Teenage boys steal Yu-Gi-Oh! cards - Pokémon-type prints of cartoon characters that are worth some money - from Asian children.

[...]

He thinks about what it must have been like to be the commanding officer of the precinct when he became a beat officer 20 years ago: "It would have been a much nicer job. They worried about crime, but they didn't worry about crime like I worry about crime. They worried about summonses, corruption. They weren't so focused on reducing crime. That's something Compstat did. I mean, don't get me wrong. It's a good thing, but it's an odd thing."

[...]

At the April community meeting, for example, a woman raised her hand toward the end with a complaint. An ice cream truck passed - and often stopped - in front of her apartment building every day, playing its song at high volume. She had written down the truck's license plate number.

Before Captain Matusiak could answer, a second woman raised her hand and said that as a matter of fact, she had the same problem, and had also written down the license number, but it was a different truck.

A uniformed officer stepped forward and said: "I took care of him today. You won't have a problem with him anymore. You have a problem, you call me personally. I'll take care of it."

Afterward, disbelief spread quickly among the officers. "Crime's been down," said Sgt. Sean Looney, a community affairs officer, "but the other complaints haven't gone anywhere. It used to be, 'Hey, there's guys with guns going to shoot them off,' and now it's Mister Softee playing his music."

Ten years ago, someone complaining about ice cream trucks would have been laughed out of the room. Ten years ago, an officer who promised to take care of it would have been marked for life, still hearing about it at his retirement party: Hey, Officer Ice Cream.

Police officers sat around after the meeting. Maytag repairmen in bulletproof vests.

One asked, "What's the world coming to?"

And another answered, "We've got to bring crime back."

[...]

"What surprises me is that the city has prospered so much that it's not the violent crimes that are happening in excess," she says. Lieutenant Fanale is a lesbian, and she likes provoking the red-cheeked Irish rookies who arrive in the spring. Out of earshot of the other officers, she says: "I'm so out in this job. That's the greatest part of this job. I'm free to be me, and that makes me a better person, a better boss."

[...]

Minutes later, the lieutenant is rampaging down Mott Street, shouting over an open cardboard box of frozen fish for sale on the sidewalk without a permit. "You don't speak English?" she shouts at the proprietor. "O.K., then I'll stop talking." She lifts the heavy box of ice and seafood and hurls it into the store. Sales girls jump. "Do you understand what 'inside' means now?"

[...]

Beside her is Officer Jacqueline Peters, her driver and friend since the lieutenant arrived in the Fifth. "I wish Sonny would get here with my shots," the lieutenant says. She left her hormone injections back at the precinct house. The officer finally calls her cellphone.

"I'm on the corner of Eldridge and Hester," Lieutenant Fanale says. She hangs up and chuckles. "It's like a drug transaction."

Another unmarked car pulls up. An officer, Richie Stellmann, leans out with a paper bag. "We got the goods," he says, passing it over and driving away.

Her driver, Officer Peters, takes the needles and small bottles that Lieutenant Fanale hands her and arranges them on the keyboard of the laptop computer between the front seats. Working in the pale glow of the screen, she draws liquid from the bottles into the syringe, tapping the tube with a fingernail to get the bubbles out. "You know somebody's going to call this in," the lieutenant says. " 'They're shooting up in the car and they're wearing N.Y.P.D. jackets.' "

[...]

The little boutiques are Officer Stellmann's beat. Incredible, the changes around here. Fathers used to make their family wait in the car while they checked their building's foyer for sleeping homeless people. These days the most obvious crime is the Bolognese sauce. Today, fathers drop $20 on a round of rice pudding cups, from a shop that sells only rice pudding.

The story reads a bit as if Michael Wilson, the writer, went in to write about the changes Compstat, the computerized anti-crime system that has revolutionized NYC policing and crime, madet, but found that, actually, there was so little crime left, the real story was just the everyday life of the precinct, where, um, crime is very minor, police are very bored, and all the children grow up strong and healthy.

Read The Rest Scale: 3 out of 5 for more of this episode of Police Story.

Gary Farber's home blog is Amygdala.