Breaking Rank (19 page)

The next day, I called the house. My son Matthew answered the phone. He told me he'd read the letter to Dad. My father had wept, and told Matt that he'd beaten me to toughen me up. He feared I was “too sensitive.”

There were, of course, better ways to “toughen me up,” if indeed that's what I needed. My father, like so many men, just didn't know how to raise a boy. One of Dad's brothers told me recently that their father, my “Pampa,” whom I'd idolized, had raised his family (the girls as well as the boys) with sticks, fists, and belts. It hurt to hear Uncle Larry's accounts of my beloved
Pampa. But as a grown-up, as a cop, I would have been surprised to hear otherwise.

Why, I asked Lieutenant Jay Helmick at the critique, had those cops just stood there on that porch?

“Because they
weren't
cops, Stamper. Whether they were afraid of the suspect, or afraid of the brass, they didn't act like cops, they didn't act like
men.
”

*
An all-black sedan used during the day by detectives and at night by patrol officers who, before they begin their shift, reverse a placard, which reads
S
AN
D
IEGO
P
OLICE
, and is bracketed to both front doors.

COP CULTURE

CHAPTER 8

WHY WHITE COPS KILL BLACK MEN

Momma and Daddy were lucky, they had girls. I had boys. My boys are eleven and nine now, and I'm scared to death for them. It's not that I'm afraid they're gonna get jumped into a gang, or wind up doing or dealing drugs. No sir. My big fear is they're gonna run into one of you people one night and they won't be coming home. It's like open season on young black men in our community, like they're walking around with targets on their backs. I have a recurring nightmare, Chief: I get this call in the middle of the night, “Come on down to the morgue, Mrs. Johnson. We got one of your boys here. Police shot him when he tried to run.”

—An African-American mother at a community forum

It's open season on us in The Heights, Chief. If you're working the blacks you're wearing a target, plain and simple. For me it comes down to this: kill or be killed. I got a wife and two boys. My sons need their father. I'm gonna do whatever it takes to make it home at the end of shift.

—A white cop, and member of an officer-safety task force, two weeks later

A
NXIOUS ABOUT THE FUTURES
of four young boys, a black mom and a white dad used identical metaphors in April 1985 to describe the “killing ground” that was, in their respective minds, the black community. There is no better case study of this issue than the Amadou Diallo incident in New York City.

Mr. Diallo was approached by four NYPD officers one night in February 1999. The cops thought he might be a rape suspect. Frightened, not understanding what was going on, Diallo reached for his wallet to show the officers his ID. One of the cops yelled, “Gun!” and in less time than it takes to read
this sentence, forty-one shots were fired, nineteen of them striking Mr. Diallo. Diallo was not a rapist. In fact, he had no criminal record.

NYPD ruled it a “clean” shooting, meaning the killing of the twenty-two-year-old, non-English-speaking, unarmed immigrant was legally justified and within department policy. The Department of Justice found no civil rights violations. A state criminal trial ended in four acquittals.

But an innocent man was shot dead. Why? Because Mr. Diallo was black. I believe the cops were afraid of him for that reason, and that reason alone. So frightened they couldn't see straight, think straight, shoot straight. (If they'd been at their PD firearms range in the Bronx all forty-one of those shots, fired as they were at point blank range, would have found their target.)

But
why
were they so frightened?

President Clinton said at the time, “If it had been a young white man in a young all-white neighborhood, it probably wouldn't have happened.” To determine whether the Diallo killing (or any other police action) was racially motivated you have to ask,
Would the cops have behaved the same way if the man had been white?

No. Diallo was killed because of his dark skin. A white man reaching for his wallet, under identical circumstances, including a language barrier, would have been given the benefit of the doubt.

Simply put, white cops are afraid of black men. We don't talk about it, we pretend it doesn't exist, we claim “color blindness,” we say white officers treat black men the same way they treat white men. But that's a lie. In fact, the bigger, the darker the black man the greater the fear. The African-American community knows this. Hell, most
whites
know it. Yet, even though it's a central, if not
the
defining ingredient in the makeup of police racism, white cops won't admit it to themselves, or to others.

I've studied fear for years. I've learned how it affects our bodies, our perception, judgment, and actions. Recently, I tried to dig up empirical evidence to support my particular theory that white cops are afraid of black men.

I researched the voluminous library of the National Institute of Justice (Bureau of Justice Statistics), scoured the reams of publications put out by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, consulted LexisNexis. I Googled till I was goggle-eyed. It's just not there. You can find all kinds of
evidence of citizen fears
of
the police. There are studies on officer stress, some of which focus on cops' fears of being fired for doing the wrong thing (or not doing the right thing). There
are
studies showing that whites, in general, are likely to view blacks as more violent than whites. (One of those studies, recently completed by Dr. Anthony Greenwald and published in the July 2003
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
, actually went so far as to put computer “guns” in the hands of 106 undergraduate, mostly white, non-cop students. In 208 scenarios the students wrongly shot black “suspects” 35 percent of the time versus 26 percent wrongful shootings of whites.) But not until some brave soul conducts a valid, reliable study that focuses on actual white cops' actual
fears
of actual black men will we have actual scientific proof of my assertion.

So, why am I so certain that white cops are afraid of black men? Because I was a white cop. In a world of white cops. For thirty-four years.

At first I was afraid of everyone, white, black, old, young. I got over most of these fears pretty quickly (which is to say I sublimated or repressed them). But not, however, my fear of black men. Not for a long, long time. As a rookie, I felt a peculiar and particular fear every time I stopped or ticketed or arrested a black man, a fear I did not feel when confronting white men under similar circumstances.

From the earliest days of academy training it was made clear that black men and white cops don't mix, that of all the people we'd encounter on the streets, those most dangerous to our safety, to our survival, were black men.

One instructor began his presentation with: “Gentlemen, what you are about to learn may save your life.” He was there to talk to us about a
particular
problem he said we would encounter with a
particular
slice of the black male population in Logan Heights. He directed us to his chapter in the academy manual:

            
This information is designed to acquaint you with the
NATION OF ISLAM OR THE
“
MUSLIM CULT
.” It should be noted at this time that your Police Department has always maintained a detachment from political, racial, and religious involvements. This policy has not changed as this is a sketch of a pseudo-religious organization whose creed is the anniliation [sic] of the white man . . .

We learned that this “pseudo-religious organization” was composed of twenty- to thirty-year-old men called the “fruit of Islam.” That these men were “selected for their physical prowess and are adept at aggressive tactics and judo.” That they were “almost psychotic in their hatred of Caucasians and are comparable to the Mau Mau or Kamikaze in their dedication and fanaticism.” That “
locally
, members of this cult will kill any police officer when the opportunity presents itself, regardless of the circumstances or outcome.”

Black men? “Almost psychotic” in their hatred of
me
? On the streets of my city. Dedicated to “anniliating” me? I wondered, but never asked, what the four African-American cops in that classroom thought of all this.

We soon learned it wasn't just the “Muslim Cult” we needed to worry about. It was
all
black men, something we were taught tacitly if not explicitly by other instructors who kept returning in their “real-world” tales to the streets of Logan Heights, to accounts of gunfights, fistfights, knife-fights—with black men. It got to the point where all they had to say was “The Heights” and you'd envision legions of black males who couldn't wait for the chance to kill a cop.

I was working The Heights one night as a rookie when my senior officer ordered me to pull up to the curb in front of a bar, aptly nicknamed the “Bucket o' Blood.” “Get out of the vehicle,” he said. “Take your nigger-knocker with you.” I stepped out of the car, slipped my baton into its ring, and peered through the passenger window, awaiting instructions. “Go on inside,” he said. “Pick out the biggest, blackest, meanest motherfucking nigger in the place and pinch him.” I was halfway to the door of the tavern when he called me back to the car. It had been a test, a jest. He laughed his ass off. It took me five minutes to stop shaking.

What if he'd said, in front of the Kensington Inn, a white bar in a white neighborhood, “Go on inside. Pick out the biggest, whitest, meanest motherfucking honky in the place and pinch him”? I probably would have thought something like,
Dang, this guy's off his rocker. Why does he want me to go in there and bust some big white guy?
But I wouldn't have been afraid. I wasn't taught to fear white people.

A couple of nights later I rode The Heights with another white cop. This guy was different. Jack Pearson had grown up in an African-American
neighborhood, had attended Lincoln High, a predominantly black school. We stopped a lot of black men that night, even put a couple of them in jail. Pearson's respectful, transparently fearless approach to them stood in contrast to the panicky, impulsive white cops I'd worked with. Watching him talk to black men (and women) and observing how he
listened
to them helped me recognize that I was a member of the panicky white-cop category.

This knowledge ultimately forced me to confront and to work (for years) on my own fears and racism. And to recognize that it was fear of black men (and no small amount of peer pressure) that, in part, drove me to behave during my rookie year as a thug, a brutal, overbearing, menace of a cop.

Good cops experience fear, to be sure. But they perform effectively by working through their fear. Ambrose Redmoon wrote, “Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.” For fearless cops, that “something else” is getting a dangerous and delicate job done—properly, humanely and safely.

Fearless cops
perceive
their surroundings more accurately, and they make more informed judgments when the work does turn tense or dangerous. It's not that they don't register hues of black or white or brown, they just don't impute
anything
to skin color. They size up Diallo-type situations—which happen
all the time
in police work—and recognize in the moment the inherent innocence of such persons. Because these cops are alert, not alarmed or paranoid, and because they assess behavior not pigmentation, they tend to produce routine rather than tragic outcomes. Cops like these, who make up maybe twenty to thirty percent of the force, are inspiring to watch in action.