b"Was your job location the same throughout your career with the city?No. Once I finished the training at East Sixth Street and once, I went through the training and was accepted, my firstassignment was in Manhattan, all the way up to Washington Heights, all the way down to South Street. I was on a mobiletask force and the mobile task force was a group of about 10 or 12 people who were selected and went through certaintraining and during that period of time, particularly the '80s, we had a lot of gangs in the school. It was a very trouble-some time. We had to go wherever there was a problem. We would be out in the field and we could get a call that therewas a problem at Martin Luther King or there was a problem at George Washington. George Washington was a veryvolatile school during that period of time, because they had a lot of gangs, the gangbusters they were called. And becauseof the mixture in the '80s at George Washington, which was a mixture of people of color, but particularly Dominicans,there was a lot of friction. So every day, or every week or so, there would be a fight. George Washington also played football and other sports. They have a beautiful field that's outdoors and whenever you have a game, you had to makesure that you had coverage in case of what went on, particularly after the game, and so the task force from Manhattan,and the task force from Brooklyn, and the task force from Queens all would be at that game. It would be our job to makesure there was no disturbance, or if there was a disturbance, to be able to deal with it as quickly as possible.If there was a disturbance, what would you do? We tried to handle it by separating people, but actually a lot of times it got into hand to hand combat. Actually handto hand combat. We've gone up against people with bats and we've gone up against people with all kinds of weapons.At one game, ironically enough, there were weapons, they were not charged against us, but in the process we found outthere were weapons. When you get a weapon, we would have to take it to the nearest precinct and go through theprocess of vouchering it. During that period of time, particularly in the '80s, the police department was not very helpfulwith us. We were new in terms of it, but we were licensed, remember, we went through the training and you werelicensed. So we would go to the precinct to make an arrest, and depending upon what precinct you went to, the sergeantwould help you with the paperwork or would help you with the fingerprint, because fingerprinting was new to us. Someof them would say: Oh, you have your own divisions, you do it yourself. Some precincts would be kind enough to makesure that we had transportation to the night court if we had an arrest. But there was a kind of conflict about why we werearresting people. But we did take the test and pass the test as special patrolmen.There was a little professional tension, perhaps?Yes, because they felt that we were not real, and as the children used to call us, toy cops, because we didn't have any guns.You were in situations where people had weapons and you didn't have any?That is correct. Sometimes your adrenaline went up. The fortunate thing on the task force is that, we were really atight-knit group, and we would always look out for each other. One person would see something and then would be alertand would help us out. A good example is this incident at a high school in Manhattan that was very troubled. My partnerand I were outside, and someone told us this guy had a gun in his pocket. So, Sandro got the guy and put his hand on thegun in his pocket to hold it. His back was turned to all the students out there. At that point I knew that I had to back himup until we got back-up. We called for assistance, we called the 10-13 in. But until we could get some assistance, I was151 "