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In the world of NYPD Chief Joseph Fox—head of Transit, guardian of the city’s subways, career cop, longtime acolyte of Commissioner Bill Bratton (himself a former Chief of Transit way, way back in the day), and current benevolent believer in and enforcer of Bratton’s quality-of-life policing philosophy, a.k.a., Broken Windows—the gun collar is the pièce de résistance. You make a stop, you come up with a loaded gun. If policing were deer hunting, he notes, it’s like bagging the eight-pointer. “It’s huge,” Fox says. It means respect; it takes talent. It’s the crux of the job: cleaning up communities. Another gun off the street.

In the spring of 1986, in a very different city from the one New Yorkers live in today—1,582 homicides that year, compared to 333 in 2013—Fox pulled off one of his very favorite gun collars. At the time, he was an anti-crime sergeant in the 61st Precinct in South Brooklyn, which stretches from Sheepshead Bay to Gerritsen. “It may not be the tranquility of a Trappist Monastery on Christmas Eve, but it’s not exactly Beirut either,” one cop described the precinct in the ‘80s. A place where you had to work for collars, though they were there to be had. This was pre-Bratton, “pre-’94,” in Fox’s parlance. Much less rhyme or reason to crime prevention than there is now, is the implication. But a string of incidents had occurred in the area, reports of a heavyset man carrying a nine-millimeter, robbing doctors and dentists’ offices. So Joe Fox decides to hit the street. He says to his partner, “I’m gonna get the fat man.”

It was a routine car stop—a well-known perp in the driver’s seat, smalltime, a guy the cops would talk to from time to time. Call him Jim. Another man on the passenger’s side. Jim’s license is suspended, so Fox and his partner pull him over for a little chat. The passenger’s side door opens, and the other man starts walking away. Casual-like, no big deal. “Whoa. Where you going?” says Fox, and the man turns around—he’s rather large—and shrugs his shoulders. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he says. He walks back to the car. And here’s the thing that Joe Fox will never forget, the clinching detail—he has a lollipop dangling from his mouth. He’s that casual—he never takes the lollipop out. “This is Joe Fox,” Jim says as the man approaches the car, and Fox extends his hand. The heavyset man is wearing a leather jacket, and it’s open, waving a little, flapping around. Joe Fox takes a look at the man’s belt—he’s still holding his right hand, he never lets the perp go, and says, “Hey, you got anything?” And the leather jacket flaps open a little more, and then it’s no longer hypothetical. “Gun, gun, gun,” Fox shouts, and with his free hand he disarms the suspect, and moments later the perps are handcuffed in the back of the squad car.

Nearly 30 years later, Joe Fox has shot up the ranks from sergeant to commanding officer of Patrol Borough Brooklyn South, to Chief of Transit, three full stars, reporting to Bratton. This early gun collar, revisited many years later, cements itself at the center of Fox’s policing philosophy. First of all, you have to have some plan when you go out to prevent crime; secondly, it’s often the little things that lead to the big things. It’s a virtuous circle, too, because cleaning up the little things makes the community a better place, and then there are fewer little things, and fewer big things. And better communities are what it’s all about, anyway. That’s how Fox operates. It’s what he’s been doing for years.

And the fat man? Fox pulls his arrest records up from time to time, to keep an eye on him. “His last one was 1990, I think he’s behaving himself,” he says.  “I rehabilitated him,” Fox jokes. “The lollipop, I’ll always remember the lollipop.”

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You might say that Joe Fox was born to be a cop. His father was one, and at five, six, seven, Fox would delight family members with his usual routine:

Q: Where’s your daddy work?

A: My daddy doesn’t work.  He’s a cop.

Everybody would laugh. Police work seemed natural to him, the obvious thing for a father to do. “People came to him for advice, with his eighth grade education,” Fox says. “If somebody was having a problem with their child, was using drugs, they came to him. When somebody had a car accident, they came to him.”

Fox became a cop in 1981, in the days of “apologist policing,” as Fox calls it. After decades of corruption and commissions, the department was under a tight leash that felt overly restrictive to a young cop like Fox. In their history of the department, NYPD: A City and its Police, James Lardner and Thomas Repetto describe a police force whose motto was nearly “thou shalt not police”: “Uniformed cops were discouraged from contact with drug dealers, saloonkeepers, and other so-called corruption hazards.” Beat cops in particular, Fox remembers, shied away from low-level drug collars. In precincts across the city, conscientious cops found their collars haphazardly, the way Fox found the fat man in the Six-One. At the same time, crime continued to rise. The corruption-wary department was “unable to cope with the crime, the drugs, and the violence that had spread across the city in the 1970s and ’80s,” write Lardner and Repetto. “New York, in the eyes of many police commanders, had become a Third World city where crime could not be suppressed, only contained.”