PLAYBOY: You're either going to get beat up or lose a lot of money.

PRICE: Yes, beat up or you're going to pay them. So they don't want anything to do with cops. The Chinese community outreach people have their hands full getting people to trust them. And they have a hard time trying to get Chinese cops down there. They have very few Chinese speaking cops in the Seventh Precinct. And the Fujianese don't even speak Mandarin, which is the universal Chinese language. They speak Fujianese. So there are next to no Fujianese cops. I don't think they're that integrated into the mainstream yet to even think of becoming policemen. There's like one guy who could possibly speak Fujianese, and he's flying everywhere. The Fifth Precinct, the Chinatown precinct, has a more developed police presence. I think the commander is Chinese. But the Seventh -- they just don't have the Chinese-speaking manpower. There has also been this huge influx of money into the Lower East Side in terms of property being snatched up by the Chinese. The Chinese and the whites are vying to grab up as much real estate as possible down there. I have a friend in the Seventh Precinct, a detective. He's a white guy who doesn't speak Chinese, but he made a connection with the Chinese embassy. He was invited, along with four guys from the Fifth and Seventh precinct, to go on a tour of China. He went to Fujian Province because that's the most pertinent place for a downtown cop to go. He said the cops there are all corrupt. And he said a lot of them own buildings on the Lower East Side, even though they've never been out of China.

PRICE: Here's what I learned, and it's kind of a drag: I think the Seventh Precinct is probably one of the lowest crime precincts. It's the smallest precinct in Manhattan. It's gone from one of the most dangerous precincts in the Loisaida days to probably one of the safest precincts where maybe the biggest crime is like counterfeit Pierre Cardin shit. Or people going into restaurants and boosting bags when some girl goes to the bathroom and leaves her bag on the back of her chair. But what happens is success breeds its own failure, which is that it's a numbers game. And this is what I learned. Policing, like everything else, is about what it looks like on paper. If you have no crime, and you're passing on no arrests because it's successful to One Police Plaza, it looks like you're not doing anything. So you have to make quality of life busts. There's no such thing as, "Wow, we did a good job." No, no. It's: "Now we got to go out and bust an old Chinese guy who's doing t'ai chi in the park at 5:30 a.m. because the park doesn't officially open until 6:30 a.m., so let's get him for trespassing." That one got kicked out in two-seconds flat. But the cops are reduced to nuisance things, quality of life things. Kids get locked up for putting stickers for their own t-shirt companies on lamp posts. There's this big anti-graffiti mandate. Can you image people in Harlem getting nuts, getting exercised over graffiti? But, you know, whatever it is, you got to look busy.

PLAYBOY: That part of the city was dangerous in 1978.

PRICE: I've lived all over Manhattan, and I was living in the Village in the late 1970s. I remember wandering around, and I walked a little too far east, and found myself in Alphabet City. I swear to god for the first time in my life I was genuinely scared. Like, How did I get into this jungle? How do I get out? And nobody did anything. Nobody said anything to me. It was just viscerally scary.

PLAYBOY: The only people over there were junkies and dealers.

PRICE: There were lines going around the block to buy heroin. That apartment they're all going to -- like a bird's nest -- is now a million bucks and you got two yuppies living in there.

PLAYBOY: Completely oblivious to what was there 30 years before.

PRICE: And the guys who were selling heroin were completely oblivious to who was there 50 years before that. Every generation is oblivious to what was there before. It's like when you do one of those archaeological cross sections of Mesopotamia. If you cut down to 30 feet, you get to earth. If you cut down 60 feet, you get to Stone Age, you know. That's what it's like, except it's all compressed to 150 years.

PLAYBOY: It makes you wonder what could possibly be there 50 years from now.

PRICE: Yeah. And we haven't even brought up the Orthodox Jews down there.

PLAYBOY: That's right.

PRICE: That's a trip. The cops have two names for the Orthodox Jews. They either call them the J's or the Hats. They're very politically powerful. I mean the police have this thing called the J Squad. If anything happens to an Orthodox down there, it's all hands on deck. Sheldon Silver lives down there, the State Assembly leader. I mean there are a couple of rabbis, who if they say, "Vote for this guy," you got 10,000 votes. It's like Constantinople. I'll tell you this one incident. We heard that there was a guy coming out of an OTB on East Broadway and he got into a fight with five guys and they beat the shit out of him on the street. And it looked like he was likely to die. The word got to the squad and they thought the name was Schwartz. It was like, bam, in two seconds that squad room was empty. Everybody was down there. They get down there and the guy's name is Schultz. They go, "Oh, fuck!" And they walk back.