Paul Bacon by Bad Cop: New York's Least Likely Police Officer Tells All

hands to be bound.
    My mother looked at me and asked, “Do I have to read him his rights?”
    “That only happens on TV,” I said. “In real life, detectives read Miranda back at the precinct.”
    “There’s nothing more to say? That’s not very dramatic.”
    As my mom reached out to shackle my dad, I put my hand between them. I couldn’t resist; he’d grounded me for a month when
     I was a teenager, and it was time for my revenge. I told my mom, “Actually, you’re supposed to say, ‘Turn around and put your
     hands behind your back.’ ”
    My mother instructed my father to assume the position. He slowly turned his back to her while giving me a worried look. I
     waved down his concern, hiding my joy.
    When my mom had slipped the cuffs over both his wrists, she asked me to take a picture.
    “Oh, okay,” I said, quickly grabbing my digital camera and lining up my parents in the preview screen before the Kodak moment
     turned into a brawl.
    “You do have the key, don’t you?” my dad said to me just as I clicked the shutter.
    I lowered the camera and said, “Shit, the key.”
    “Don’t joke around,” my dad said. “And watch your language.”
    I stepped around my mother and knelt behind her to open the handcuff pouch on the back of my belt. I pulled up the flap and
     tried to find the key.
    “What’s taking so long?” said my dad.
    “Nothing. The key’s just very small.”
    “How small can it be?”
    “You wouldn’t believe it,” I said, and shoved my finger behind a tiny leather flap inside the pouch. “Whew. Here it is,” I
     said, pulling out the key, the size of a microchip. “See what I mean?”
    While I was freeing my father, he said to my mother, “If I’d had handcuffs when we were married, you might not have been a
     runaway housewife.”
    “Fat chance,” said my mom.
    The next morning, I donned my full dress uniform, a three-quarter-length blue blouse with two rows of gold buttons down the
     front. Then I reached into my closet for my gun locker. I tapped in my secret code without looking, the locker beeped in response,
     and the front flap sprang open. Inside were my gun, which was nearly new, and my patrolman’s shield, which was decidedly used.
    My shield—a nickel-plated New York State seal embossed with the number 1627—had once belonged to another cop. How many people
     had worn the shield before me was a mystery. So were the circumstances leading up to this moment, when I first pinned their
     numbers to my chest. The previous officer 1627 might have turned in the shield willingly or unwillingly. The last place he
     or she’d worn it might have been the back of an ambulance, or a morgue. One thing was certain: My shield had seen some kind
     of action. I didn’t see any bullet holes, but if I held it sideways and turned it, I could tell it had been bent out of and
     back into shape more than once. Wondering what kind of forces the shield had withstood in the past, I tried to bend it with
     my hands, unsuccessfully.
    After fixing the emblem to my blouse, I pulled my pistol out of the locker and slid it into an off-duty holster under my arm,
     where it would remain out of sight. Ideally, I wouldn’t be enforcing any laws on graduation day, so I probably wouldn’t need
     my gun. But the shield and the gun were a matched set; I’d been told to never carry one without the other.
    Four hours later, I was standing on a cement ramp leading into Madison Square Garden. A crooked line of dark-blue uniforms
     stretched from the street behind me, up the ramp, and around a wide bend. We were 2,108 recruits in all—with no supervision.
     Most of the things we’d been prohibited from doing at the academy were now being done with reckless abandon. Cops-to-be were
     talking on their cell phones and playing cards, smoking cigarettes and passing around flasks. Everywhere I looked, someone
     had a hat on backward, or handcuffs spinning on the end of a pen.
    We’d already been marched