A COP'S LIFE: ROOKIE TO RETIREE IN 20 YEARS
The typical NYPD career takes a well-trod course. You go to school, you get assigned to a random post somewhere in the five boroughs (unless you have friends higher up, in which case you get assigned wherever the hell you want), you do a few years there, then you make detective or take a civil service test and become a sergeant. You do that for a few years, then maybe take another civil service test and make lieutenant. (Some guys choose to not become a detective or a sarge, and they stay a “cop” cop for the full 20 years of the career.)
Soon after that, you retire as early as 40 years old and spend the rest of your life on a boat in Florida, or working for a private security firm if you get bored. That’s about it.
Oh, wait—there’s also the endless litany of traumas, frustrations, fights, arrests, dead bodies, vomiting junkies, piles of paperwork, Kafkaesque bureaucratic snags, and tons of laughing your ass off.
Over the next five days, real live NYPD cops are going to walk you through the stages of a New York cop’s life from start to finish. Please pay attention and be nice. They’re just as scared of you as you are of them. (OK, not really. They aren’t scared of you at all.)
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Illustration by Christy Karacas
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Police academy is sort of like high school, EXCEPT there’s more guns.
NYPD recruits put up with petty indignities, like 50 lockers and ten showers for 75 people in the gym. You run around from class to class, get yelled at by instructors, cram for tests on stuff that you forget the minute you take them, and play pranks on other students. It doesn’t sound like it, but it’s pretty fun.
Academy lasts six to eight months, and then it’s Gun and Shield Day. They herd the graduating class to the basement, where a bored guy fishes a shield out of a shoe box, hands it to each new cop without looking up, and then calls the next name. After that it’s over to the academy range to receive and load your first NYPD gun. They could do with a little more pomp and circumstance, but whatever—everyone walks off that line thinking to himself, “Holy shit, I’m a cop!”
There are a few weeks of school left after that. The guys with “hooks” already know what precinct they’re going to, and everyone else sits and wonders. The NYPD is divided into eight patrol boroughs. Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn are divided into north and south, while the Bronx and Staten Island count as one each. Every patrol borough has its own quirks, and where you go first decides what kind of cop you’ll be.
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 Anonymous, on Jun 9, 2009 wrote:
4 years ago I loved this job. Now I can’t stand to come to work. I get in the shower to come to work and think, "how is the brass gonna fuck the silver badge today?" My chief is a pussy who was never a cop, and anybody over Sgt has a gaping vagina that spits out discipline for the most minor of infractions. Morale is in the toilet, haven’t had a raise in 6 years, no new equipment for years, and were the 2nd biggest department in the state. I can’t wait to retire or even find a new job. | | Anonymous, on Apr 15, 2009 wrote:
this was great, I really enjoyed reading this. | | Anonymous, on Apr 15, 2009 wrote:
this was great, I really enjoyed reading this. | | |
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