – insisted do the rest precisely by the book.
I transmit my protest, point out with an insistent thought that this brat has already killed two old ladies today and its only ten hundred hours.
They respond coolly telling me the last thing any of us need is the public defender’s office on our backs again.
The boy knows about the voices in my head and laughs a little at my helplessness.
Yet he’s not so cocky to think I won’t flip out and use the super, super ego in my head or not.
Plenty of cops like me have ended their careers by saying, “fuck it” and teaching at least one punk how thin protection the public defender actually provides.
Hiding this thought give me a headache and I curse myself for indulging in it, rather than waiting for that privacy hour when the monitors go off – one hour in 24 when a cop can make live to his wife or cheat on her without it being recorded by internal affairs.
Again, I ask the boy his name, then push the matter a little by asking if he is Jeremiah Jones.
He gives a not. But this is not enough.
Regulation says he has to say it, or we can’t use it in court.
Yet a nod is as good as a wink – enough for us to haul him in for questions and get him the hell out of the halls long enough to interrupt his crime spree for a few precious hours.
He’ll complain, of course, and the public defender would review these tapes to see if I complied with all the rules.
A shirt button from the boy’s shirt lies near the boy’s feet and I kick it down the stairs, hearing it plink echo through the stair well as it tumbles.
Destruction of evidence, my own thought says.
I tell the kid to get lost.
No bust, no internal investigation, and I keep my job for another day.
The boy grins and flees, his footsteps following after the button as if after some great treasure.
I know and he knows, he won’t stop.
Someone else will get hurt tonight.
Someone else will die.
But I follow the rules.
I get to keep my job, even if I’m not doing it.
I hope internal affairs is happy.
I know the public defender will never be.



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