The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston's Racial Divide (12 page)

The two applicant pools were then merged into a single master list. The first name on the new list was the highest ranking minority applicant, and the second name was the highest ranking non-minority applicant. To fill openings, the police department went down the list—in effect, alternating between the two groups. The first opening went to a minority applicant, the second to a nonminority. The system was intended to “facilitate the appointment…of one minority policeman for each white policeman.” No one disputed that the plan favored minority applicants, who, by virtue of merging the two pools, ended up ranked higher than a white applicant who had a higher score on the exam or was related to an officer killed in the line of duty. That was the whole point of the affirmative action plan—to use race to correct a gross imbalance in the racial makeup of the force. The goal was to achieve “rough parity,” where the percentage of minorities on the Boston police force mirrored the percentage of minorities living in the city.

Mike Cox was a second grader at St. Mary’s in Brookline when the Castro decree’s quota system first went into effect in 1973. Fifteen years later he sat down to take the civil service exam under the revised system with the hope of becoming a police officer. As always, his older sisters had been looking out for him. Lillian not only showed Mike the recruitment ad in the newspaper, she got him the forms he needed to apply.

Lillian was responding to an interest Mike had had since he was a boy, even if he was uncertain whether he could ever measure up to the job. “It seemed like a very difficult job,” Mike said. Self-doubts aside, the Castro decree had guaranteed a police job was no longer a long shot for a young black man. By 1988, the look of the police force had changed radically. Of the 1,908 officers, 365 were blacks and Hispanics—making up 20.7 percent of the department’s total workforce.

Mike became excited about applying. “It was an opportunity to do something which I would probably learn to like, and I always had an admiration for law and the legal field.” Mike was also impressed by the pay. “It wasn’t bad either.” Earning power was no small thing to him in his new role as provider. The year of 1988 was proving to be a big and hurried one—a personal trifecta covering marriage, family, and career.

Mike and Kimberly were married on June 25, 1988. Vince Johnson was his best man. Mike had just turned twenty-three and Kimberly was twenty-two. The wedding came just a few weeks after Kimberly’s graduation from Spelman College with a bachelor of science degree in biology. The newlyweds immediately settled in Boston. Five months later, on November 14, Michael Cox Jr. was born. Even with all that, Kimberly was intent on juggling motherhood and her medical school ambitions.

In the fast makeover of his life, Mike’s one piece of unfinished business was Providence College. Mike had not returned to Providence following his semester at Morehouse. He became preoccupied with Kimberly, their marriage plans, and starting a family, and he decided he could not start a police career and continue school. “I always knew I could go back to school,” he said. “I didn’t know if I necessarily would have another opportunity to go into the police academy.” When Mike told Kimberly he was going to drop out and apply to the police department, she supported him. They agreed that Mike would complete college later and go on to pursue another goal: a law degree.

Mike passed the civil service exam, filled out the department’s thick application, had a physical, and sailed through a series of interviews. The process included an assessment by a mental health professional who, studying the paperwork and noticing Kimberly’s academic bona fides, joked, “What’s it like being married to someone who’s much, much smarter than you?” Mike laughed. “It’s a matter of opinion,” he retorted.

Soon Mike got the good word: He was in—an affirmative action hire in the new class of recruits that would begin six months of training at the Boston police academy on February 27, 1989. Vince Johnson was one old friend taken aback by Mike’s career move. “I couldn’t believe he was a cop,” he said. “He never seemed the type.” But one of Mike’s former neighbors on Winthrop Street in Roxbury was not surprised. “The profession he chose was a good one for him,” the elderly woman named Seleata said. “He cares about people and always has.”

Following graduation from the police academy, Mike was ready for prime time—and he was assigned to a new station opened by the city to beef up police coverage in the high-crime neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan. The older station, known as Area B–2, was located in the heart of Roxbury in Dudley Square, just a few blocks from where Mike grew up. The new facility, known as Area B–3, was built a couple miles south on Blue Hill Avenue in the Mattapan neighborhood.

Mike began his probation working as a patrol officer during the day shift. A few months later, Mike jumped at the chance to work a more pro-active assignment. Cornell James asked the rookie to work with him. James, a black officer in his early thirties, was a veteran working nights in plainclothes. His family lived on Whiting Street, a cross street off the Coxes’ Winthrop Street, and the two families knew each other well.

Mike was eager to join James. For a rookie still on probation, working in plainclothes was the fast track. But Mike quickly learned of the assignment’s unique dangers. One night he and Cornell James went after a car thief. Listening to the radio, they heard the suspect had abandoned the car and was fleeing on foot. Mike ran from the cruiser and began heading down a street hoping to cut the suspect off. He was playing a hunch. “I was going to the point where the suspect was going to be at.” He was dressed in street clothes. His badge was on a necklace around his neck, his police ID was in his wallet, and he wore his service belt. But the police identification was mostly concealed. To any bystander, Mike looked like a black man on the run.

Suddenly, a police cruiser raced by and cut directly in front of him. To avoid being hit, Mike leaped and landed on the hood of the car. He tumbled to the ground, and before he could stand up one officer had grabbed him by his shoulders while a second officer had him by the throat. “I couldn’t talk. He was choking me.” Mike was unable to explain who he was even if he’d wanted to. The first officer suddenly let go; he’d seen the police ID. The second officer, meanwhile, “stood there trying to choke me and threw me on top of the car.” The first officer began yelling that Mike was a cop and then the second officer finally backed off. They left to chase the suspect.

Mike was left dazed by the hit-and-run. “I wasn’t scared,” he said. “I was baffled.” It was the choking by the second officer—a textbook example of the use of unnecessary force. “I didn’t understand why he was choking me because I was offering no resistance, so I was more or less angry. I didn’t know what was going on.”

But Mike quickly let go of his concerns. After the suspect was apprehended, the two officers swung by the Area B–3 station to look him up. They were not from Mike’s station and didn’t know the rookie. “They all came by to apologize,” Mike said. The first came up and said, “I didn’t recognize you.” The second also said he regretted the mistake. It ended there. But not before word got around and a captain in Mike’s station called him into his office. “I gave an oral report,” Mike said. The captain explained his concern: He’d heard talk the officers involved had a “reputation for doing things like that to black people who live in that area.” He wondered if Mike wanted to file a formal complaint. No way, said Mike. He was a twenty-four-year-old rookie cop. “I said, ‘Captain, I’m on probation. I just started this job. They all apologized. I’m satisfied with that.’”

When his probation ended early in 1990, Mike was assigned to stay in B–3 in Mattapan, although his shift changed to the “last half” from 11:45
P.M
. to 7:30 in the morning. He started out patrolling alone in a service car, responding to routine calls from the dispatcher. Then one night, Craig Jones, another black officer at the station, asked Mike to team up with him. Craig was working in plainclothes in an anti-crime car—in fact, by this time, Craig and his partner were the only ones in that capacity in B–3. But Craig’s partner was getting transferred downtown, and Craig needed a new partner.

The two didn’t really know each other, although they’d seen each other at the station house. Craig had been on the force only a little more than two years. He grew up in Boston and, as part of busing, attended South Boston High School. Then he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served three years—at bases in Fort Lee, Virginia; Fort Knox, Kentucky; and Karlsruhe, Germany. When he was discharged, he worked as a security guard in a mall. He entered the police academy in late 1986 and hit the streets in 1987.

Mike took to Craig’s offer instantly. He had liked working with Cornell James. He saw working in street clothes as carrying a bit of prestige along with the freedom to be really active on the street, the kind of police work he wanted: “Drug arrests, gangs, things like that.” The two teamed up and, in short order, established themselves in Mattapan as a pair of enterprising crime-fighting cops drawn to the action. “We would go to places where they were known to sell drugs,” Mike said. “Or there were a lot of shootings that we would respond to. Priority 1 calls only—the highest priority—it would be shootings or stabbings and gang calls.”

One early morning in June, the new team of Cox and Jones played a key role in apprehending a man who’d shot another officer in the thigh. It was 2:30
A.M
. on June 28—three days after Mike’s second wedding anniversary—and the two raced to a housing project called Bataan Court after hearing about a shooting on their radio. They arrived in time to see a black man, brandishing a rifle, jump into a Pontiac. The ambulance was arriving to attend to the fallen officer, and Mike and Craig took off after the fleeing Pontiac. They were able to radio in the car’s location to the dispatcher, and, several blocks away, another unit cut it off. Two men with rifles were arrested.

Six months later, at 4:15
A.M
. in the morning of December 6, a convict who’d just gotten out of prison went on a shooting rampage in Dorchester—firing an AK–47 semiautomatic machine gun. Two residents were wounded, and a man was killed. Mike and Craig were one block away. They arrived to find two men standing in the middle of the street. The men began to run. Despite a mismatch in firepower, Mike and Craig jumped out and gave chase. One suspect stumbled, and the AK–47 hit the ground with a thud. The suspect kept going. Craig grabbed the weapon while Mike followed the man into a backyard farther down the street. Another officer, coming from the opposite direction, cut off the suspect and captured him. Mike’s eyewitness account later convicted the man.

The next month, Mike and Craig were in their cruiser at 3:40

A.M
., staking out a party when they saw two men leave the apartment building in a hurry. The men climbed into a car. Mike and Craig then heard on the radio that a shooting had occurred in the apartment. The dispatcher was calling for police units as well as an ambulance to respond. Mike and Craig were all over it. They turned on their lights, raced after the car, and cut it off. They arrested the two men inside and recovered a.38-caliber handgun from the car. The weapon was loaded with four live rounds and one spent shell.

Time and again, Mike and Craig thrust themselves into the thick of it. In the process they’d learned about each other. Both were tall and strong and took pride in their physical fitness. They discovered they complemented each other personality-wise—a bit of yin and yang. Craig ran hot—he was typically a step ahead at an incident, jumping in to size up the crime. “He liked doing that, you know,” said Mike. “Going inside, see what’s going on.” Mike ran cooler and quieter. He tended to work the perimeter.

It worked. They were a good fit. They made arrests—or assisted in arrests—that were clean, intense, and exciting. High-five police moments. Barely two years on the force, and Mike and Craig shared awards for exemplary police work. Their role in arresting the man who shot another officer, for example, resulted in a “medal of honor” in 1991. Then, in early 1993, they won a promotion to the elite gang unit. By January 25, 1995, Mike, having done well on the exam, was awaiting a promotion to sergeant.

Along the way, however, were nights when the crime fighting was not so clean, when in the heat of the moment the lines between the good guys and the bad guys became confused and complicated, when Mike Cox experienced déjà vu to the first time he was mistaken as a suspect. One episode was later during Mike’s rookie year, after he had completed his probation. He and several other officers were chasing a suspect on foot down a street in Mattapan. The suspect jumped over a fence. Mike ran along the fence to keep up with the suspect, and then he began climbing over it too. But as he climbed he felt someone grabbing at his legs, trying to pull him down. Mike turned and saw two officers. “There was apparently some mistaken identity,” Mike said, but the confusion was short-lived. “I was able to verbally say who I was, and that more or less ended the physical grabbing of me.” Mike wasn’t troubled by it. “I wasn’t punched or anything.”

Nor was he troubled by several other incidents. Hearing a report one night that an armed man was walking in back of a building, Mike and Craig headed over to investigate. They carefully made their way down an alley when they noticed an officer they knew standing in the dark. They assumed the officer recognized them. But he had not. Mike and Craig, dressed in hooded sweatshirts like a pair of gangbangers, continued walking toward the officer. The officer shouted, “Show me your hands, show me your hands!” He drew his gun. Finally Craig said something. “Mark, Mark—it’s me, Craig.”

The officer relaxed, and the suspicious persons incident was recorded officially as an “8-boy,” police code for no person to be found. Unreported was a mix-up that, in a blink, could have gone bad but luckily had not. For their part, Mike and Craig had not helped matters. They had not radioed ahead to say they were responding so that the officer in the alley would be on notice that two officers in plainclothes were on their way. But despite its dark potential, the moment passed—no harm, no foul.