AT NOON ON A Friday morning in April, Officer Frank Irizarry was still “a bit punchy” over an arrest he made the previous night. “Let’s just say they were doing the dance of the pickle,” he said of the two men he brought in to NYPD Precinct 22, otherwise known as Central Park. “If you’re having sex in the park that’s lewd behavior.”

Sgt. Glen Ramroop and Officer Chris Wendt tried to calm him down with jokes while they manned the desk of the surprisingly quiet police station. “I’m really sorry,” said Wendt as he flipped through a copy of the Daily News. “I’d love to come join you, but I’m reading about Amy Fisher.”

“This is the safest precinct in the city,” Irizarry said.

Central Park cops still have to deal with the problems that come with being in New York City. There are lots of drug deals in the northern section of the park. Fights are common, especially in the summer when 200,000 people can visit the park on a given weekend. “The regulars” get territorial, according to Irizarry, and don’t appreciate newcomers invading their space. Police must shepherd the park’s homeless to shelters and its mentally disabled to hospitals. And until the city clamped down on raucous behavior at festivals a few years ago they had to contend with misconduct at events such as the Puerto Rican Day Parade, which in 2000 saw several women groped by a large group of men.

Many people still associate Central Park with a 1989 incident in which a young woman was raped while jogging through the park at night. Irizarry said violent crimes are rare in the park, and much more isolated than in the early 1990s.  There were five rapes and no murders in the park during 2003, according to Compstat, the department’s crime statistics database.

Most of the sex Irizarry sees is consensual, and he sees it a lot – in horse-drawn carriages, in the fields, in the trees. He can’t quite figure it out. “There’s something about getting a blow job in a horse carriage car,” he said. “It always happens. I’ll give them a summons for that. We do get quite a bit of outdoor voyeurism.”

Irizarry once arrested a couple making love while about a half-dozen people stood by and watched. “They were just doing it like it was nothing,” he said. He also recalled last year when two men got stuck having sex in a tree. The police rescued them before promptly arresting them.

But it’s not all sex, all the time in the park. Sometimes people drop out of the sky, and that is what keeps the cops interested in their work.

“A guy with a parachute crash-landed in the precinct parking lot,” Irizarry said. “We arrested him because you are not allowed to fly over New York air space.” And then there was the hot air balloon displaying a political message that landed in the northern part of the park last year.