The Force. Don Winslow
that Torres is a piece of shit. He’s a big motherfucker, Torres, but to Malone he looks like a big, brown, pockmarked Puerto Rican toad.
Torres nods to Malone. It somehow manages to be a gesture of acknowledgment, respect and challenge at the same time.
Sykes walks in and stands behind the lectern like a professor. He’s young for a captain, but then again he has rabbis at the Puzzle Palace, brass looking out for his interests.
And he’s black.
Malone knows that Sykes has been tagged as the next big thing, and that the Manhattan North Special Task Force is a high-profile box for him to tick on his way up.
To Malone he looks like some precocious Republican Senate candidate—very crisp, very clean, his hair cut short. He sure as hell don’t have any tattoos, unless there’s an arrow pointing up his asshole reading This Way to My Brain.
That isn’t fair, Malone thinks, checking himself. The guy’s record is solid, he did some real police work on Major Crimes in Queens and then became the Job’s designated precinct janitor—he cleaned up the Tenth and the Seven-Six, real dumping grounds, and now they’ve moved him here.
To check another box on his sheet? Malone wonders.
Or to clean us up?
In either case, Sykes brought that Queens attitude with him.
Squared away, by the book.
A Queens Marine.
Sykes’s first day on command he had the whole Task Force—fifty-four detectives, undercovers, anticrime guys and uniforms—come in, sat them down and made a speech.
“I know I’m looking at the elite,” Sykes said. “The best of the best. I also know I’m looking at a few dirty cops. You know who you are. Soon, I’ll know who you are. And hear this—I catch any of you taking as much as a free coffee or a sandwich, I’ll have your shield and gun, I’ll have your pension. Now get out, go do your jobs.”
He didn’t make any friends, but he made it clear that he wasn’t there to make friends. And Sykes had also alienated his people by taking a vocal stand against “police brutality,” warning them he wouldn’t tolerate intimidation, beatings, profiling or stop and frisk.
How the fuck does he think we maintain even a semblance of control? Malone thinks, looking at the man now.
The captain holds up a copy of the New York Times.
“‘White Christmas,’” Sykes reads. “‘Heroin Floods the City on the Holidays.’ Mark Rubenstein in the New York Times. And not just one article, he’s doing a series. The New York Times, gentlemen.”
He pauses to let that sink in.
It doesn’t.
Most cops don’t read the Times. They read the Daily News and the Post, mostly for the sports news or the T&A on Page Six. A few read the Wall Street Journal to keep up on their portfolios. The Times is strictly for the suits at One Police and the hacks in the mayor’s office.
But the Times says there’s a “heroin epidemic,” Malone thinks.
Which is only an epidemic, of course, because now white people are dying.
Whites started to get opium-based pills from their physicians—oxycodone, Vicodin, that shit. But it was expensive and doctors were reluctant to prescribe too much for exactly the fear of addiction. So the white folks went to the open market and the pills became a street drug. It was all very nice and civilized until the Sinaloa Cartel down in Mexico made a corporate decision that it could undersell the big American pharmaceutical companies by raising production of its heroin, thereby reducing price.
As an incentive, they also increased its potency.
The addicted white Americans found that Mexican “cinnamon” heroin was cheaper and stronger than the pills and started shooting it into their veins and overdosing.
Malone literally saw it happening.
He and his team busted more bridge-and-tunnel junkies, suburban housewives and Upper East Side madonnas than they could count. More and more of the bodies they’d find slumped dead in alleys were Caucasian.
Which, according to the media, is a tragedy.
Even congressmen and senators pulled their noses out of their donors’ ass cracks long enough to notice the new epidemic and demand that “something has to be done about it.”
“I want you out there making heroin arrests,” Sykes says. “Our numbers on crack cocaine are satisfactory, but our numbers on heroin are subpar.”
The suits love their numbers, Malone thinks. This new “management” breed of cops are like the sabermetrics baseball people—they believe the numbers say it all. And when the numbers don’t say what they want them to, they massage them like Koreans on Eighth Avenue until they get a happy ending.
You want to look good? Violent crime is down.
You need more funding? It’s up.
You need arrests? Send your people out to make a bunch of bullshit busts that will never get convictions. You don’t care—convictions are the DA’s problem—you just want the arrest numbers.
You want to prove drugs are down in your sector? Send your guys on “search and avoid” missions where there aren’t any drugs.
That’s half the scam. The other way to manipulate the numbers is to let officers know they should downgrade charges from felonies to misdemeanors. So you call a straight-up robbery a “petit larceny,” a burglary becomes “lost property,” a rape a “sexual assault.”
Boom—crime is down.
Moneyball.
“There’s a heroin epidemic,” Sykes says, “and we’re on the front lines.”
They must have really cracked Inspector McGivern’s nuts at the CompStat meeting, Malone thinks, and he passed the pain along to Sykes.
So he hands it off to us.
And we’ll pass it down to a bunch of low-level dealers, addicts who sell so they can score, and fill the house with a bunch of arrests so Central Booking will flow with puke from junkies jonesing, and bog down the court dockets with quivering losers pleading out and then going back to jail to score more smack. Come out still addicted, and start the whole cycle all over again.
But we’ll make par.
The suits at One Police can say as much as they want that there are no quotas, but every guy on the Job knows there are. Back in the “broken windows” days, they were writing summonses for everything—loitering, littering, jumping a subway stile, double-parking. The theory was if you didn’t come down on the small stuff, people would figure it was okay to do the big stuff.
So they were out there writing a lot of bullshit C-summonses, which forced a lot of poor people to take time off work they couldn’t afford to go to court to pay fines they couldn’t pay. Some just skipped their court days and got “no-show” warrants, so their misdemeanors escalated to felonies and they were looking at jail time for tossing a gum wrapper on the sidewalk.
It provoked a lot of anger toward the police.
Then there were the 250s.
The stop and frisks.
Which basically meant that if you saw a young black kid on the street, you stopped him and shook him down. It caused a lot of resentment, too, and got a lot of negative media, so we don’t do that anymore, either.
Except we do.
Now the quota that isn’t is heroin.
“Cooperation,” Sykes is saying, “and coordination are what makes us a task force and not just separate entities officed in the same space. So let’s work together, gentlemen,