We Are the Cops (23 page)

Second thing was, you don’t ever transport anybody without another officer following. That’s just safety. Protocol. He didn’t do that. He also didn’t call where he was going with him. I think there was some radio traffic with this other incident – it was a malicious destruction of property – that was going on a couple of buildings over. I think he just didn’t want to get in the middle of that radio traffic so he thought, ‘I’ll just throw this kid in the car and take him home.’ So he didn’t call up where he was going. So when he did call, his last transmission was asking for assistance – I think that’s right before they scuffled. When he asked for assistance, we knew where he was, not that anybody could have got there in time, though.

The third thing is, I don’t think he needed to arrest the kid. He was the type of officer who if you lied to him a few times, he’d get upset and I think he let that get to him. I think if he had given the kid one more chance, it might have gone differently – who knows? But the other thing that we can’t understand is – I mean, I know it’s in our DNA to chase – when someone runs from us, we chase. That’s what we do, but why did he chase him? It’s a fifteen year-old kid. He knows who he is. You don’t need to catch up to him. We’ll get a warrant for him later. It’s just bad practice to chase somebody on your own, because things can go sideways. So that was another thing.

So just a litany of things that had one of them just gone different. Like, he had a taser. When he was running from him or when he was scuffling, why didn’t he just taser him? Just a variety of things.

It was a lesson to all of us. A sad lesson – this is how you don’t do it, this is why this happened. It wasn’t one of those things where he was just sitting in his patrol car and someone came up and killed him – stuff you can’t stop – this was preventable.

I have friends that have been shot on the job. I’ve had friends who have been killed on the job. I’ve known other guys who have been killed in car accidents and helicopter crashes. You know, there are a lot of ways to die on this job. Being shot, of course, is probably the worst of all of them. But the fact of life is, it’s part of the job, although you never go in wanting to be that person or know that person.

But as well as the officers who get killed, we also get a lot of people injured on this job and they don’t always come back. I don’t know if we do enough for them. We have guys who have been beaten with a hammer and they’re brain damaged. There are officers who have been involved in horrific shootings and they’ll never be right again.

I’ve been to a lot of police funerals and they’re really sad and tragic and I really feel for the families afterwards but these guys that are shot in the line of duty – or are maimed or hurt – and they live, you know, their names don’t go on a wall anywhere. Their families are left coping with their injuries and their lives
have been altered completely and that to me is just as tragic, but you don’t get the big hoopla. You have a big police funeral when a police officer dies – and it’s horrible and it’s sad and it’s tragic and somebody has been ripped out of their family’s lives – but then we have people walking around who have suffered devastating injuries and their families are caring for them and they’re not working any more and that’s a sad situation all the way around. I feel for both groups but I don’t know who I feel worse for. They’re both pretty devastating.

I’ve certainly known a lot of people that have been killed in the line of duty – if not personally, I know who they are or I know of them – but I know a lot more people who were hurt in the line of duty who are going to walk around with those issues forever.

We have a guy who teaches at our academy who was shot point blank in the head. If you’ve ever read the book
Homicide
by David Simon – the one they based the show, ‘The Wire’, on – well, he’s in the book. His name is Gene Cassidy, he works at the academy; he teaches law. Basically a guy was wanted on warrant, Gene was by himself and the guy just pulled out a gun and shot him. Someone from the neighbourhood called it in, actually. Gene never had the opportunity to call for help himself.

Gene’s blind now – completely blind – and he has no sense of taste or smell. He’s not a police officer any more; he’s retired but he’s a contractual employee. He’s had two children that he’s never seen and he almost died again last year. When they saved his life back in 1987, one of the blood transfusions he had, he contracted hepatitis from. They never knew about it because they weren’t
checking for hepatitis back then. He didn’t know about it until he was so sick that he almost died. He had to have a liver transplant. Gene’s a fighter. He’s an amazing guy. He doesn’t let it stop him at all. But he almost died twice from the same incident – once from the gunshot wound and once because of the transfusion that they gave him to save his life, which almost killed him twenty-something years later.

But he never complained about what he can’t do; he went back to school and got his masters in teaching, whilst blind. He’s raised two kids and his wife is amazing, obviously. She’s had to shoulder a lot of that burden. But he’s never lost the desire to be a part of the police department. He worked really hard to get and to keep that job at the academy. That job isn’t promised or guaranteed to him – you’d like to think it would be but we’re not always so conscious of the people who have been hurt rather than killed.

So those are the kinds of guys who are fighting. They’re fighting every day. I’ve worked with a couple of guys over the years who have been hurt so badly, they’ll never have a normal life. They keep moving and they keep going and you know, existing – sometimes on a feeding tube – and that’s really the tragedy that nobody talks about: how many people get hurt in the line of duty that don’t die but who will never be the same.

You know, we’re great for a big funeral but when somebody is hurt in the line of duty and they can’t function any more, how do we treat them? Do people still come around? Do they still see them? That’s almost worse, I think. I don’t know; I don’t want
to go out either way. I don’t want anyone I know or care about to have to face either one of those things. But the truth is we have a lot of wounded warriors of our own.

These officers were in plain clothes and they were chasing this guy. They were like, fugitive hunters and this guy was wanted for murder. Unfortunately they boxed him in and he came out shooting, and so they came out shooting too. I can’t remember what kind of gun he had but everyone came out with the heavy artillery, firing back and forth. One sergeant got shot in the leg.

Then this one officer, unfortunately, came up and he was in a car behind the suspect’s car. One of our other cars came from the front and started shooting and the officer who was behind the suspect’s car, got shot. He got hit in the head. I think it was just a fragment but it got him in the brain. They think it could have been friendly fire. He’s been permanently handicapped and on life support ever since.

He’ll never come back to work. He’ll never get out of rehab, probably ever. He’ll probably never walk again. He’s not responding to any treatment. He’s almost like a vegetable and he’s only thirty-seven years old. He’s got four little kids. He’s like a vegetable. He’s on a vent and he’s not coming back.

Author’s note:

A few weeks after returning home I received an email from the officer who told me about the above incident. Six months after being hit, the police officer had died. Here is a slightly edited version of what he
wrote in the email:

We buried him [the officer] today. It was determined to be friendly fire. Shot April 2nd, died last Saturday. Officer responsible is a mess. All have seen a shrink, but it still hurts. Can’t even begin to understand the anguish he feels. It was a fragment from a shotgun blast that struck the top of the perp’s vehicle. The sergeant that was shot in the leg during the same confrontation is back at work.

P
olitics is everywhere in policing, whether it’s city politics, the public’s politics or the media’s, office politics, departmental politics, bosses’ politics or even the politics between officers themselves. Policing has many frustrations and most of it comes down to politics of one kind or another.

When politics was brought up during these interviews, I heard strong opinions, thoughtful comments and also some anger. In an office in downtown Manhattan, I sank further and further back into my plastic chair and listened as an experienced detective unloaded a couple of decades’ worth of deep dissatisfaction on me. What started off as a cosy chat turned into a full-blown rant about the changes he had seen, including the poor attitudes – in his eyes – of the new recruits and the current trend for officers to align themselves with specific religious and racial groups.

Other officers were also struggling to understand the attitude of the younger cops, especially their views of how more experienced colleagues
approached dealing with members of the public. One officer explained it by telling me how the new, younger generation of cops had been brought up watching news reports of alleged police brutality (something that could possibly be timelined from the 1991 Rodney King incident in Los Angeles). He thought attitudes to policing were changing and there was a far more liberal generation of cops joining the force than before, one that had a different view on how the police should police.

Personally, I feel that social media is having a dramatic effect on the police and how the police are being perceived. With the advent of camera phones and the Internet, the police are being observed and scrutinised like never before. Social media can be such a powerful force - as witnessed during the ‘Arab Spring’, for example - and it is giving people a voice, an audience, anonymity and a soapbox; all this regardless of whether what they have to say is correct or not, right or wrong. People - including cops – can be tried and convicted around the world over a 30 second video clip filmed on someone’s phone. Social media has opened up a whole new dawn in how communities, political groups and individuals challenge authority and speak out. It’s not all bad but it’s not all good either. Exposing wrongdoing is a good thing but there needs to be some balance and sometimes I feel that the police need to catch up – and quickly. They need to be ready to defend their departments and their officers’ actions where appropriate. And there were other issues that surprised me, when they were brought up – a black officer’s opinion on racism, for example. Surprising because he wasn’t talking about white officers being racist towards blacks but rather how he himself – a black officer – could be racist. Or the
police officer who told me that he didn’t like cops (something I actually heard a number of times). And then there were the allegations of crime statistics being massaged, political correctness and bosses who had forgotten where they had come from.

Not everyone is happy about the past and not everyone is happy about the future, and there are those who aren’t happy about the present, either, but just like the public and the media, cops too have a lot to say and their experienced and educated opinions are certainly worth hearing. And hear them I did.

You are your police; your police department should represent your community. I’m not saying that if you had more black officers, crime would be less, but with a department this size and our city being probably fifty per cent black, I think we only have six black officers out of forty-five. We’re still behind the curve and I’m talking about different races; I’m talking about Lebanese, I’m talking about Iraqi, Hispanic, whatever. When you can start counting on your fingers how many you have, I think that there needs to be a bigger drive.

But we’ve gone out to colleges and wherever we know there are more African-American – or minorities – and attempted to recruit them. So as long as you’re attempting to recruit them, that’s a good thing. And I think you get departments now that are attempting to do that, and the same with recruiting females.

But even in a city where you had a majority or at least half a police department that’s African-American, like Detroit, the citizens
don’t respect the police any more than before. They won’t speak to a white officer but if they have information, they won’t speak to a black officer either; it just goes with the general face of police work.

Me – as a black officer – I’m considered an ‘Uncle Tom’, a sell-out. If I go to lock up somebody, they’ll say, ‘Oh, you’re acting just like a white officer.’ No, I’m just enforcing the law and if that has to do with whatever colour you put on it, well, it’s an easy way out to say that you’re just doing this because you work for the government or a police department.

With more black officers in departments, you’d think that you’d have less police brutality cases among African-Americans or any other minority or you’d think that you’d have less stereotyped pretext stops but I don’t think you do, because police are still police. I think you do stereotype at some point. It’s one thing to be racist and go out and do your job based on colour, but on the flip side of it if I’m in a predominantly black neighbourhood and I see a white guy walking down the street at six or seven in the morning, I will stereotype, because I see that white guy and I think, ‘He’s going to buy drugs’ or ‘What is he doing here?’ It’s weird when you look at it that way but stereotyping is in all police officers – black and white.

I had a truck, a nice Chevy, with some nice rims on it and between white and black officers in Detroit I was stopped equally. If I was stopped six times in that truck, it was three times by white officers and three times by black officers. And the six times I got stopped in that truck, it had nothing to do with a traffic violation;
it was just a pretext stop based on my colour. They didn’t know I was police and whatever reason they gave for stopping me, I can tell you that it was baloney.

So you have to be careful when you say someone is stereotyping or someone is racist, because you can still be racist and you can still stereotype among your own people. Even as a black officer, I can still stereotype against a black person. And that’s what’s swept under the rug, whereas it stands out if you’re white and you’re pulling me over because I’m black, or whatever. But on the same thing, it doesn’t give me a pass just because I’m a black officer and I pull over a black person when I don’t have probable cause or reason. That is something that is definitely under-reported, because, ‘I’m black; I can’t stereotype.’ Yes, you can and people forget about that.

I have to thank my partner for this. There had been a robbery and at roll-call we were given the location and description of the vehicle. They’d robbed several people of their jewellery and they thought it might be drug-related. The vehicle had a Maryland registration plate and we had to be on the lookout for it.

So when we turned out to go on patrol, my partner kept saying, ‘Come on, let’s go look for this vehicle.’

I was like, ‘Are you serious? What are the chances of us finding this vehicle?’

Let me go back. Prior to that roll-call, three days previously, we actually pulled over that vehicle. We did a car stop and it was during a controversial time where officers had taken some guys
out of a vehicle and were being charged for it – it was in the media that the officers had racially profiled them. Well, when we had pulled this vehicle over it was for turning without a signal.

After we walked back from the car, my partner said to me, ‘There’s something dirty about these guys.’

I said, ‘Well, what are we going to do?’

And he said, ‘A few days ago I would have pulled them all out of the car and searched them because there’s something not right. They’re acting strange.’

I said, ‘I agree with you but what are we going to do?’

They were two male Hispanics and one black male. But we were concerned because of this recent thing in the media about racial profiling, so we didn’t want to take the chance. They had Maryland plates on the car, we issued them a ticket and just let them go. Two days later at roll-call, we hear that the same car and the same guys were committing robberies with a firearm – two firearms, actually.

So we went out and that’s when my partner said to me, ‘We need to go back to that area.’

And I said, ‘What are the chances of finding this car now? Are you serious? These guys aren’t going to be driving around.’

He kept breaking my chops about it so we went down there and took a drive. We literally drove down the block, drove into the sector area and drove right by them.

So he starts screaming, ‘There’s the car! There’s the car!’

We pulled the car over, we called backup to help us and as the back-up patrol car was pulling up, it was coming towards us, head
on. We had the car stopped and we were behind the car.

The passenger of the police car – one of our partners – got out of the car and said, ‘He’s reaching for the gun!’

We hadn’t even gotten to the window, the guy had the gun in his hand and we thought that he was going to try to shoot us, so we all pulled out our guns. He dropped his gun on the floor of the car and just put his hands out and we ended up arresting them all for robbery. They were wearing the jewellery that they had robbed. It ended up being a good arrest.

The thing is, we could have had them three days prior to this but we walked away. If we had pulled out our guns and arrested them, we might have stopped three more people from getting robbed. But because we were afraid of being seen to be racially profiling, we didn’t stop them. It had nothing to do with them being Hispanic or black; it was their actions in the car that were making us feel suspicious. But the public, when you take a male black, a male Hispanic out of their car and put them on the hood of the vehicle, the public perception is, ‘oh, he’s doing that because he’s black’ or ‘because he’s Hispanic’ – the two ‘white cops’, you know?

So we effectively didn’t do our job because of racial profiling. Because it was in the media at that particular time and we were afraid that we would be the next ones in the media and end up losing our jobs or be brought up on charges and questioned by internal affairs.

I think crime is slightly on the rise. However, the figures are definitely
fiddled and they’ve been fiddled since the early 90’s with the creation of CompStat – Comparative Statistics – which is a brutal freaking interrogation by the bosses downtown asking precinct commanders why they’ve had a rise in crime in their precinct. And that rise in crime could be by just one case.

The cops on the street would take a report, which would then come into the command. But before we detectives even got to look at it, somebody else would be reclassifying it as a lower crime. We would battle with them because according to police department guidelines there are only two people who are allowed to reclassify a crime – one is the precinct commander and one is the squad commander. They are the only two people allowed to reclassify a crime but suddenly you had civilians doing it.

What would happen is, we would get the complaint or report in the morning and we would hand them out to whoever would catch the case. The case detective would then call up the complainant and ask, ‘Can you tell me what happened?’

And the complainant would say, ‘Yeah, but I already spoke to someone.’

‘You spoke to who? And what did they say?’

We’ve already put it on our sheets saying that it’s a robbery and you’d go downstairs and you would talk to this civilian who’d say, ‘Oh, no, no. We’ve already reclassified it to a grand larceny – a theft.’

‘But I spoke to the victim. It’s clearly a robbery.’

‘No, it’s a grand larceny now.’

So robberies became grand larcenies. Grand larcenies
became petty larcenies. Like, you’ve got to be shitting me.

Every police department is the same.

Talk about discretion. I used to tell my guys, ‘Look, a street officer has the most discretion of anybody on the police department. The higher you go up in the ranks, the less discretion you have – because you don’t have that freedom of decision making that you do on the bottom level. You’re the one that’s out there; you’re the one collecting the information; you’re the one that has to make the decision.’

Now, obviously the officers are going to get into situations where they’re going to say, ‘Sarge, I need your input.’ And then maybe the sergeant is going to say, ‘I need the lieutenant down here.’ But that doesn’t happen very often. Mostly the officer on the street makes his own decisions.

So when you come right down to it, the patrol officer on the beat has the most discretion of anybody in the chain of command. Even the Chief doesn’t have as much discretion as the patrol officer does! The Chief answers to the Mayor’s office and every reporter that’s standing outside his office wanting a statement from him about this or that or one thing and another. And it just goes down the chain like that, from the Mayor to the Chief, then the Assistant Chief – they’re all worried about their asses, in case some newspaper reporter writes some bad story about them. But not the patrol officer – he doesn’t have those worries or concerns.