When I first moved to Brooklyn , my
area was considered a “gang hotspot” and I used to see kids on the corners
wearing red jackets and baseball caps – the rim flat, like new, not curved. They
were always polite to me and not ever once did I feel unsafe around them.
That doesn’t mean there wasn’t any violent gang
activity. One day I walked into a little
discount store at the south end of the block.
I guess I was in the store about 10 minutes when I heard sirens, but there were always sirens
– ambulances, patrol cars, fire trucks – so I didn’t think anything about
it. When I came out of the store, I saw across
the street there were some patrol cars, an unmarked car, and an ambulance. There were a lot of patrol cops and a couple
of detectives in suits. EMTs were
putting someone into an ambulance. I
asked a patrolman what happened. And
what happened is that a kid had walked up to another kid and shot him in the
face at four o’clock in the afternoon.
I walked on home, dropped my stuff off, and a bit later I
left the house heading to Manhattan . I walked north on the block to the subway
station at Prospect Park
After that shooting, I took a ridealong one evening with the
NYPD in my precinct. I had to wear a
bulletproof vest. In the space of an
hour or so, I went with them on three “calls.”
All of them involved a gun. There
was a man in a check cashing place who got robbed after he cashed his
paycheck. The robber had already taken
off on a bicycle. The patrolmen looked
at the surveillance tape in the store and saw that in his nervousness, the
robber had dropped some of the money and other patrons in the establishment
picked it up and quietly slipped in their pockets. They were already gone as well. The next call was to visit a school janitor
who said some kids had come inside the school while he was cleaning and he ran
them off. He said they had a gun. Then we went to a gas station where someone
threatened a woman at the pump with a gun – I had to stay inside the car so I
wasn’t really sure why. Then, they got a
dangerous call and had to drop me off quickly at home.
Except on a police officer, I never saw a gun in Brooklyn . I saw a butcher knife once, though. A woman behind me in the post office pulled
it out and started tapping it on my shopping cart handle. This was a post office deep in the
neighborhood. It had an old, badly
painted mural on the wall of famous sports figures from Brooklyn ,
clerks behind bulletproof glass, and a jillion pieces of used gum stuck in
black circles on the floor. The few
times I went to this post office, there was a little old lady sitting outside
the front door on top of three stacked kindergarten chairs, talking to
herself.
The woman with the knife was a lot bigger than me, but for
some reason instead of feeling frightened, I got angry, really angry. She surely didn’t expect to see me in the
post office, so right away I knew that knife was in her big, junky purse because
she was afraid in the neighborhood and that big, old Wild Thing was trying to
scare me. Although, she definitely had
my attention, I never looked at her nor at the knife after I first saw it. I pulled the cart away from her to the other
side of me as calmly as you please, and she stepped really close to my left arm
and tapped the knife on her hand. I
still didn’t look at her, and if I was afraid, I still didn’t feel it. I just felt the steam coming out of my ears. I don’t like being bullied. There were bug-eyed people in line watching
her. I stepped to a window, purchased
stamps, and left.
I went to the police station to report it, and they said it
was a federal crime, so they didn’t take a report. I went home and reported the incident to the
post office over the phone. I never
heard from the postal police, but the next time I was in that particular post
office, a few months later, it had been completely painted white, the gum had
been scraped from the floor, and there were five surveillance cameras in the
ceiling. I never saw the big, old Wild Thing again. Maybe she got arrested.
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