Behind the Blue Wall

E.W. Count decodes Police lingo in 'COP TALK'

By Soledad Santiago

WHAT LANGUAGE do cops speak behind the Blue Wall of silence? We've heard a few tidbits during police testimony in high-profile cases, but even those are regurgitated for public consumption.

Because cases can be lost when fast-talking lawyers twist words into unforeseen meanings, cops are tight-lipped to a fault. Even the case file that tracks the progress of an investigation is decipherable only to the initiate -- anagram-happy scribbles about - "DD5s" and CUPIs, "perps," "skels," "uncles," "ghosts," the "CATCH unit," "dropping dimes" and "unusuals." Assuming you could listen in, is this a code civilians can crack?

It took a decade, but there's a New York writer who's done it. The result is E.W. Count's "Cop Talk: True Detective Stories from the NYPD" (Pocket Books). Faced with Count's pen, the wall crumbles and cops fairly babble.

"In the beginning I'd ask a question and get half an answer," Count explains. "Cops' reports are very sparsely written so nothing can get used against them later in court. But when I finally got them to speak -- I was charmed not just by their stories but by their language."

Charmed? It's not the word most people would associate with cops. Count, a diminutive, blue-eyed resident of the upper West Side who once attended Bronx High School of Science and Bennington College and then became a fashion and travel writer, makes no secret of the quirky road that led her to the subject of cops and what they do. "My passion was Paris courtyards, enclosed worlds where secret things might be going on," she said. "Detectives are on a quest too, except that theirs is life and death."

It was a less-than-unique New York experience that changed Count's direction. In 1979, she was mugged on her own doorstep in me 24th Precinct. The cops caught the three young perps so quickly -- inside a half hour -- that the law required no official police lineup.

The revalation that night," she recalled, was that there is somebody in that blue-and-white car. I came out of my ivory tower. I wanted to be in the world. I was inspired."

Citizen Count followed her muggers' cases through the court system. Eventually I struck up a friendship with the cops who made the collar. A year later, I rode in my first squad car. Within minutes we were on our way to a homicide. I followed that case through the entire system, too. I was hooked," she says.

In "Cop Talk," she interviews detectives who solved New York City's biggest cases: the Central Park jogger; the Happyland fire; Robert Chambers, the preppie killer, and elusive drug kingpin, Nicky Barnes. The detective reports she was privy to reveal something generally not known to the public in each case. For instance, when heroin dealer Barnes was finally arrested, detectives discovered that his Washington Heights apartment was a sophisticated, designer jewel and contained an intellectual's library.

"[Male] detectives incorporate the best of both sexes " Count explains. They have all the macho qualities. On the other hand, they are mostly intuitive, supposedly a feminine trait."

Count is fascinated by the special alchemy between the empirical and the intuitive clues detectives use in solving crimes. She explains, "It's instinctive and often unconscious. Good interviews lead to good investigations. It can be as subtle as body language. Inconsistent body-language patterns point to lies. And on the phone you listen for breaks in the pattern of the answers."

In the course of writing her book, cops learned to trust Count in a way they don't trust most people, she says. In 1980, her friendship with Lt. Jack Doyle, who headed the detective squad in her home precinct, led to her novel, "The Hundred Percent Squad." Doyle's squad was unique in cracking all the homicides on their blotter, year after year.

"Cop Talk" finds Count crossing the line -- from fiction to fact. Likewise in cyberspace, she established "Cops & Crime," a Prodigy bulletin board, where real cops from all over the country talk to each other, and to her.