New York City has its own “A-Team” that responds to the city’s most dangerous situations. The Emergency Service Unit, or ESU, have dealt with the arrests of some of the most dangerous drug deals, to taking a 300-pound Tiger out of an apartment. They meet at hidden headquarters and discuss whatever tactics need to be done to carry out a task. As Hannibal Smith said, “I love it when a plan comes together.” Click below to read more.
NEW YORK CITY – The special operations police met at a hidden headquarters before dawn. Officers loaded submachine guns, donned Kevlar helmets and muscled into 40-pound ballistic vests.
The New York Police Department’s elite Emergency Service Unit, or ESU, was gearing up for a high-risk arrest in one of the city’s roughest neighborhoods. Small patches sewn to their gear, marked with “A-,” “B+” and the like, advertised not performance grades but, rather, blood types. This saves time, officers said, should one of them get shot.
“Subject has a history with drugs and firearms,” said the detective leading the pre-raid briefing. “There’s also a pit bull.”
The first officers through the suspected drug dealer’s door would be members of ESU’s aptly-named “A-Team,” short for Apprehension Tactical Team. These heavily-armed, highly trained cops — jammed bicep-to-bicep into the back of an unmarked truck rattling through the dark streets of Brooklyn — had given The Daily a rare chance to watch them at work. The A-Team serves as vanguard for ESU, an elite police unit that, by some accounts, remains the department’s most coveted job.
“When you raise your right hand and get sworn in, they say it’s a front row seat to the greatest show on Earth,” said Det. John Kenny, 37, who has spent 8 years with the unit. “In ESU, we got the backstage passes.”
Officially designated the Emergency Service Division in 1930, the unit has gone through a number of names over the years but its motto — “anytime, anywhere” — and its ever-expanding mission has remained the same. The unit’s 400 members represent the NYPD’s best effort to hedge against all the iffy, tricky or terrifying scenarios that can’t be foreseen in a city of 8 million people.
Whether there’s a building collapse, plane crash or mass shooting — Emergency Service takes the call. ESU responds when suicidal New Yorkers perch on bridges, and they help recover bodies of those who can’t be talked back to safety. They’re also the department’s first line of defense when New York’s urban jungle literally gets wild.
In 1961, it was a lion found locked in a car on Manhattan’s West Side. In 1973, a small herd of cows got loose in the Bronx. In 2003, a 300-pound tiger was discovered growling inside an apartment in Harlem. In each case, different generations of cops were called in to wrangle, lasso or tranquilize the beasts. And, in each case, those cops came from ESU.
The unit even takes charge when the circus comes to town — pre-arranging security for the Ringling Brothers’ elephants as the animals lumber through the Midtown Tunnel.
“It kind of has to be one of those things that’s in place,” said Dave Norman, a 16-year veteran of ESU. “You don’t want to have to make a decision with an elephant running down 34th Street.”
Still, the police department’s more basic job is jailing suspected crooks, and ESU is no stranger to the task. The A-Team is called in constantly to make high-risk arrests, which helps explain why every member of ESU must rotate through the team on a three-month basis.
On the morning The Daily tagged along with them, the members of the A-Team rammed open doors, cleared rooms and ended the day with at least eight drug suspects safely in custody. The only casualty was the brawny officer in charge of breaching the apartment door, Sgt. Michael Gargan, who sliced his forearm open on a shattered window on the way in.
“It went into a thousand pieces when I rammed the door down,” he said as a medic bandaged his blood-streaked arm. “It’s a little scratch.”
Gently mocking him, other team members suggested perhaps Gargan had cut himself on purpose, in a bid to boost drama for The Daily’s story.“I think I saw him sticking a pen knife in his arm!” someone cracked at the back of the truck. Gargan rolled his eyes and laughed.
No matter how intense the work, ESU cops remain colleagues on the job. “Job” is a word they tend to use a lot when describing the tasks they undertake — not missions, not operations, but jobs.
“Because we’re working,” said Det. Karl Duenzel, a 15-year ESU veteran. “It’s not like a military-style operation. An operation is some kind of planned event. For us, the job is what it is — we respond to whatever comes over.”
NICE