By Ellen Butler, Staff Reporter
Pete Valentin, the 17-year-old captain of the 42nd Precinct's Explorers Club, stares straight ahead, arms to his sides, holding his corps members at attention. Their breath makes clouds in the cold morning air at the Fort Schuyler Marine Corps Reserve base in Throgs Neck.
A minute later, they're laughing in a jumble in front of a police van. Valentin jumps on its hood to pose for Police Officer Kevin Mojica, who is snapping a photo.
These 18 Explorers -- 14 boys and four girls -- are participants in a citywide leadership-development effort run by the Police Department and the Boy Scouts.
The Explorers attract a wide variety of young people, from some who have lived sheltered lives to some who have been in gangs, according to Mojica, "Mo" to the teens. If they make it in the Explorers, he said, "They end up being good kids."
The 42nd Precinct's club, the borough's first, started a year and a half ago. Explorers are between ages 14 and 21. To stay in the program, they must maintain grade averages of 70 or above and stay out of trouble with the law. They pay $7 a year to the Boy Scouts for medical liability insurance and $75 to rent uniforms.
Though the Explorers are taught police procedures and the state penal code, the point is not to recruit new cops, said Mojica, 30, who works full time with youth. Valentin, for example, wants to be an architect. The officers steer the teens toward college scholarships and help them find tutors.
Tyrone Blake, a junior at Alfred E. Smith High School, plans to do a stint in the Marines and go on to be a New York City narcotics officer.
Drug busts in Blake's building on Grand Avenue piqued his interest in becoming a cop. "While I'm coming in from school, the cops were leaving with people in handcuffs. You got cops running out on the roof, on the fire escapes. It gets your adrenaline pumping."
Edgar Hernandez, a Morris High School junior, said, "I used to be very shy and timid," but the officers boosted his self-esteem. "They'd yell at me, `Speak up! Speak up with feeling!'"
On a recent Wednesday afternoon, before their weekly meeting, a dozen teens perched in the precinct's narrow community affairs office. Rose Negron, another officer on the youth beat, said 65 percent of the teenagers who started a year and a half ago are still in the program.
The whole club decides what punishments to assign to members who don't follow the rules, she said. Disciplinary measures range from requiring push-ups to, in rare cases, asking Explorers to leave.
Sitting at her desk, Negron said the discipline works for some and not for others. One Explorer "had that perpetrator mentality, a really bad attitude" but stayed for several months and never refused to get down on his knuckles and do push-ups. "He started to change," she said. "And then we lost him."
Looking up, she pointed at the precinct's front desk. "There he is," she said, shocked. Narcotics officers were questioning a handcuffed teenager.
"That hurts," Negron said shaking her head.
Meanwhile, the Explorers, now wearing pressed gray pants and navy-blue shirts with NYPD and Explorer badges on their sleeves, headed out to Morris High School for drills.
Hernandez said friends tease him for spending time with the police. They joke, "Oh, I smell pork around."
"I don't pay no mind to that." he said. "I'm doing something with my life."