Officer Grace Jones has been called a lot of things in her eight years with the NYPD. “Stupid” isn't one of them. You don’t get to where Grace is by letting your guard down, not when you’re patrolling the South Bronx at 3am, not when you’re breaking up prostitution rings in Hunts Point, and not when you’re shoving sixteen-year-old crackheads into the back of squad cars for anything from petty theft to first degree. It kills her by inches, some of the stuff she sees. It really does. So she suits up and locks it down, compartmentalizes, pulls every trick she knows so it doesn’t get to her too badly. She figures as long as she doesn’t lapse into raging alcoholism then her coping methods are working all right.

It’s nights like this, though, when it’s bitter cold and pissing down rain, that Grace has trouble keeping all that mess from rising to the surface. She’s got the cruiser idling outside a busted-up looking Duane Reade with the heat cranked up as high as it’ll go because it’s cold as a [i]bitch[/i], watching homeless people shuffle past or curl up in the shelter of abandoned stoops. There’s a couple of streetwalkers working the curb in spite of the weather, shivering in tatty halter tops and fishnet stockings, hoping for some john to drive by and get them out of the cold for a while.

Grace is from the Bronx. She knows how it is and how things can go bad real quick, and she's got nothing but sympathy for hookers. She doesn't harass them, and she never picks them up unless they’ve got something going on the side like drug dealing or grand theft auto or (God forbid) they’re minors. The ones on the curb tonight aren’t up to anything apart from being miserably cold, forced to stand out here by pimps who aren’t about to lose business because of some shitty weather, and Grace’s heart goes out to them. She’d pile them all into the back of the squad car just to get them out of the elements, but that’d do nothing but get them beat the next day for getting picked up by the cops. So Grace sits and watches and feels pretty miserable herself.