The Black and the Blue

A NOTE ON INTERVIEWS AND ATTRIBUTIONS

While researching this book, my co-author, Ron Harris, and I conducted interviews with close to one hundred law enforcement professionals, elected officials, community advocates, and survivors of police shootings. These individuals represented every race, color, gender, age, profession, and political affiliation. The law enforcement and police interviewees represented every rank of service from patrol officer to detective to chief of police. For a year, we spent long hours on the road driving or on the trains and planes from Boston to Chicago to Los Angeles to New York City to St. Louis to Newark to Baltimore and Seattle to St. Petersburg with the goal of collecting a real profile or representation of urban, suburban, and rural policing environments.

Some people we sought out because of their many years of dedicated service to the noble profession; some we sought out because of their knowledge of criminal justice reform; some we wanted to hear from because their approach ran counter to my views as a black officer—they believed that everything is fine. If I wanted to hear all sides of the issue, I had to be open to all perspectives.

While many of the interviewees agreed to be identified by their real names, some did not. This is primarily because many of these people are still actively working in law enforcement. Among the many courageous individuals who let us talk to them and come into their homes are Trooper Tony April, Detective Brian Mallory, Chief Kathleen O’Toole, Commander Crystal King-Smith, Chief Chris Magnus, and Chief Philip Banks. We’ve included firsthand accounts from each of them.

Within the ranks of law enforcement lurks the dated and dangerous concept that “Cops don’t tell on cops.” This is why I decided to take on this project. If not me, then who else, to help figure out what is really going on in law enforcement? I’ve included my own personal experiences.

The majority of the interviews I conducted took place between 2015 and 2017. My process revealed many experiences similar to mine, particularly among minority police and law enforcement officers, and were generally corroborated by white police officers, albeit from different police environments and departments.

Finally, I am a champion of wholesale police reform in the United States. And like the brothers and sisters in blue I interviewed, I am proud of my own personal contribution and the contribution of all law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line to serve our country.

For 27 years, I depended on law enforcement professionals—both black and white—to protect me from harm, danger, or death. We do things that many could never do, go into places where many would never go, and confront situations that many could never face. We routinely place ourselves in harm’s way to protect the liberties of people we will never know or see. I never felt that any officers I ever worked with would not have risked their own safety to ensure mine or that of other members of the public. For this I am eternally grateful.

But, as leaders, we understand that to address a problem, we have to acknowledge the problem. I don’t know that most Americans even understand that we have a problem. I hope and trust that The Black and the Blue awakens Americans to the problem of racial injustice in our law enforcement community—and our society—and helps address the problem.

—Matthew Horace

INTRODUCTION

I am a cop. Make no mistake about it. I’ve been part of the best and the worst that my noble profession represents. I’ve worked hard and played hard, true to cop culture. I’ve been in sports leagues with cops, I have eaten, drunk, and worshiped with cops. I have picnicked, partied, and celebrated with cops. I have cried with cops and when some of us have died, a part of me has died with them. I have pursued bad guys and protected communities in every state in the country, even Guam, and at nearly every level of law enforcement. I’ve held lots of titles. I was a police officer in Arlington, Virginia, before I joined the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, where I started as a special agent and progressed to become an ATF senior executive. I’ve headed task forces, conducted trainings, overseen high-risk operations, coordinated multistate investigations, and more.

Still, at my core, I’m just a cop, one of the hundreds of thousands of men and women who have at some point taken an oath to protect and serve the people of this great nation.

I’m the guy who responds to the pleas for help; the guy who breaks up family fights; who pushes through the bolted door, knowing that danger and death may lurk on the other side. The guy who goes on that “routine call,” aware that it could be my last; who comforts crime victims; who finds missing children and talks down irate lovers. I’m the officer on that dimly lit road trying to figure out whether the object in a person’s hand is a cell phone or a handgun, who in a split second must decide whether a motorist reaching for the glove box is nervously searching for his registration and insurance card or making a dangerous lunge for a weapon.

I am Officers Gabriel Figueroa and Paul Abel in Pittsburgh, who rescued a child from the back seat of an SUV as it teetered precariously on the edge of a steep hillside while the unconscious driver and front-seat passenger sat slumped over, overdosed on heroin.

I am Officer Katrina Culbreath in Dothan, Alabama, who, after listening in on a trial where an 18-year-old mother pleaded guilty to shoplifting in order to feed her 17-month-old daughter, drove the woman to a local grocery store and bought her food.

I am a man who has shed too many tears and stood at attention too many times as the mournful wail of bagpipes, signaling the final goodbye to a fallen comrade, washed over me.

I am Officers Jose Gilbert Vega, 63, a father of eight and two months from retirement, and Lesley Zerebny, 27, a rookie just returning from maternity leave after the birth of her 4-month-old daughter, both gunned down as they responded to a domestic disturbance call in Palm Springs, California.

I am the five Dallas officers killed by an insane gunman as they protected the constitutional rights of Black Lives Matters supporters to march in protest against shootings involving police—Brent Thompson, Patrick Zamarripa, Michael Krol, Lorne Ahrens, and Michael Smith.

I am also a “male black,” shorthand for the millions of African-American men who, because of the decades of myths and prejudices, are inherently viewed as suspicious and dangerous. Our presence prompts women to hold their purses just a little tighter, families to click their car doors shut, store clerks to phone in about a “suspicious black man.” We are always a threat, always “strapped.” The scary weapon we carry is the very skin we’re in. We are “armed” with it everywhere we go.

Like other black men, I feel the frustration, the humiliation, the fear, and the rage just knowing I am at risk for doing nothing more than breathing. As a black man, I brace myself through every police encounter, whether I am a corporate executive, cafeteria worker, or computer geek, schoolteacher or United States senator, professional athlete or architect, or cop.

So, even as a cop, I am the black child who was told by loving parents that no matter how absurd the reason for the stop by police, no matter what insults are hurled my way, no matter what degradation I’m subjected to, submit so you can make it home alive.

I am filmmaker and Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., arrested at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after someone telephoned to say they thought a suspicious black man had broken into Gates’s home.

I am Gregory Gunn, the son of a respected Montgomery, Alabama, police officer, who was walking home after a late night of work and playing cards. Gunn was unarmed when he was stopped by the police, because the officer said Gunn looked “suspicious.” The officer shot and killed him.

I am Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy playing a decades-old game of imaginary cops and robbers with a toy gun. It was given to him by a relative. The police were called and Rice was shot dead within two seconds of the officers’ arrival.

I am DeJuan Guillory, a 27-year-old father of three and the son of a former police officer. He was riding his ATV four-wheeler with girlfriend when an officer stopped him and asked them for their IDs after just responding to a call about an ATV theft. Guillory’s ATV had not been stolen. However, the officer shot and killed him and later charged his girlfriend with attempted first-degree murder of a police officer.

As a career African-American law enforcement officer, I’ve literally lived on both sides of the barrel, my finger on the trigger, one second away from using deadly force in one case and, in the next, as a black man with a police officer’s gun pointed at my face, a blink away from being killed.

In writing The Black and the Blue, I entered this discussion from both sides. Consequently, I found that the crimes and injustices in law enforcement are about race, and are also about more than race.

We cannot pretend that the racism, prejudices, and biases we—black, white, men, women, native born, or immigrant—all carry are not issues within our society and, hence, law enforcement. But the issues go much deeper. Cases of police misconduct, inappropriate police shootings, racial profiling, and police “mistakes” point to much broader, systemic issues, rather than just a few bad apples. Too often, they reflect a culture of disregard among police for the people they are paid to serve, an us-against-them mentality that affects us all. In many cases, unacceptable tactics and procedures are woven into the fabric of local policing by our elected officials, who provide tacit and, in some cases, explicit approval of discriminatory, unconstitutional police conduct. Practices that are ingrained in most of our departments lead to encounters that put the public and police officers at risk.

Too often, police officers aren’t adequately trained in the real day-to-day requirements of the job. Additionally, we send officers into the nation’s cultural and racial divide without the proper tools. Consequently, they make errors in judgment. They chase a suspect down an alley when they shouldn’t, and somebody ends up getting shot. Officers use force that wouldn’t have been necessary if they had used their heads. What should have been routine results in tragedy.

We welcome men and women into law enforcement who should never be there. I’ve worked with men and women we all knew were time bombs waiting to explode. Then there are scores of officers who, despite their track records of misconduct and malfeasance, manage to go from one law enforcement agency to the next.

Too often, misconduct by officers at every level of the police hierarchy is tolerated or condoned by a cop culture that places loyalty between cops ahead of our sworn oath to serve and protect the public. This is often referred to as the “blue line.” Officers fear the dangerous consequences of being ostracized by other officers. Most frustrating: When officers’ bad acts are revealed, rarely are those officers held accountable.

Unfortunately, we are so acculturated by police mythology embedded in movies and television shows (one-quarter of the top 100 television shows are law enforcement dramas) that we rarely find fault in what officers do. Even when police departments want to get rid of bad cops, when they decide an officer should be prosecuted in the death of a civilian, the public rarely places blame on the police, regardless of the brutality, regardless of who gets killed.

When I started writing this book, I told a friend, a former chief of the New York City Police Department, that I didn’t want to minimize the risks officers face. While I understand the frustrations of African-Americans and others, I want to make sure they understand how difficult the job can be. My friend turned to me and said, “Black people know how hard the job is. What they don’t understand is how it is that we, the police, are never wrong. They don’t understand how, in case after case, a person is shot and killed by police, but the police never are at fault. They never do wrong.”

The need to address the subject of police and race has been brought into sharper focus recently by the Black Lives Matter movement. Capitalizing on the lightning speed of social media, Black Lives Matter has shone a beacon on instances of questionable shootings of black men by police. BLM’s efforts stirred hundreds of thousands of people across America into action.

Despite claims to the contrary, Black Lives Matter is not anticop, just as the women’s movement is not antimen, and the civil rights movement was not antiwhite. Black Lives Matter generated improvements in a handful of police departments around the country. More police departments are seeking different use-of-force tactics and have adopted body cameras to better monitor their officers’ interactions with the public. Some, like the Cleveland Police Department, have instituted new hiring procedures to better screen out possible problem officers. Some have increased training to focus more on how to handle complex human interactions, such as with the mentally ill and the homeless, two groups who now account for a very large share of police departments’ enforcement load.

Fewer have followed the lead of the Seattle Police Department, which is training officers to recognize and handle the biases that we all have. Meanwhile, the New Jersey attorney general has mandated that every police department begin bias and use-of-force training.

Most people know that something is wrong, but we are poles apart on what it is. Study after study shows that white and black Americans see this issue dramatically differently. In Minnesota, the home of two of the most high-profile shootings of black men, more than 90 percent of black Minnesotans hold a favorable opinion of Black Lives Matter, according to a local poll. However, only 6 percent of their white neighbors share that view. Visualize that for a minute. The question is asked and 90 black people out of 100 move to one side of the room and only 6 white people out of 100 join them in agreement. Everybody else is in opposition.

Conversely, virtually all the white respondents to the poll had a positive view of law enforcement while only about 1 in 4 of the black respondents did. Let’s try our visualization again, this time with 98 white people on one side of the room and 26 black people joining them in agreement.

That’s not a gap. That’s a chasm.

1.

THE BOOGEYMAN

Implicit bias lives in our police departments, just as it exists among our coworkers, families, friends, and associates. It affects us all and consumes some of us. Thirty years ago, however, the term implicit bias hadn’t entered the lexicon, and it was the last thing on my mind as a young rookie on a domestic abuse call when I entered an apartment building in Arlington, Virginia. I was just praying I wouldn’t have to shoot the person standing in front of me.

The textbook definition of implicit bias says it is the attitudes or stereotypes that we all have. They, in turn, affect our encounters with people, and influence our actions and decisions in an unconscious manner. In other words, we internalize repeated messages from our family, our friends, our neighbors, our community, and the stereotypes and images we see on television, and in movies, magazines, and other media.

Bias is different from racism and sexism. Racism and sexism affect the conscious prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race or sex based on the belief that one’s own race or sex is superior. Implicit biases are attitudes and assumptions ingrained in our subconscious. Our implicit biases explain why tall men are almost invariably asked if they played basketball and why, if I say, “peanut butter,” you are likely to respond, “jelly.” They explain why studies show that European standards of beauty are widely accepted as the norm, even among Asians, African-Americans, and Hispanics. Those same studies show that, across the board, regardless of race, Americans have a pro-white bias. African-Americans and Latinos are less pro-white-biased, but the overall culture apparently pushes us in that direction as well. Implicit bias also explains why wealth and power are most often associated with white men. Unfortunately, it also explains why black men are inherently felt to be dangerous by much of America, even by many African-Americans.

We all have these biases. They don’t necessarily make us bad people. They just make us people. Unfortunately, when they are held by someone with a badge and a gun, and the power to take a life, those biases can play out negatively and people who shouldn’t be, end up dead.

I first learned about my own bias as a rookie cop while on a domestic dispute call that evening in Arlington. I was working a DUI assignment when I got the call to assist another officer. So, I hurried over. I met with the primary officer, a woman who was from a nearby police force who was my partner on this call. She brought me up to speed and we walked over to the residence. Since it was a domestic violence call, I assumed we would be meeting a distraught woman, probably crying, possibly injured.

Wrong.

The complainant was a man, average build, about 5-foot-10, possibly Hispanic. He said he had been assaulted by his lover, Leslie, and he wanted Leslie out of the apartment. We both felt it was weird, a man being beaten up by a woman. Still, I’m thinking, This will be simple. Handling a woman is a lot easier than dealing with an adrenaline-charged, probably irate, possibly drunk man. It was dusk when I got the call. By now, it was getting dark. As we headed upstairs to the apartment, my partner and I agreed that she would take the lead for a woman-to-woman conversation. Good plan, I said to myself.

Wrong again.

When we entered the apartment, Leslie was sitting on the sofa. Leslie was a large black man, as wide as a La-Z-Boy. Trust me, Leslie was big. Now, I’m concerned, but not overly so. Back then, I was 6-foot-2 and weighed a well-muscled 260 pounds. Still, I’m mentally rehearsing my training for situations like this, in case of resistance. Leslie was polite. He said he was sorry that he and his lover had created the disturbance that had brought us to his door. Everybody was amiable, and things were going fine until we told Leslie something we knew he didn’t want to hear.

“Sir, your roommate wants you to leave the apartment,” my partner said. “Please stand up so we can go downstairs.” Our reference to Leslie’s partner as his roommate was further evidence of our bias at the time. If it had been a heterosexual relationship, we most assuredly would have referred to the other individual as boyfriend or girlfriend.

“I don’t want to leave,” Leslie responded. “This is my apartment, too.”

He was passionate, but not threatening.

“Sir, you have to leave,” my partner said. “Please come with us downstairs, and I’m sure we can work this out.”

We needed Leslie out of the apartment because it would have been extremely difficult to handle a big guy like him in that small space. Again he said he didn’t want to leave and refused to stand up. My partner asked again. Same reaction. We went back and forth with Leslie for a minute or so about standing up and he told us repeatedly that he didn’t want to leave and how he loved his partner. This was not good. Noncompliance is cause to notch things up a bit. We were now getting close to possibly having to use force, which is always dangerous. Then without warning, Leslie did exactly what we asked him to do. He stood up, and that was when things really got scary.

To be honest, I never really wanted to be a cop. I joined the Arlington County (Virginia) Police Department in 1986, not long after graduating from Delaware State University, a historically black public university in Dover, Delaware. Representatives from the department visited our campus in my senior year and recruited me to join the department. I liked them, but I didn’t immediately commit. Still, I thought, depending on how my initial plans panned out, it could be a good fit.

My goal after graduating college was to become a starting offensive lineman in the National Football League. I played left and right guards and filled in at tackle from time to time. I was big, and I was fast. People, including me, thought I was pretty good. I made the All-Mid-Eastern Atlantic Conference team one year. So, I figured I’d give the NFL a try. That dream, however, was set back significantly when I was cut during tryouts with the New York Giants the summer after my graduation.

I had thought about following the typical career trajectory of guys trying to break into the NFL. You spend the year eating and lifting and running, trying to get bigger, stronger, and faster while working security at clubs and concerts to make ends meet until the next training camp. Some guys make it and others do it for as long as five years before giving in to the reality that they just weren’t good enough. I considered it, but my father, an electrician, and my mother, a secretary, took me aside and suggested it was time to move on with my life and start a career. The offer from the Arlington County Police Department was available and sounding better by the day. So I took it.

Arlington’s was one of the very few accredited police departments in the nation, which made them special. One of the requirements for all accredited police forces is that their officers must all be college graduates. I liked that. I thought it would make any organization much more professional and would mean fewer guys just looking to play cops and robbers. Arlington was also a very affluent area, a lot more than the neighborhood I grew up in. The median household income in Arlington is almost double the median household income for the rest of the nation. Consequently, it was also the highest-paying police department in the Washington, D.C. area, even higher than the police department in the nation’s capital. That particular fact really attracted me to the job.

Which is a roundabout way of explaining how I had come to this moment in time where I might have to shoot someone.

If I thought Leslie was big sitting down, he was a mountain standing up, at least 6-foot-8 and well over 300 pounds. I thought I was buff, but I was nothing compared to him. At this point, my partner and I were at an extreme disadvantage. Somebody could get hurt or worse. The only thing that I had that could really handle him without me or my partner getting hurt was my weapon. In 1986, tasers weren’t as readily available as they are now. So, to collect ourselves and manage a potentially volatile situation, we reversed our instructions.

“Sir, could you please sit down?” I said.

Leslie looked at me, confused. “I don’t want to sit down,” he responded. “She asked me to stand up, so I’m standing up.”

Now, we have this huge, possibly violent man standing in front of us and not following our command for him to sit down. Things were not good, and then Leslie heightened the tension. He said he needed to see his lover downstairs. Now that was not going to happen. We certainly weren’t going to allow a person who is accused of assaulting someone back into close proximity to the alleged victim. So, again we asked Leslie to sit down. He ignored us. We asked again. He refused. We asked again. He refused again.

My partner and I knew that we would be hard-pressed to arrest Leslie without additional support, based solely on his size. I had resigned myself to the fact that once we put hands on this very large man, if his noncompliance continued, lethal force might be necessary. We had choices to make. If we tried to handle him physically, we could both be hurt badly. If we had pulled our weapons at this point, our actions likely would have been defensible, and if, at some point in a struggle, we had shot Leslie, we probably would have been justified.

“I feared for my life” would have been my defense, and it would have been reasonable, though not completely accurate. That’s what the higher-ups tell officers to say when something goes awry. You learn it in the police academy and it becomes the mantra of every officer when any shootings occur. And who can prove that you weren’t in fear for your life, even if the fear was caused by something improper that you yourself did.

Here’s an example from a true story. On a winter afternoon in New York, an 18-year-old black male was seen leaving a local store. A police officer radioed in that he saw the teenager tugging at something in his waistband, possibly a gun. The teenager, however, was unarmed. Other police began to follow the man. The suspect didn’t know he was being followed. As the teenager neared his apartment building, police say they told him to stop but he ran into the apartment building. Video of the incident, however, shows the man casually walking into his home as though he never heard a command. The officers then tried to kick down the front door of the apartment building so they could get to the kid’s apartment. Remember, this was a teenager who might or might not have a gun, but police were trying to kick down a door to an entire apartment building.