Ken vs. the City

I went running this morning on the Brooklyn Bridge, something I should do more often. This morning I found cops climbing all over one of the towers.

It was part of a training exercise for the NYPD’s Emergency Services Unit. In this scenario, some crazy person had climbed to the top of the tower with the intending to jump. In this instance, the “crazy person” was one of the ESU trainees.

I spoke with an Officer Castro, one of the NYPD officers who joined the ESU for this exercise. He said that suicidal people climb on bridges in New York all the time. And while they seldom ever actually jump, every time it happens it holds up traffic and endangers the lives of the police officers who have to go up there and get them. He mentioned an incident last year where a guy they nicknamed the “spider-man” climbed up on top of one of the bridge’s main cables, and every time the officers got close to him, he would jump through the air to a different cable.

During a real incident, the ESU would try to talk to the “crazy person” to calm them down. Since I wasn’t up there on top of the tower, I don’t know if that was part of the training exercise or not. But they strapped the “crazy person” tightly into a sort of back board/sarcophagus thing. Another officer was strapped to a harness facing him, presumably to talk to him and keep him calm on the way down, and to keep the whole arrangement from swinging too much during the descent.

They made their way down, lowered down the middle of the tower by a climbing rope played out by officers on the top. As they were descending, a lot of people stopped to take pictures. When they reached the deck of the bridge, they were greeted with applause.

I apologize for the lack of pictures. Since I was running, I had no camera with me.