On New Year’s Eve our regular and unscheduled days off were canceled, many vacation days were canceled, and requesting sick leave invited careful scrutiny by department surgeons. Around 37,000 cops were working last night, 8,000 of them in Times Square. On Thursday afternoon, my partner Joe and I made sure that we had the right equipment for duty the next night, especially working flashlights.
The one detective in the office who had the night off was preparing to leave. “Hopefully I’ll see you guys next week. Keep your heads down when the bombs go off now. And if people start to pass out, hold your breath.” He is not Joe’s favorite detective. Joe called after him, “On your way out, have a look on my desk. There’s a fresh box of go fuck yourself. Have some.”
What was most remarkable to me about last night was the apprehension; that and the sheer number of cops in Manhattan. The fear of the disasters that the night would bring had been building for some time. Between the Y2K bug shutting down all the nifty services that keep New Yorkers happy and the resulting riots, and the near certainty of terrorists exploding bombs under all our big buildings and the resulting riots, there was a palpable sense, from both inside and outside the police department, that New Year’s Eve 1999 was going to be a very rough night. Several of my friends wanted me to set up some sort of notification system whereby, when the disaster struck, if I could get to a working phone, I would let them know I was among the living. One of the detectives with whom I worked last night told us that his young son had hopped up on his bed that morning and told him, “Daddy, please don’t get killed tonight.”
It was not only the rarely gullible civilians of the city who were nervous. In the training that all cops received for the millennium detail, members of the Emergency Service Unit described some of the various types of poisonous gasses there are in the world and the bad things that happen when you are exposed to them. Then they told us not to attempt amateur bomb disposal. We were reminded that on New Year’s Eve 1982, bombs set by the FALN horribly maimed three New York City cops.
I was assigned to work with the Manhattan South Narcotics Major Case Squad last night, which contained the most experienced cops in my district, and they were a little unnerved as well. Last month I helped execute a search warrant with some of these guys in an apartment belonging to a very bad fellow who was probably armed, probably home, and who had expressed a desire to end his life in a shootout with the police. It turned out that he wasn’t home, but before we knew that the guys on the entry team had gone in, and their grim determination impressed me. That determination got a little rattled last night by the Y2K specter.
The major case guys, my partner Joe, and I were assigned to do narcotics enforcement in and around Times Square in the hours leading up to and immediately after midnight. Unlike most of the police officers present in midtown, we were in plain clothes. Ordinarily, cops look forward to working out of uniform but, as someone said last night, it meant we didn’t have our riot helmets.
In Times Square it was loud and bright, and I couldn’t really see the pageantry that was going on. The only explosions were from fireworks, the only Y2K glitch seemed to be when Sen. Charles Schumer’s microphone didn’t work during a press conference, and–as everyone now knows–the evening was otherwise uneventful. The crowd seemed to be made up largely of out-of-towners interspersed with the increasingly rare Times Square hustler. The air was even relatively warm. The nicest part of the evening seemed to be the absence of violence and the almost universal good mood of the crowd. Perhaps this will be the tone of the world going into the new millennium, or maybe it was just relief that the lights were still on and no one exploded
Joe and I had a hard time finding drug lords around the festivities. We contented ourselves with handing out some marijuana summonses to a few unfortunate folks on their way to the Billy Joel concert at Madison Square Garden. One woman did try to keep Joe from taking her friend’s grass, running interference with her arms out like a little blocking back. She was 5 feet nothing, and Joe was in too good a mood to take it seriously, so all she got was a stern talking-to. We were preparing paperwork in connection with those summonses when midnight came. Not the most romantic way to ring in the new millennium, but I think of last night as a very happy way to start things off.
For the heroes of the night, I would, of course, like to look to my fellow cops, who on the whole wanted very little to be out in Times Square, who wanted to be home with their wives or out at their neighborhood pubs and parties, who didn’t have to disarm bombs or quell riots, but who by their presence saved Fun City from the frightening fate that had come to seem inevitable. I hope my arrogance can be forgiven if I give the NYPD all the credit for the fact that nothing blew up, no horrible crimes were committed, the fabric of society was preserved, the world did not come to an end, and West 41st Street between Broadway and Seventh Avenue was free from smokers of the evil viper weed.
