Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets

by David Simon

  As law enforcement goes, it’s downright ugly. And yet with the right amount of talent and finesse, both incidents will be ruled justifiable by the state’s attorney’s office. In a strictly legal sense, they can certainly be justified; before firing their weapons at the two men, both officers may well have believed they were in jeopardy. When ordered to surrender, the suspect on Stricker Street reached for something in the back of his truck and a plainclothes officer fired one shot into his face, fearing that he was trying to grab a weapon. The officer in tonight’s incident fired one shot through the windshield after the suspect, attempting to drive away from the plainclothesmen, struck one of the officers with the car’s bumper.

  For homicide detectives, however, a justified police shooting means only that there was no criminal intent behind the officer’s actions and that at the time he used deadly force the officer genuinely believed himself or others to be in serious danger. From a legal standpoint, this is a hole large enough for the proverbial truck, and in the case of these two vice squad shootings from the Western, the homicide unit will feel no qualms about using every inch of that chasm. The equivocation inherent in every police-involved shooting probe is understood by any cop with a year or two on the street: If Nolan or McAllister or Kincaid were asked at the scene whether they truly believed the shooting to be justified, they would answer in the affirmative. But if they were asked whether that shooting represented good police work, they would provide an altogether different answer or, more likely, no answer at all.

  In the realm of American law enforcement, the deceit has been standardized. Inside every major police department, the initial investigation of any officer-involved shooting begins as an attempt to make the incident look as clean and professional as possible. And in every department, the bias at the heart of such an investigation is seen as the only reasonable response to a public that needs to believe that good cops always make good shootings and that bad shootings are only the consequence of bad cops. Time and again, the lie must be maintained.

  “I take it the lady in question is already downtown?” says Nolan.

  “Yes indeed,” says McAllister.

  “If it’s the same girl as on Stricker Street, I’m going to bust a gut hearing about how every time she goes down on a guy, he gets shot.”

  McAllister smiles. “If we’re all right here, I think I’m going to head for the hospital.”

  “You and Donald can both go,” says the sergeant. “I’m going back to the office and get things started.”

  But before he can do so, a nearby uniform overhears the citywide dispatch call for a multiple shooting in the Eastern. The uniform turns up the volume and Nolan listens as the call is confirmed and an Eastern officer asks the dispatcher to notify homicide. Nolan borrows a hand-held radio and assures communications that he’s responding from the shooting scene in the Central.

  “We’ll meet you back at the office,” says McAllister. “Call if you need us.”

  Nolan nods, then heads across town as McAllister and Kincaid go to the emergency room at Maryland General. Twenty minutes later, the thirty-six-year-old suspect- “a working man,” he is quick to assure them, “a happily married working man”-is sitting up in a back room, his upper right arm bandaged and encased in a canvas sling.

  McAllister calls his name.

  “Yes sir?”

  “We’re with the police department. This is Detective Kincaid and I’m Detective-”

  “Listen,” says the victim. “I’m really, really sorry, and like I wanted to tell the officer, I didn’t know he was a police-”

  “We understand…”

  “I had my glasses off and I just saw him coming up to the car waving somethin’ and I thought I was gettin’ robbed, you know?”

  “That’s fine. We can talk later…”

  “And I wanted to apologize to the officer but they wouldn’t let me see him, but really, sir, I didn’t know what-”

  “That’s fine,” says McAllister. “We can talk about this later, but the important thing is that you and the officer are both all right.”

  “No, no,” says the suspect, waving his sling in the air. “I’m fine.”

  “Okay, great. They’ll be taking you down to our office and we’ll talk there, okay?”

  The suspect nods and both detectives walk toward the emergency room exit.

  “Nice guy,” says Kincaid.

  “Very nice,” says McAllister.

  The guy is telling the truth, of course. Both detectives couldn’t help but notice that the suspect’s eyeglasses were still sitting on top of the Oldsmobile’s dashboard. Parked in an isolated spot with his pants at his knees, the man probably felt particularly vulnerable at the sight of a young man in street clothes walking up to the car with something shiny in his hand. The victim on Stricker Street had the same fear of a robbery and, as a supermarket security guard, he impulsively reached for his nightstick in the back seat when the first officer jerked open the passenger door. Mistaking the stick for a long gun, the cop fired one round into the man’s face, and only by the grace of the University ER did the poor guy survive. To the department’s credit, the second shooting will be enough to prompt the deputy commissioner for operations to pull the district vice units off the street long enough to make changes in the prostitution detail procedures.

  Over on the east side, Roger Nolan is dealing with the fallout from a triple shooting. The scene on North Montford is a wild one, too, with a young girl shot dead and two other family members wounded. The wanted man is the dead girl’s estranged lover, who compensated for the end of the brief relationship by shooting everyone he could find in his girlfriend’s rowhouse and then running away. Nolan is at the scene for two hours, prying witnesses from the neighborhood and sending them downtown, where Kincaid begins to sort through the early arrivals.

  Returning to the homicide office, Nolan checks the small interrogation room, satisfying himself that tonight’s streetwalker is not the same girl whose customer was shot on Stricker Street. He checks in with D’Addario, who has arrived, and with the twenty-six-year-old plainclothesman who pulled the trigger and is now a nervous wreck in D’Addario’s office. Then he scans the bustling activity in the office and does not see the face he is looking for.

  Sitting at Tomlin’s desk, he dials Harry Edgerton’s home number and listens patiently as the phone rings four or five times.

  “Hullo.”

  “Harry?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “This is your sergeant,” says Nolan, shaking his head. “What the hell are you doing asleep?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re supposed to be working tonight.”

  “No, I’m off. Tonight and Wednesday, I’m off.”

  Nolan grimaces. “Harry, I got the roll book right in front of me and your H-days are Wednesday-Thursday. You’re on tonight with Mac and Kincaid.”

  “Wednesday and Thursday?’

  “Yeah.”

  “No way. You’re kidding me.”

  “Yeah, Harry, I’m calling you up at one A.M. just to fuck with you.”

  “You’re not kidding me.”

  “No,” says Nolan, almost amused.

  “Shit.”

  “Shit is right.”

  “Anything going on there?”

  “A police shooting and a murder. That’s all.”

  Edgerton curses himself. “You want me to come in?”

  “Fuck it, go back to sleep,” says the sergeant. “We’ll be all right and you’ll work Thursday. I’ll pencil it in.”

  “Thanks, Rog. I could swear I had Tuesday and Wednesday. I was sure of it.”

  “You’re a piece of work, Harry.”

  “Yeah, sorry.”

  “Go back to sleep.”

  In a few hours, when events again overtake the squad, Nolan will regret his generosity. Now, however, he has every reason to believe that he can make do until morning with two detectives. McAllister and Kincaid have returned from
the hospital with the wounded suspect, his arm in a sling, and an interview is already under way in the admin office. From the look of things, it is going pretty much as expected, too. After giving a half-hour statement to Kincaid and McAllister, the victim’s most sincere desire is to apologize to the cop who shot him.

  “If I could just see him for a moment, I’d like to shake his hand.”

  “That might not be a good idea right now,” says Kincaid. “He’s a little upset right now.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “He’s very upset that he had to shoot you and all, you understand.”

  “I just want him to know that-”

  “We told him,” says McAllister. “He knows you didn’t think he was a police officer.”

  Eventually, McAllister lets the suspect use the admin office phone to call his wife, who last saw her husband an hour and a half earlier, when he was leaving for a five-minute ride to an all-night video store. The detectives will listen sympathetically as the poor man tries to explain that he’s been shot in the arm, arrested and charged with assault on a police officer and that it’s all just a big misunderstanding.

  “I’m going to have to wait to make bail,” he tells her, “but I’ll explain when I get home.”

  No mention is made of the perverted sex charge, and the detectives assure him that they have no reason to want to wreck his marriage.

  “Just make sure she don’t show up for court,” Kincaid tells him. “If you can do that, you’ll probably be all right.”

  Back in D’Addario’s office, the young plainclothesman is writing his own report of the incident, electing on the advice of his district commander to give a voluntary statement to the detectives. By law, any attempt to compel an officer’s statement makes that information inadmissible in court, and the detectives are under standing orders from prosecutors to do nothing more than request a statement from any officer involved in a shooting. Since the Monroe Street probe, however, the police union has been urging officers not to give any statements-a policy that in the long run is likely to breed trouble. After all, if a homicide detective can save another cop, he won’t hesitate to do so; but any cop who refuses to explain his actions is just asking for a grand jury investigation. On this night, however, the major from the Western manages to convince his man to consent to an interview, thereby giving the detectives room to work.

  The officer’s report conforms to the suspect’s own statement that the plainclothesman fell on the hood of the car, after it jerked forward three or four feet, then fired a single shot through the windshield. The interview with the prostitute provides further corroboration. Not that she saw all that much, she tells the detectives, her field of vision at the time being somewhat limited.

  Slowly, methodically, the five-page report begins to come together beneath the hum of Kim Cordwell’s word processor. Reading the draft, D’Addario pencils a change or two and suggests the rewording of a few critical sections. When it comes to police-shooting reports, D’Addario is something of an artist; eight years in homicide have trained him to anticipate the likely questions from the command staff. Rarely, if ever, has a shooting report bounced down the ladder after the lieutenant put his mark on it. As awkward and excessive as the use of deadly force might have seemed out on that parking lot, it reads squeaky clean in the finished product.

  Nolan watches the paperwork progress and again tells himself that they can do without Edgerton and that it’s better, after all, to get a full night’s work out of Harry on Thursday rather than call him downtown two hours into a shift.

  But two hours later, just as the floodwaters have started to recede, the phone rings again, this time with a shooting call from North Arlington Avenue on the west side. Kincaid leaves the last of the paperwork from the police shooting behind, grabs the keys to a Cavalier and drives twenty or thirty blocks to watch the sun rise over a dead teenager, his long frame stretched across the white asphalt of a back alley. A stone whodunit.

  When the dayshift detectives begin arriving a little after seven, they find an office in a state of siege. Nolan is at one typewriter, working on his 24-hour report as his witnesses wait in a back room for transport back to the Eastern. McAllister is down at the Xerox machine, copying and collating his police-shooting opus for everyone above the rank of major. Kincaid is in the fishbowl, haggling with three west-siders who are trying hard to avoid becoming witnesses to a disrespect shooting that happened right in front of their eyes.

  McAllister manages to slip out a little after eight, but Kincaid and Nolan end their day in the afternoon rush at the ME’s office, waiting for their respective bodies to be examined and disassembled. They wait together in the antiseptic sheen of the autopsy room corridor, and yet they are anything but together after this shift.

  The issue, once again, is Edgerton. Earlier in the night, Kincaid overheard Nolan’s telephone call to the missing detective; if he hadn’t been knee deep in witnesses and incident reports, he would have boiled over on the spot. Several times during the night he had been ready to blast Nolan about it, but now, with the two of them alone in the Penn Street basement, he’s too tired to argue. For the moment, he satisfies himself with the bitter thought that in his whole career, he never managed to forget when the hell he was supposed to be working.

  But Kincaid will have his say; that much is certain. The air of compromise, the teasing banter, the rough acknowledgment of Edgerton’s effort to handle more calls-all of that is out the window as far as Donald Kincaid is concerned. He’s had it with that crap. He’s had it with Edgerton and with Nolan and with his place in this goddamn squad. You’re scheduled to be in at 2340 hours, you’re in at 2340, no later. You’re scheduled to work the Tuesday shift, you come to work on Tuesday. He didn’t give the department twenty-two years to put up with this kind of bullshit.

  Roger Nolan, for his part, simply doesn’t want to hear it anymore. To his way of thinking, Edgerton is a good man who works his cases harder than most of the men in homicide, and besides, he’s back to clearing murders. Okay, thinks Nolan, so every now and then Harry gets out there in the ozone. So he got his shifts wrong. So what should we do? Make him write a 95 explaining why he’s a space cadet? Maybe dock him some vacation days? What the hell good is that? That shit didn’t work in patrol and it sure wasn’t the way to do business in homicide. Everyone knew the story about the time a supervisor had demanded that Jay Landsman write a 95 explaining why he was late for a shift. “I was late for duty,” Landsman wrote, “because when I left the house to come to work there was a German submarine parked in my driveway.” For better or worse, that was homicide, and Nolan simply wasn’t going to jam it to one detective to make another feel better.

  The middle ground is gone. On this, the morning after, Kincaid keeps the rein on his anger and says nothing. Nor does he give Edgerton more than a passing comment when both men show up for their shift on Friday.

  “I don’t even blame Harry,” Kincaid tells the other squad members. “I fuckin’ blame Roger for not making him straighten up.”

  But over the next few days, Kincaid’s anger becomes white heat, and the others-McAllister, Garvey, even Bowman, who is more likely than not to side with Kincaid in this dispute-know enough to leave it alone and stay out of the way. In the end, the inevitable explosion comes on a four-to-twelve shift that marks Edgerton’s next off-day. It’s a shift comprised entirely of yelling and cursing, of accusation and counteraccusation, that finishes with Nolan and Kincaid shouting at each other in the main office, emptying all their guns in the kind of firefight that leaves few pieces to be picked up. Nolan makes it clear that he regards Kincaid as more trouble than anything else, telling the detective to mind his own business and then accusing him of failing to work his cases hard enough or long enough. And while it’s true that Kincaid has a healthy share of open files over the last two years, it’s also fair to say that Nolan is offering up the kind of criticism that no veteran detective is willing to hear. As far as Donald
Kincaid is concerned, he’s gone as soon as a vacancy opens up on either shift.

  After showing its fault lines for more than a year, Roger Nolan’s squad is finally breaking apart.

  EIGHT

  The sights, the sounds, the smells-there is nothing else in a detective’s frame of reference to which that basement room on Penn Street can be matched. Even the crime scenes, no matter how stark and brutal, pale against the process by which the murdered are dissected and examined: that is truly the strangest vision.

  There is a purpose to the carnage, a genuine investigative value to the gore of human autopsy. The legal necessity of the postmortem examination is understood by a detached and reasoning mind, yet the reality of the process is no less astonishing. To that part of the detective which calls itself professional, the medical examiner’s office is a laboratory. And yet to that other part, which defines itself in hard, but human terms, the place is an abattoir.

  The autopsy brings home the absolute finality of the event. At the crime scenes, the victims are most certainly dead, but at the point of autopsy, they become for the detectives something more-or less. It is one thing, after all, for a homicide detective to detach himself emotionally from the corpse that forms the center of his mystery. But it’s another thing altogether to see that corpse emptied of itself, to see the shell reduced to bones and sinew and juices in the same way that an automobile is stripped of chrome and quarter panels before being hauled to the wrecker. Even a homicide detective-a jaded character indeed-has to witness his share of portmortems before death truly becomes a casual acquaintance.

  For a homicide detective, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner is both a legal necessity and an evidentiary asset. A pathologist’s autopsy forms the baseline for any homicide prosecution simply because, in every murder case, it must first be proven that the victim died from human intervention and not from some other cause. But beyond that basic requirement, a good cutter’s abilities can often mean the difference between an accident being mistakenly viewed as a homicide or, equally disastrous, a homicide being attributed to accidental or natural causes.