Free Badge of Evil by Bill Stanton Page A

opportunist, an aggressive, ambitious motherfucker. He wanted to be a playa and he recognized immediately that night that his moment had arrived. The fuck they say about luck? It’s like when hard work and preparation meet opportunity, or some shit like that, right? Well, that night was Kevin’s motherfuckin’ shot at gettin’ lucky. He wanted it, no doubt. But did he have the balls to step up and take it?”
    Supreme told Lucy that Kevin Anderson grew up in Mount Vernon, a predominantly black suburb of New York, populated mostly by working-and middle-class families. During his last semester at Tulane he was involved in an ugly scandal when campus security found a large quantity of drugs and stolen final exams in his dorm. He blamed his roommate and the guys next door. To avoid a scandal, the school agreed not to press charges and to sweep the whole thing under the rug if all of them agreed to leave.
    Angry and bitter, Kevin returned to New York and finished his degree at City College. Then he entered the police academy. After graduation, he was assigned to uniform patrol in the Thirty-Third Precinct in Harlem. Supreme’s territory. In those days it was Supreme’s whole world. He knew every block of that precinct. And based on his experience getting stopped, hassled, chased, arrested, and slapped around a couple of times, Supreme believed there were basically three kinds of cops in the Three-Three, and probably everywhere else for that matter.
    There was the cop who signed in every day, worked his straight eight, minded his own business, and went home. He was just trying to earn a living, put in his twenty, and retire. There was the really gung ho cop, the guy on a mission who wanted to protect and serve, the guy who believed he could make a difference, maybe even change the world. Lastly, there was the predator, the dangerous, aggressive, macho cop who just as easily could’ve gone the other way. This cop loved the action and lived to mix it up in the streets. He wanted to lock up the bad guys, but not for the right reasons. He was all about what was in it for him. This was Kevin Anderson.
    â€œSo Big K decided that night to step up and seize the motherfuckin’ moment. Him and his partner cuffed us like we were gonna be arrested. But once they had us secured, that crazy nigga tells his partner to go for a walk. He tells him, ‘No sweat, man, I’m huggin’ this. I’m all over it. I’ll meet you at the car in like fifteen minutes. I got somethin’ I need to take care of here and you don’t wanna be part of it.’ ”
    Once the other cop was gone, Supreme said, Kevin announced that he was their new business partner. Unless they wanted to spend the next twenty-five years in prison, they were going to give him 15 percent of everything they did. “But here’s the part that’s really fuckin’ wacked,” Supreme said. “He wasn’t just shakin’ us down. He actually wanted to be partners . Big K was offering to earn his end. I thought he was trippin’, man. The crazy-ass fucker told us he believed he could provide intelligence not only on police operations but on our competitors as well.”
    The plan was, in its way, genius. Kevin told Supreme that he was certain he could get his hands on CompStat data, the computer-generated statistical analysis of crime data the NYPD began using to clean up the city’s streets in the midnineties.
    For decades, cops had just muddled along, making an arrest when they saw a crime in progress or attempting to track down a perpetrator when someone reported being victimized. They were totally reactive. Prevention was not in the playbook. In truth, no one, not even the cops themselves, believed they could actually prevent crime.
    Once a year, the FBI would publish crime figures for every city in America. Once a year. And this was the only accurate intel the cops got about what kinds of