Verwandte Artikel zu The Job: True Tales from the Life of a New York City...

The Job: True Tales from the Life of a New York City Cop - Softcover

Osborne, Steve

 
9781101872147: The Job: True Tales from the Life of a New York City Cop
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1101872144 ISBN 13: 9781101872147
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

“A nice quiet night.”

During his two decades on the force, if you asked NYPD officer Steve Osborne how things were going, that’s what he’d tell you. On a stakeout? Nice quiet night. Drive by shooting? Nice quiet night. Now, with The Job he’s ready to talk, and does he have some stories to tell.

Most civilians get their information about police work from television shows, which are pure fantasy. Here, Osborne takes us into his world, the gritty and not so glamorous life of real street cops. And along the way he finds humor and soul searching humanity in the most unlikely places. For anyone interested in knowing what a cop’s life is all about, this is a must read.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Steve Osborne was a New York City police officer for twenty years, retiring in 2003 as a lieutenant and commanding officer of the Manhattan Gang Squad, with numerous citations for his police work. He has told his stories before packed audiences at The Moth storytelling venues across the United States. He has written for The New York Times and USA Today. Now a consultant for television and film productions, Osborne lives in upstate New York with his wife and their two dogs, Jingles and Duke.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Introduction
I’m not quite sure how it happened, or even why, but a few months after retiring from the New York City Police Department, I picked up a pad and pen and started writing. Like most cops, I had sto­ries to tell, and for some reason I can’t explain, I felt the need to put them on paper. I had no training in writing, other than police reports, but that little voice in the back of my head—the one that kept me safe all those years—was now nagging at me to tell my stories.
 
For twenty years my family and friends really didn’t understand what I did for a living. It was like I was living a double life, and they only knew half of it. I would go to work early in the evening, and most times I didn’t return till early in the morning. Of course they knew I was a cop—but what did that mean? Most civilians get their information about police work from the newspapers, which barely get half the story right, or they get it from television shows that are ninety-nine percent pure, out-of-this-world fantasy.
 
Sometimes I would share some of the funny stuff about the job, but the blood and gore, and especially the danger, I needed to keep to myself. When my wife would call me at work and ask how things were going, I would always tell her I was having a nice quiet night. Even if I was sitting on some dark street, armed with two guns strapped to my hip, waiting for some perp wanted on a homicide to show up so we could jump him. My answer was always the same. I’m having a nice quiet night.
 
Once I was sitting in my office talking to her on the phone and there was a shooting right on the station house block. The sound of gunshots boomed and echoed through my office window, causing me to duck. This might sound unusual, a drive-by shooting right next to the station house, but at the time I was working in the Bronx, and in the Bronx, shit happens. I had to put my hand over the receiver so she wouldn’t hear the gunfire and go nuts worrying. When I tried to hang up so I could run outside, she got mad at me. She was busy telling me that the bills were killing us this month and we had to watch the spending. I wanted to tell her that I had to go, because I thought something else just got killed down the block, but I couldn’t do that. Instead I think I told her my stomach was upset because I ate some bad rice and beans, and I had to go to the bathroom—now! A few seconds later I was charging down the block, gun in hand, running into who knows what. The credit card bills and the mortgage were going to have to wait.
 
I wanted to write some of my stories down just in case I dropped dead or I crossed the street one day and got run over by a bus. I didn’t want them to die with me. I don’t claim to be anything spe­cial, and my experience is no different than any other cop out there. I just took the time to write some of it down. When I would get together with my buddies, mostly other retired cops, it wouldn’t take long before the tales started flying, and each story was just as incredible as the last.
 
When I entered the police academy an old-time instructor told me, “Kid, you just bought yourself a front-row seat to the greatest show on earth.” What he was telling me wasn’t anything new. I think every old cop has used that line on every new cop in every city and every small town in every corner of the country. And the reason it’s used so much is because it’s true—every word of it. I don’t care if you work in Manhattan or in some tiny village out in the middle of nowhere with just one lawman in it, we all have stories. I wish all of us would put them on paper, because there’s nothing funnier or more terrifying than a good cop story.
 
Like most active cops, I’ve forgotten much more than I remem­bered. When I was in uniform it wasn’t unusual to handle twenty jobs a night. And when I was in plainclothes, my team and I would make several felony collars a week, mostly robberies, assaults, and gun arrests. I wish I would have kept a diary or taken more pic­tures, then maybe I could recall more, but some stories stay with you forever. Some you never forget, no matter how hard you try.
 
When I was a kid my father was a cop. Not the easiest childhood in the world, but it was interesting. Whenever I would do some­thing bad, and tried lying about it, he was always one step ahead of me. He was used to interrogating murderers, so getting the truth out of me wasn’t that difficult. I usually cracked under the pressure in about ten seconds.
 
I grew up in a no-nonsense blue-collar neighborhood where toughness was valued as much as, or more than, anything else. And in that neighborhood, the old man reigned as king. You either loved him or feared him, and he really didn’t care which it was. He was also the neighborhood problem solver. Once some pervert had flashed one of the neighborhood teenage girls and it was brought to his attention. This was the old days, so not everything was adju­dicated with an arrest. When I asked him how he handled it, the only thing he said was “He’ll never do that again.” I’m not quite sure what that meant, but the guy was never seen or heard from in my neighborhood again.
 
He was also a great storyteller, as were his friends. I loved it when his cop buddies would come by the house, swaggering in with all that hardware hanging off their belts and talking about what happened out on patrol the night before. To me these were the coolest guys in the world, real men, and I wanted to be one of them. I never wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer or even an astronaut. I wanted to be the one standing over the dead guy in the middle of the street, trying to figure out who killed him. It’s not that I’m a dummy or an underachiever, it’s just that none of those other pro­fessions called me as much as police work did. I think that’s why I was a solid C student in school. Algebra, physics, and geometry were useless to me. I was never going to do brain surgery or travel to the moon. I was going to be a cop. Deep down inside I knew I was put on this earth to catch bad guys.  I just wish it paid as much as some of those other professions.
 
When I first started writing, I didn’t know where it was going or what it would lead to. I just kept listening to that little voice in my head that told me to shut up and keep writing. After I wrote my first story, “Growing Pains,” I took a chance and handed it out to a few trusted friends and relatives to get some input. If the writing sucked, and I was wasting my time, I figured I could always start a vegetable garden or maybe make beer in a home brewery to help fill up my free time. But what happened next surprised me. Almost everybody said they had a tear in their eye by the time they fin­ished reading the story. It wasn’t the reaction I was expecting, but I figured having the ability to make people cry (without whacking them over the head with a nightstick and dragging them off to jail) was a good start, so I kept at it. The next story was “Hot Dogs,” and my same trusted advisers said it made them laugh. Then came “Mug Shot,” and they were getting misty again.
 
Being a cop for twenty years makes you very cynical, and skepti­cal. Every day when you’re on patrol people lie to you, or at least tell you what you want to hear, so when I heard those first couple of compliments I didn’t know whether to believe them or not. I’m more of a meat eater than a vegetarian, so the vegetable garden wasn’t really calling me, and the more I thought about making beer the less it appealed to...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1101872144
ISBN 13 
9781101872147
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
273
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
GPSR Kontakt
gpsr@libri.de

Europaallee 1
Bad Hersfeld
36244
Deutschland