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Guardian Angel on Alert
By Chuck Ferrara

Before becoming a minister, I spent over 16 years with the New York City Police Department, eventually retiring as a lieutenant while on the captain's promotion list. With the exception of my academy training and my last year as the Personnel Lieutenant with the Patrol Borough Manhattan South Command, all of my service time was as a street cop in high crime areas of the city. There are literally hundreds of stories floating around in my head and written on my heart-some of which make me extremely proud and others I'd rather forget.

During my time on the job, I met people of celebrity in the eyes of the public and some in their own minds. I worked with some of the best cops in the world, and others who should have never been given a badge and a gun. One thing I am certain of is that I love cops and respect the job they perform day in and day out. That is one of the reasons I have served as a police chaplain for the past 15 years.

One night in Harlem

Many police officers have been given religious medals of St. Michael, the patron saint and guardian angel of police officers, by persons who love them. Well, St. Michael was on duty one particular night while I was working in Harlem.

It was a normal night patrolling the hot steamy streets of Harlem. Everybody and his brother was out on the street, having felt how unbearably hot it was inside of the apartments. Standing on 8th Avenue in the area of West 118th Street, everything appeared to be quiet-quiet, that is, for Harlem. I was chewing the fat with my partner, Dominic, when a scream for help broke the normal rhythm of sound waves crisscrossing our space.

"Help!" a woman screamed in desperation. "Help! They just took my bag!" Out of the corner of my eye I caught the fluid strides of two men running diagonally across the avenue away from where we were standing. No doubt it was two heroin users crazed in their minds and craving in their bodies for a fix. Nothing or no one would get in the way of their next score.

Thank goodness that during most of my police career I was in great shape. Serving as an officer in an Army Reserve Special Forces Group certainly kept me motivated to run five miles every day with weights on my ankles and a rucksack on my back. Like a shot out of a cannon, my partner and I took off after them while Dom called into central that we were in a foot pursuit of two males wanted for a bag snatch. Being street smart and having done this before, the two fleeing suspects split up in two directions, leaving me to pursue the guy with the bag and my partner to go after his accomplice. All that kept running through my mind was that I was going to get this guy. I didn't take drugs, I rarely had a drink, I ate right, and worked out. This guy was a junkie, and I was going to take him down. The more this thought kept running through my head, the faster his pace became. It is strange what goes through your head during times like that.

I kept rationalizing that I had a belt of equipment around my waist weighing a ton. I was holding my hat in one hand and a portable radio in the other. I was wearing boots while he had on sneakers. But he was gaining and that ticked me off all the more. So I dug deeper with the best airborne finish a paratrooper could muster, and began to close the gap as he looked back like a scared gazelle on Wild Kingdom being pursued by a lion.

Realizing I wasn't a donut-eating cop who was going to slow down or give up, he darted into an abandoned building that I knew to be occupied by squatters who used it as a shooting gallery and flop house. Whenever cops entered this building, people would run in all directions knowing "The Man" was in the house. Heroin addicts would limp along the hallways with ulcerated legs from shooting heroin in them because veins everywhere else had collapsed. Strange, but I always felt sorry for addicts. They were living in hell waiting to die, and it was only a matter of time. The thing I could never figure out was why the city allowed these buildings to exist. They had electricity and natural gas. So in the winter the junkies would huddle around a stove with all four burners going to heat the room. Who paid the electric and gas bills? No one ever could explain that one to me.

As I entered the hallway I could hear my prey's footsteps laboring up the marble steps of this once nice abode-now a rat-infested building with the stench of urine and human excrement. As I climbed the steps, I reholstered my radio and unholstered my service revolver, not knowing what I would encounter on one of the floors. By the sound of the

suspect's steps, I knew he was still climbing north and had not darted into one of the abandoned apartments. So I kept climbing two and three steps at a time hoping to gain on him. When we reached the fifth floor and were still climbing, I realized this guy was running on adrenaline only. As I tried to focus on the suspect, I also kept wondering if my partner was okay. Was he rolling around on the sidewalk with the other guy? Nevertheless I had to remain focused on the one I was after. When I hit the landing between the fifth and sixth floor of the building, I heard the roof door slam shut. He had gone onto the roof. It would be dark and unlit. I kept climbing. I wasn't going to give up now-or was I?

In all my years as a cop I never backed down from a situation, no matter how dangerous. This isn't a bravado statement, it's a statement of fact. The police could not back down. We were the thin blue line between civilization and chaos. When I took my oath of office I knew that I would not have the privilege of running the other way in times of danger.

For some reason I stopped dead on the inside of the roof door and threw my back up against the wall. Why wasn't I going through the door? I knew he went out there. He's only a desperate junkie, and certainly not someone I couldn't take down. It was as if someone had his hand on my chest holding me back. I do not remember if I felt a physical presence stopping me or if it was something else that paralyzed me from going one inch further. By now I was covered with perspiration. My heart was beating so hard I could actually see the center portion of my chest popping up and down and hear my heartbeat in my inner ears. I slid down the wall in a crouched position and called for a backup. They were there in a matter of minutes. There are no soldiers or police officers like those serving in the NYPD.

When two officers worked their way up to me, I told them what had happened and that for some reason I wasn't comfortable with going through the roof door. We unscrewed the light bulb on the landing for concealment as one of the backup officers swung open the door and held it open. As I shined my flashlight onto the roof landing I quickly noticed flattened discarded cardboard laid out just past the exit threshold of the doorway. I asked the second officer to keep his light trained on the cardboard as I pulled my nightstick from its holder. Stretching my nightstick through the doorway, I poked at the cardboard and watched pieces of it fall into a black abyss. The cardboard covered a hole in the roof approximately eight feet by five feet. The drop went down two stories into a pile of plaster, metal, and glass. It was a clever booby trap that the neighborhood felons knew about. Had I run through that door in hot pursuit of the bag snatcher, I would have fallen two stories either to my death or serious physical injury.

What was it that stopped me from going through that door? I had gone through more roof doors than I would like to remember and had never paused, never stopped. Why that time? Intuition? I don't think so, because that intuition never kicked in before during similar circumstances. Someone held me back from going through the door and onto the roof that evening. I am convinced to this very day, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it was the hand of God, and perhaps a guardian angel, that prevented me from falling to my death. Nearly every time an angel appears in the Bible, the first words the angel says are, "Don't be afraid!" In some unspoken way those words were conveyed to me, "Don't be afraid; I've got your back."

 

Spiritual Warfare

I was working as the evening desk lieutenant in the 10th Precinct on the west side of Manhattan when a call came over the radio that two college students, a young couple, were stabbed in the back by a female who fled into her ground floor apartment after the assault. These two innocent kids were minding their own business walking north on 8th Avenue toward the Long Island Railroad terminal located beneath Madison Square Garden when a 400-pound woman charged them from behind shouting unintelligible words. She stabbed them both in the back with a kitchen knife. Thank God the two victims survived. After a brief standoff where the assailant barricaded herself in her apartment, members of the elite Emergency Services Unit broke down the door and apprehended this incredibly huge, strong, and crazed suspect. It required three pairs of handcuffs linked together to rear cuff this woman due to her size.

When she entered the station house her eyes were partially rolled up toward the back of her head. She had white foam bubbling from her mouth as she continued to babble an unintelligible grouping of phrases. I instructed the arresting officers to bring her up to the booking room and to secure her in the holding pen. After 20 minutes, one of the arresting officers came down to the front desk to inform me that she was not cooperating and was downright scary to handle. From the time she entered the precinct I sensed in my spirit that this woman was driven by something evil. So I had a sergeant relieve me on the desk and I traveled up the stairs to where she was being held.

Entering the room I could smell a foul odor coming off of this woman. She was now shouting and bouncing off of the caged walls of the holding pen. The minute she spotted me she stared me down with a steel cold look that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. All of my 175 pounds looked her right in the eyes, with both arresting officers watching. And then I said, "Sit down in the name of Jesus." That was all I said. She backed up to the rear wall and sat down and we did not have a problem with her for the rest of the night until she was taken to a hospital for observation.

I know that is not standard police procedure. But there are some things in the spiritual realm that cannot be easily replicated as a procedure. Just as you would carefully suit up with the right equipment for patrol, it is equally, if not more, important to put on what the Bible calls the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand. What is the full armor of God, anyway?

"Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil's schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the saints" ( Ephesians 6:11-18).

Ironically, St. Paul was most likely chained to a Roman centurion when he wrote his description of the full armor of God. A centurion was like a first century police officer. And as Paul gazed at the soldier's armor he was inspired by the Holy Spirit to see in it the analogy of God's spiritual provision for our battle with Satan. That is why Paul reminds us that "our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms" (Ephesians 6:12-13).

So, when I think of what makes a good cop, I've come to believe that it has a spiritual dimension as well as a professional dimension. I knew I wanted to be equipped with God's spiritual armor.

 

Reaching out

There are lots of good cops working the streets of our towns and cities. In fact, I would say there are lots of great cops we see everyday. But having worn the badge for many years and now involved in police chaplaincy for many years-I can tell you that there are lots of spiritually empty police officers out on patrol. They lack that spiritual dimension in their lives. They are highly trained, confident in what they do, loyal to the point of being willing to lay down their lives for another-but unaware of how to lay down their lives for Christ.

Beyond the Badge was written as a tool to help anyone reach out to a cop. I know from personal experience that when officers surrender their lives to Christ, they take on a whole different outlook on life-their personal lives, their marriages, and the people they serve. We must be willing to reach out to our law enforcement community with the hope of the gospel.

When a person in crisis dials 911, they don't get a pastor, evangelist, or Christian counselor-a police officer responds. Imagine if an officer could respond with spiritual wisdom, faith, and courage to those calls from persons in their deepest hour of need. What I used to hear was, "There is something different about you, officer." That gave me an open door to share my faith with them. Some situations and circumstances are only changed from a power and hope that comes from beyond the badge.

 

Charles "Chuck" Ferrara is the senior pastor of the New Fairfield United Methodist Church in New Fairfield, Connecticut, and an ordained United Methodist minister since 1988. In 1986, he retired as a lieutenant after serving 16 years with the New York Police Department. He is a former member of the U.S. Army's Airborne Special Forces.This article is an excerpt of Pastor Ferrara's new book, Beyond the Badge: A Spiritual Survival Guide for Cops and Their Families (Living Streams). Good News has been encouraging United Methodist congregations to adopt their local police force and get a copy of Beyond the Badge to every police officer in America. For more information on purchasing the book, call Good News at 1-800-487-7784.



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