On the North Side, the Fifth covered the lower part of Westlake, a rundown section of brownstones, walk-ups, and neighborhood stores. Its social problems were small and crime rate low. The half of Westlake that the Fifth took in occupied half of the Fifth’s territory, but less than twenty percent of its men and time. Westlake, after the war, was still a place where social workers never went.

The rest of the Fifth was beyond the aid of those not armed. That included the entertainment district, embracing State Street, and the repository of the city’s gravest ills, known to the Post Office as Port Smith 3, but called Joytown by the population or, less openly, Port Smith 69. It paralleled State Street down to Lewis Park, a cuff of grass at the edge of the bay.

Joytown was a mile long and six blocks wide, centering on Pleasance Street—the name since Colonial times, and the butt of countless bad jokes. The buildings were old, two, three, and four stories, most with mansard roofs. They were cold-water flats, rooming houses, and hotels. Some were simply condemned above the street floor. In spite of the disruption to commerce of the area, the fire laws were strictly enforced.

On any Wednesday afternoon with ten men on sick call, the Fifth Precinct could clean out Joytown: prostitutes, pimps, homos, junkies, pushers, vagrants, and bums; but that night and Thursday morning ninety-five percent of them would be rightly on the street again for lack of evidence. On Thursday afternoon the newspapers would attack the police for having sought headlines, which the papers had given eagerly. On Friday, a whore or pimp would complain of police brutality, and the Commissioner, following the law, would suspend the implicated officer until a hearing could be convened. Commercial and entertainment interests in Port Smith had a use for Joytown, and this was the context in which the police enforced the laws.

The pushers and pimps remained their fair game. Brazen whores were run in for sentences of sixty days. Sex offenders were handled with dispatch. There had never been a kidnapping in the modern era, and the last murder case in which the killer had not been found with his victim had occurred in 1944, when a soldier on leave had strangled a prostitute. Burglaries took most of the time of the Fifth Detective Squad, collecting evidence, interviewing, waiting for breaks. Brawlings in which no complaints were made were not counted in the squad’s statistics. The rest of its business required speed. Muggings and heists were solved in an hour or two, or not at all. Rapes, those that were reported, generally took a few days: most were the result of bad pickups. The Fifth detectives, and more particularly the men not assigned to burglary details, were called the Bucket Brigade. On busy nights they did nothing but answer the phones and run.