Free Beware the Night by Ralph Sarchie

in size, it’s one of the busiest and most dangerous in the world. More than 118,000 people—nearly two-thirds of them Hispanic, one-third African American, with about 2 percent white and 1 percent Asian—live in this crowded inner-city area, which is also home to 1,950 violent parolees.
    In a typical year, we investigate 32 murders—roughly one every eleven days—87 rapes, 682 violent assaults, 870 robberies, 1,022 burglaries, and 2,234 car crashes. Our cops also help 4,472 sick and injured people, respond to 76,789 radio runs (911 calls)—and make 10,353 felony arrests. Even in New York City, that volume of calls is incredible: When our seven sector cars turn out for patrol at midnight, at least 19 jobs usually await each one. As a sergeant, I have to respond to every serious call that comes over the radio. It’s my job to decide whether to make the location a crime scene and whom to detain for questioning and whom to release. I decide whether we need detectives, helicopters to chase suspects, an evidence collection team, the accident investigation squad, the canine unit, or a whole array of other specialized resources.
    To give an idea of what that’s like, here are a few cases I handled this week: The first call came over the radio as a 10–53 (car accident). “One man down, likely,” Central added, meaning that there was a victim who was likely to die. At the scene, we reconstructed what happened: After smashing into a parked taxicab at such high speed that one passenger was flung through a window and landed eighty-three feet away, the driver sped away, utterly indifferent to the fate of his friend. We arrested the callous son of a bitch later that night. Although the injured man was lying in pools of blood and brain fluid when we arrived, he was still alive when the ambulance came.
    So was the assault victim in another case, who’d been stabbed in the heart during a dispute over $20.
    Another night I got a call that’s every parent’s nightmare: A baby wasn’t breathing. Even though we all knew it was too late when we saw the one-month-old boy, paramedics spent long, desperate, and ultimately futile minutes trying to breathe life back into him. What upset and infuriated me the most was that this little boy didn’t have to die. He’d be cooing in his crib right now, if his parents had put him to bed on his side—the sleep position that lowers the risk of crib death by 50 percent—instead of his stomach. Remembering how my wife and I practically memorized the baby care books when we were expecting Christina, and got a special cushion to keep her safely on her side at night, I couldn’t understand how anyone could be so appallingly ignorant.
    The next day I caught a homicide where the victim had no face. His features had been totally obliterated with one blast of an assault rifle, except for an eyeball, which dangled from his head. What was left of his brain was still throbbing inside his shattered skull. I’d never seen anything like it—and neither had the paramedics. We found bits of brain and skull fragments splattered on a sidewalk twenty-five feet away.
    Even the animals are violent where I work. Earlier this month I got a call about a berserk pit bull. From the size of the crowd at the scene—and the screams I heard—I knew something really bad had happened. We pushed our way through the horrified spectators, some of them little kids, and found the dog growling furiously as it shook something small, limp, and bloody in its mouth. The victim was a tiny Chihuahua, still wearing its little pink leash, that the pit bull had attacked and killed right in front of the pet’s shrieking owner. As a dog lover myself, I felt awful about the whole thing.
    The constant brutality I saw after joining the police force had a corrosive effect—I felt myself becoming brutal too. After having been shot once, I was all too ready to get rough with a mugger who resisted arrest or a batterer who got in my face when