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NYPD Had A Secret Labor Day Rooftop BBQ & You Weren't Invited
By
Christopher Robbins
Published Sep 5, 2012
Modified Sep 5, 2012
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Jen Chung / Gothamist
By
Christopher Robbins
Published Sep 5, 2012
Modified Sep 5, 2012
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As your out-of-breath apartment super has told you many times, charcoal grilling on your roof [PDF] is illegal—except if you're the police. A Post reporter stuck at 1 Police Plaza on a lazy Labor Day smelled roasting flesh and followed his nose to a story: high-ranking police officers were having an illegal BBQ atop NYPD HQ. When asked if that was true, one officer lied and said, "Nope." The reporter then witnessed officers erecting a "six-foot barrier that blocked sight of the police cookout." Gothamist's deeply embedded police sources say that officers were merely interrogating some ground chuck that had made furtive movements on a fire escape, and had no choice but to Stop, Question, Season, Pat, And Turn Every Four-And-A-Half Minutes.
Though he was blocked from enjoying the holiday spread his employer has so rightly earned, the Post reporter noticed that the "participants included bosses in the $49-million Joint Operations Center, which opened last year and is supposed to monitor possible terror attacks," and officers in charge of the Real-Time Crime Center and Operations Division, which monitors the brats so they jet nice and juicy and puffy but not too crispycrime as it occurs in real time.
NYPD Spokesman Paul Browne told the paper that police can use grills anywhere on 1 PP. When pressed as to how the officers somehow circumvented the law, Browne replied, “Sounds like you weren't invited." When he's not promulgating falsehoods on a taxpayer-based salary or obfuscating the truth about NYPD initiatives of dubious legality and utter pointlessness, he's actually a pretty nice guy!
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Christopher Robbins
Christopher Robbins is a New York City reporter covering transportation, affordable housing, local politics, and criminal justice. His work has also appeared in New York Magazine, The Village Voice and The New York Times. Chris is a graduate of Patrick Henry High School in Roanoke, Virginia, and enjoys biking to Fort Tilden in the summertime.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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