ARMED AND DANGEROUS: Memoirs of a Chicago Policewoman
By Gina Gallo
Forge, 335 pages, $24.95
One thing they don’t always tell you about being a police officer: It’s funny. Consider the incompetent thieves who inadvertently set a herd of cattle rampaging through the streets of Chicago. Or the poker-faced sergeant who calmed a disturbed citizen by assuring him that a ” `debogulator’ ” would quell the dangerous rays emanating from his microwave. Or the call to Lincoln Park Zoo, when a man was caught in the act of nonchalantly molesting a cow.
In “Armed and Dangerous: Memoirs of a Chicago Policewoman,” a former Chicago officer writing under the pen name Gina Gallo recounts those tales and many more, collected from her years on the job. Gallo guides readers on a journey that begins with a crew of naive recruits and ends with injury, despair and burnout. In between she gives readers a taste of life as a big-city cop–complete with comedy, drama and heartbreak.
Granted, Gallo’s recollections are far more dramatic than those of an average officer. The book tells readers that it is “based on actual events, but many are composites.” That gives the author license to fictionalize somewhat, and it’s difficult to tell which incidents actually occurred as written–or even which Gallo experienced herself. She writes that she shot and killed a man at the very start of her career, an act that the vast majority of officers don’t experience in their lifetimes. After that, she talks of landing in the hospital more than once with severe injuries, the result of vicious fights and a harrowing accident. But even if Gallo’s account isn’t typical, it touches on aspects of police life that many officers would likely relate to, particularly the insidious changes that creep up during a career: The gradual transition from shock to acceptance, the development of gallows humor and, ultimately, the creation of what Gallo calls the “game face.”
The author begins her adventures in 1982 at the Chicago police academy, where a belligerent, bellowing Sgt. Woods warns his fresh-faced recruits, ” `Most folks don’t like us; lot of ’em hate us. Get used to it.’ ” Readers may be dismayed at Woods’ cynicism: Come on, sergeant, at least let your recruits finish training before they start viewing the public as the enemy. Gallo’s slide into the us-versus-them mentality thus begins, and her depiction of that psychological evolution–and development of her game face–is a powerful aspect of the book.
In the preface Gallo says her father was a police officer who “could speak of the grisliest crimes with the same level of detachment as one discussing the weather.” Gallo grows up to become a therapist at a state facility, she says, and then changes careers after budget cuts reduce her salary. She finds that she’d earn more as a police officer and joins the department, vowing to never become as cold as her father was. But as the pages of her book unfold, she does, bit by bit.
And she shows us why. The reasons for her transition are sometimes tough to read about, as she is confronted with tragedy time and again in the high-crime, poverty-stricken areas where she works. Answering a call to an abandoned building, Gallo finds a shivering 7-year-old who tries desperately to protect her younger siblings–“five tiny bodies huddling together in the dark”– while they wait for a neglectful mother who never returns. In another case, an idealistic young boy is brutally raped by a priest. Yet another involves finding the emaciated body of a dead addict with a hypodermic needle still sticking from her arm.
The child-abuse cases particularly affect Gallo, who poignantly describes feelings few police officers confess to the outside world. “To save ourselves from going insane, we have to change,” she writes, adding that officers learn “that the only way to cope is to hide what’s left of their hearts.”
Surrounding her are mostly male colleagues who appear to be less vulnerable–at least on the surface–to these heartbreaks. As Gallo describes it, these men react more often with anger than with sorrow, but they do react. In the chapter “Suffer the Children,” several officers are assigned to handle a potentially suicidal mother who had just killed her baby boy, nearly severing the child’s head from his body. Filled with rage, an officer leaving the scene thrusts the baby’s body before Gallo’s eyes, asking, ” `Whattaya think of that?’ ” A second officer then tells her he’d like to kill the murdering mother himself. “His words are savage,” Gallo says, “but his eyes reflect the same fear and frustration we all feel: another victim, another instance when we were too late.”
The violence is interrupted by a stream of bizarre, freaky and funny incidents that are also part of the police world: transvestite prostitutes who rescue a helpless litter of newborn puppies; a lonely old lady who calls the police just so she can greet them, stark naked; and the erstwhile cow molester who claims “he wasn’t hurtin’ anything, least of all the cow.”
Certainly most police careers are more sedate. Only rarely does Gallo admit that the average beat cop goes through stretches of inaction that can be out-and-out boring, and occasionally her anecdotes seem almost too pat. One depicts a wealthy drug dealer so stereotypical that he comes across more like a character on a TV show than anyone a real officer would encounter.
Still, other tales ring with the truth of harsh reality, complemented by Gallo’s gift at turning a phrase. She climbs the dark, dank staircases of public-housing high-rises, calling them “the Stairmaster from Hell,” and later describes a 13-year-old prostitute as “an adolescent sage with fifty thousand miles of street wear.”
She also doesn’t hesitate to point out flaws in the department and in her fellow officers, some of whom use their authority to cruelly intimidate civilians, to steal from crime scenes–or to deliberately hide from anything that reeks of risk. As a woman, Gallo recalls the pressures females encounter and the adaptations they make to do a “macho” job. At times the book bogs down in redundancies, and its assertion that police officers are sexual magnets may puzzle those who’ve observed that some of Chicago’s finest could use a good workout at the gym. Gallo’s leftover bitterness remains somewhat mysterious, too, because it isn’t fully explained.
In its strongest moments, though, “Armed and Dangerous” gives glimpses of a compassionate cop’s predicament: the aching desire to make a difference in a harsh world. As the years pass, Gallo’s faith fades. Eventually she realizes “my heart has cracked in pieces” and “no amount of game face or callousness will ever protect me.” She looks at her life, surprised to see that she no longer has friends other than fellow officers, that she’s afraid for her family, that she has, in the end, become her father. “I can feel it,” she writes, “the coldness descending that means I’m withdrawing to another place, somewhere behind that callous cop veneer.” In such moments, Gallo offers rare insight into a compelling world.
