Welcome to New York, or, The Details of My Mugging
The details of my mugging this afternoon, an unremarkable incident (it’s more commonplace in today’s New York than I’d believed), but I’ve delineated it here so that I don’t have to tell the story over and over again and because I’ve been terribly lazy about blogging lately and this macroblog effort should make up for that. The good parts have been helpfully bolded.
A sidewalk robbery was once, it seemed, the most common of big-scary-city stories. I moved to New York in January of 2007, well into the city’s much-derided “Disneyfication” (a term I am loath to use, as it applies to little outside of Midtown. Though now more accessible to green New England girls like me, Downtown Manhattan and the outer boroughs are far from Epcottian). It was implied everywhere that New York had become laughably safe. And I felt much more at ease than I had living in Boston, even. Streets were well-lit, businesses open late into the evening, sidewalks always populated with with harmless fellow pedestrians. I adhered to obvious cautious-lady tactics: no parks or suspicious side streets after dark, taxis in the wee hours, and if I did find myself strolling down an empty street at night, I’d do the keys-outward-between-the-knuckles thing; primally armed like a slapdash Wolverine.
My two-year anniversary with the city is in a couple of weeks, and today I was mugged for the first time. It’s almost disappointing, like the big chalkboard in my mind that said “1 year and 353 days without a robbery” was just erased and I’m back at “0 years and 0 days.”
Here’s what happened, which I repeated to police officers and detectives so many times today it seems like an old anecdote:
- I was walking westbound on West 26th Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. Just ambling, really. It was a sunny day and I thought I’d go pretend shopping (that’s when I go into upscale stores and imply to the salespeople that I have loads of dispensable income) at some Chelsea furniture shops.
- There was some construction on the south side of the street, and I had to pass through a sidewalk detour. I had my earbuds in (listening to Santogold, I think), which were attached to my iPhone, which was in my coat pocket with my hand wrapped around it.
- I felt a strange hand enter the pocket and easily pull the phone out, and the headphones separated from it.
- I turned to see a man, and these are the things I noticed about him, in order: beige coat, brown skin, black ski cap. He demanded my wallet and I think I froze or just said “Oh my God” because he said, “Hurry up,” and swatted my face with a gloved hand. Not hard enough to really hurt, but enough to knock my sunglasses askew and scare me a good deal. He then said, “Don’t make me hurt you, bitch,” and I detected an accent: Caribbean, I decided.
- I pulled my wallet from my purse and asked him to please, just take the cash. “You don’t need my IDs.” I recalled a friend who was also able to negotiate such a deal with an unarmed mugger. I assumed if he were armed, he would have shown me a weapon by then.
- He agreed and I pulled fifty dollars from my wallet (two twenties, two fives), and he hastily grabbed it from me. He fingered the rest of my wallet’s contents: receipts from Christmas gifts, a bank statement, a long-expired Loehmann’s coupon. I think I said, ”It’s just receipts, that’s all I have.” He said, “Okay,” and took off, eastbound across 26th Street.
- At least three people walked by as I gathered my belongings off the sidewalk: the headphones that had detached from my phone and a knit hat and copy of Bright Lights, Big City that had fallen out of my purse at some point. I stopped two young women and asked to use a cell phone. They obliged, and I called 911. The operator asked me what my attacker looked like and I deliberately said “African American” as the last descriptor because the good samaritan who stood beside me as I used her phone was black.
I spent a few minutes crying in front of a Chipotle on Seventh Avenue, then a few more crying inside the lobby of an FIT building on West 27th before the police arrived to do whatever it was they were going to do (I didn’t know, really, I expected them to come and tell me the perpetrator was probably impossible to find, my stolen things unlikely to be recovered, and that I was a silly, jaded girl. I kept thinking about that monologue in Before Sunset, wherein Julie Delpy’s character describes an incident with an insensitive member of the NYPD).
I was surprised, and a little embarrassed, to receive four officers. Two took me back to the scene of the crime in their squad car, which smelled of either stale pot or stale beer and had nearly no legroom. When they weren’t asking me questions or speaking into their radio, they made jokes about other officers and fiddled with the radio. There turned out to be a security camera in the scaffolding. I can’t imagine what the footage looks like. Probably very awkward and unexciting.
I was told that 26th Street divides two precincts, and that the crime had occurred in one, but I had been picked up in another. I was passed off to another set of officers, who asked me the same questions (mostly about the physical description of my mugger and details of the incident). I was taken in their squad car to the precinct headquarters in Murray Hill. I was told to look out the windows in case my mugger was roaming around the neighborhood and I excitedly did, eyes alert for black men in beige jackets all the way to the station.
I was taken into a room at the rear of the station to fill out a form describing my stolen belongings (the second line read “Item: Cash; Description: Fifty Dollars; Approximate Value: $50; Other Identifying Characteristics: Two 20s, two 5s”). There was a young girl sitting in a chair diagonal from me, who was being yelled at by a middle-aged woman in plainclothes. “A hooker,” I thought. I listened to more of the conversation and it turned out the girl had lost an expensive camera at a house party and the woman was scolding her for carelessness and asking her if she really wanted to involve the NYPD and its time-strapped detectives. The girl was crying and defending herself and I felt a bit sorry for her.
I was taken upstairs to meet with a detective, an amicable man who was at the end of his shift. The desks and surrounding walls were covered with “Wanted” posters, pictures of employees’ children, plaques honoring fallen officers, and other papers of assorted significance to police work or inside jokes about the desks’ occupants.
We sat in another back room, which looked like an interrogation room from a television show. The detective asked me the same battery of questions, only recording my recollected facts and I-think-sos and I-can’t-remembers carefully on legal documents. He helped me retrace my steps (I’d walked there from 14th Street and First Avenue) and told me that the area between West 24th and 30th Streets has experienced a rash of robberies in recent months. We snickered over a verbal spat occurring outside the door—some members of the precinct were criticizing Plainclothes Woman for being rude to Expensive Camera Girl. A female officer later came in and told me it was unfortunate—that even though the girl shouldn’t have involved the police, she might be too scared now to reach out were she ever really in need.
My detective left and came back a few times, then I was taken outside to look at mugshots. I looked at 34 pages of pictures (6 perps to a page) before they all began to look alike: some white, some black, some Hispanic, all sad-eyed, most with goatees, many with poor skin or fresh wounds, a few matching my mugger’s physical type. It feels pretty uncivilized to scan 204 mugshots, picking out the chubby black men. “I’m feeling some major liberal guilt,” I said aloud, and a detective to my right snickered without looking up from his paperwork.
While I was waiting for my detective to escort me outside, another asked his colleagues in the room if they’d heard about the robbery in Central Park. “They got a guy on his bike, beat him up bad, basically left him to die. A lot of people walked by before it was reported. One stole the bike.”
To which the snickering detective replied, “Welcome to New York.”
