Rita Mullaney spent six years as a beat cop in Chelsea, and for much of the time since, she has been trying to develop a TV show about her work. In the meantime, there are the photographs she took of the characters on her beat: the regulars at the soup kitchen where she minded the line every day, the homeless people who came to trust her, the new rich and the very poor, the mentally ill and the woman whose week was not complete if she did not call the precinct with a noise complaint about her neighbor. It was the early 1990s, when New York was awash in crime, but Officer Mullaney’s duties entailed more social work than muscle.

“I kept meeting all these people, just because I was that person that they would see every day on the street, and some of them had these amazing stories,” said Ms. Mullaney, 52, who retired from the force in 2012. “I wanted to document them and remember them.” There was the man who rebelled against Mussolini in Italy and the Cuban “ballerina” who spoke no English but showed the officer the beautiful lace lingerie he wore under his masculine outerwear.

“You become part of their world,” Ms. Mullaney said. “You see them as human beings, and we all make mistakes. One minute it’s dealing with the homeless guy on the street who’s going to the bathroom, and then the multimillionaire whose cat is on the ledge. Sometimes you’d have one approach you and then the other approach you, and you’d introduce them.”

Ms. Mullaney credits a childhood spent in Irish bars owned by her father, uncles and grandparents with teaching her to talk to people, including people under great duress. “You could always walk from block to block and hear a story,” she said. Some of them she keeps in her memory, and some she captured in her photographs.