by David Simon
“Yeah,” said the man, “I shot the motherfucker.”
Instead of emptying their guns, the arresting officers merely cuffed the shooter and took him downtown. Where once on the streets of Baltimore there had been a code, now there were dead police and living cop killers.
Worden was torn. A part of him knew the old ways could not be defended or even sustained, but still, Buckman had been a friend, a young patrolman who had been busting his ass to make Worden’s operations squad in the Northwest District. Called at home by his shift lieutenant, Worden dressed quickly and arrived at the station house with a dozen other officers at about the same moment that Buckman’s murderer was transferred to the lockup. The official story was that the suspect complained of abdominal pains while being processed and photographed, but everyone in the city understood the source of that pain. And when Baltimore’s black newspaper, the Afro-American, sent a photographer to Sinai Hospital in the hope of depicting the suspect’s injuries, it was Worden himself who locked the man up on a trespassing charge. When the NAACP demanded an inquiry, department officials simply stonewalled, insisting that no beating had occurred.
But it was a small, pathetic victory, and in the roll call rooms and radio cars there were hard words for the two officers who, with a .38 already on the ground, had allowed Buckman’s killer to surrender. The words became harder still after the trial, when the man slipped away with a second-degree verdict and a sentence that would allow parole in little more than ten years.
The Buckman murder was one milestone, but the journey was far from over. Seven years later, in an East Baltimore carryout, the department once again came to terms with its future. And once again Worden stood on the periphery, helpless, as another cop, another friend, was sacrificed in an altogether different way.
In March 1980, the victim was a seventeen-year-old kid with the unlikely monicker of Ja-Wan McGee; the shooter, a thirty-three-year-old detective named Scotty McCown. A nine-year veteran who was then working with Worden in CID robbery, McCown was off duty and in plainclothes at a sub shop on Erdman Avenue, ordering a pizza, when McGee and a companion entered and walked to the counter. McCown had already been watching the two teenagers for a few minutes, glimpsing them as they returned several times to the window, scoping the store’s interior, apparently waiting for something. Only when most of the customers left did the two walk inside and make their way toward the counter. McCown had been a robbery detective for five years, and the scene he was witnessing seemed a little familiar. This is it, he thought, slipping his off-duty weapon from its holster and into his raincoat pocket.
And when the flash of silver came out of Ja-Wan McGee’s coat pocket at the counter, McCown was more than ready. He fired three without warning, wounding McGee in the upper back. The detective ordered the other teenager to stay where he was, then shouted for the counterman to call for the police and an ambulance. Then he leaned over the prone victim. On the floor was a black and silver cigarette lighter.
The shooting of Ja-Wan McGee came only weeks after a similarly questionable shooting by a white officer had sparked race riots in Miami. When the picketing began in earnest outside City Hall, everyone in the department could see the writing on the wall. Everyone but Scotty McCown.
Worden had come to the robbery unit in 1977, two years after Mc-Cown, and he knew the younger man to be a good cop who was about to be destroyed by a bad shooting. Worden dug out a couple of fresh reports from the Eastern District, robberies in which the suspect had used a small pistol, a chrome .25-caliber.
“Maybe these will help,” Worden offered.
“Thank you, Donald,” the younger detective told him, “but I’ll be okay.”
But he would not be okay. The protests, the whispered threat of riots, grew louder after the state’s attorney’s office declined to present the case to a grand jury, citing a lack of criminal intent on the part of the detective. Three months later, a departmental trial board convened to hear testimony from McCown, who insisted that he fired his weapon because he feared for his own safety and the safety of others. The five-member panel heard from the victim’s companion in the carryout, who explained that he and his friend were not casing the store, that they repeatedly looked through the window before entering because the shop was crowded and they didn’t want to wait in line to buy sodas. Most important, the panel heard from Ja-Wan McGee, now paralyzed at the waist, who testified from a wheelchair that he “was walking in the door, and the guy took two steps and started firing.” The trial board deliberated for an hour, then found the detective guilty of violating three departmental rules involving the use of a firearm as well as acting “in a manner which reflected discredit on the department.” A week later, the police commissioner declined to consider any lesser punishment or rehabilitation for the detective. Instead, Pomerleau accepted the trial board’s recommendation and fired the detective.
“Miami brought justice for us,” declared the regional head of the NAACP, but to police on the street the case against Scotty McCown made it clear that a department that had once refused to discipline even the most wanton acts of brutality was now sounding a general retreat. The question was not whether the Ja-Wan McGee shooting was good or bad; every cop who ever felt the need to draw his weapon winced at the thought of a cigarette lighter on the linoleum and a seventeen-year-old crippled for life. The question was whether the department was going to sacrifice its own rather than confront one of the most unavoidable truths about police work: the institutionalized conceit that says in every given circumstance, a good cop will give you a good shooting.
A heavily armed nation prone to violence finds it only reasonable to give law officers weapons and the authority to use them. In the United States, only a cop has the right to kill as an act of personal deliberation and action. To that end, Scotty McCown and three thousand other men and women were sent out on the streets of Baltimore with . 38-caliber Smith & Wessons, for which they received several weeks of academy firearms training augmented by one trip to the police firing range every year. Coupled with an individual officer’s judgment, that is deemed expertise enough to make the right decision every time.
It is a lie.
It is a lie the police department tolerates because to do otherwise would shatter the myth of infallibility on which rests its authority for lethal force. And it is a lie that the public demands, because to do otherwise would expose a terrifying ambiguity. The false certainty, the myth of perfection, on which our culture feeds requires that Scotty McCown should have shouted a warning before firing three shots, that he should have identified himself as a police officer and told Ja-Wan McGee to drop what he believed was a weapon. It demands that McCown should have given the kid time to decide or, perhaps, should have used his weapon only to wound or disarm the suspect. It argues that a detective who fails to do these things is poorly trained and reckless, and if the detective is white, it allows for the argument that he is very possibly a racist capable of viewing every black teenager with a shiny lighter as an armed robbery in progress. It doesn’t matter that a shouted warning concedes every advantage to the gunman, that death can come in the time it takes for a cop to identify himself or demand that a suspect relinquish a weapon. It doesn’t matter that in a confrontation of little more than a second or two, a cop is lucky if he can hit center mass from a distance of twenty feet, much less target extremities or shoot a weapon from a suspect’s hand. And it doesn’t matter whether a cop is an honorable man, whether he truly believes he is in danger, whether the shooting of a black suspect sickens him no less than if the man were white. McCown was a good man, but he let go of a .38 round a moment or two before he should have, and in that short span both victim and shooter became entwined in the same tragedy.
For the public, and the black community in particular, the shooting of Ja-Wan McGee became a long-awaited victory over a police department that had for generations devalued black life. It was, in that sense, the inevitable consequence of too much evil justified for t
oo long. It made no difference that Scotty McCown was neither incompetent nor racist; in Baltimore, as in other police departments nationwide, the sons would be made to pay for their fathers’ crimes.
For cops on the street, white and black, the McGee shooting became proof positive that they were now alone, that the system could no longer protect them. To preserve its authority, the department would be required to destroy not only those men who used and believed in brutality, but also those who chose wrongly when confronted with a sudden, terrifying decision. If the shooting was good, you were covered, though even the most justified use of force could no longer occur in Baltimore without someone, somewhere, getting in front of a television camera to say that police murdered the man. And if the shooting was borderline, you were probably still covered, provided you knew how to write the report. But if the shooting was bad, you were expendable.
For the department, for the city itself, the consequences were predictable, inevitable. And now, every cop who knew his history could look at Monroe Street and see the bastard child of an earlier tragedy in an east side carryout. Maybe John Scott was killed by a police, and maybe it was a calculated murder, though it was hard for Worden or anyone else to imagine a cop consciously risking both his career and his freedom to ace a car thief. More likely, the death of John Scott was nothing more or less than a chase, a scuffle and a half-second of fearful deliberation in a dark alley. Perhaps the gun was leveled and the trigger squeezed by a mind haunted by memories of Norman Buckman or any other cop who hesitated and lost. Perhaps, in the echo of a gunshot, a cop wondered in panic how it could be written, how it would play. Perhaps, before driving away from Monroe Street with headlights dimmed, a Baltimore cop thought of Scotty McCown.
“Roger Twigg done put our shit out on the street,” says Rick James, reading the article a second time and lapsing into west side vernacular. “Somebody ’round here been doin’ some talking, yo.”
Donald Worden looks at his partner but says nothing. In the main office, D’Addario is finishing up with the last items on his clipboard. Two dozen detectives—homicide, robbery, sex offense—are clustered around him, listening to another morning’s allotment of teletypes, special orders and departmental memoranda. Worden listens without hearing any of it.
“That’s the problem with this whole investigation,” he says finally, rising for a second pass at the coffeepot. “This place leaks like a fucking sieve.”
James nods, then tosses the newspaper on Waltemeyer’s desk. D’Addario ends the roll call and Worden wanders out of the coffee room, looking at the faces of at least a half-dozen men who were tight with some of the Western and Central District officers now under investigation for the Scott killing. Worden allows himself a hard thought: Any of them could be a source for the newspaper story.
Hell, Worden feels some obligation to put his own sergeant on the list. Terry McLarney had no stomach for chasing other cops, particularly those he had worked with in the Western District. He had made that much clear from the moment John Scott hit the pavement, and it was for that reason that the Monroe Street probe had been taken away from him.
For McLarney, the notion that his own detectives were being used to pursue his old bunkies from the Western was obscene. McLarney had been a sector sergeant in that godforsaken district before returning to homicide in ’85. He was damn near killed in that district, shot down like a dog while chasing a holdup man on Arunah Avenue, and he’d seen the same thing happen to some of his men. If you were going after cops in the Western, you were going without McLarney. His world did not allow for that much gray. The cops were good, the criminals bad; and if the cops weren’t good, they were still cops.
But would McLarney leak? Worden doubts it. McLarney might bitch and moan and keep his distance from the Scott case, but Worden doesn’t believe he would undercut his own detectives. In truth, it was hard to imagine any detective consciously leaking details to thwart an investigation.
No, thinks Worden, dismissing the thought. The newspaper story came from within the department, but probably not directly from a homicide detective. A more likely source would be the police union lawyers, trying hard to portray the fresh witness as a suspect so as to take the heat off any officers. That made sense, particularly since one of those lawyers was quoted by name near the end of the article.
Still, Worden and James both know that the newspaper story is largely accurate and up to date—a bit leaden in its suggestion that the new civilian witness is a suspect, but otherwise on the mark. And both men know, too, that Twigg’s source is therefore close enough to the investigation to get the facts straight. Even if the union lawyers are the reporter’s primary source, they’re still getting inside information on the status of the investigation.
For Worden, the newspaper article is part and parcel of the larger problem with the Monroe Street probe: the investigation is taking place in a fishbowl. And no wonder. When cops investigate other cops, it’s usually the work of an internal investigations unit, a squad of detectives committed to prosecuting fellow officers. An IID detective is trained for the adversarial role. He works out of a separate office on a separate floor of the building, reporting to separate supervisors who are being paid to make cases against sworn members of the department. An IID detective is unaffected by station house loyalty, by the brotherhood itself; his allegiance is with the system, the department. He is, in patrolman’s parlance, a cheese-eating rat.
Because the uniforms who chased John Scott were all potential suspects, the Monroe Street probe was, for all practical purposes, an internal investigation. And yet because John Scott was murdered, the investigation could not go to IID. It was a criminal case and therefore the responsibility of the homicide unit.
Worden had to contend with his own divided loyalties as well. A quarter century was no small thing in any profession, but for Worden, the years in uniform meant everything. He carried a little bit of Norman Buckman with him, a little bit of Scotty McCown, too. Yet he was committed to the Monroe Street investigation because it was his letter up on the board, written in red next to the name of John Scott. It was a murder—his murder. And if some cop out there didn’t have brains and balls enough to turn in that body, then Worden was willing to write him off.
It somehow made it easier on Worden that many of the officers involved had behaved like witnesses in any other murder. Some had willfully lied to him, some had been purposely ambiguous; all were reluctant. For Worden and James both, it hurt to sit there in an interrogation room and have men wearing the uniform piss up your leg, then tell you it’s raining. Nor was there any outside cooperation coming in from the districts. The phone wasn’t ringing off the hook from uniforms who feared being jammed up in another cop’s shooting, who might be trying to keep out of a jackpot or cut deals for themselves. Clearly, Worden realized, the word on the street was that homicide didn’t have enough to charge anyone. If a cop was responsible for this murder, no one would come forward as long as it was believed that the probe had bottomed out.
That, too, was a result of too much talk, too many connections between the homicide unit and the rest of the department. For two months, Worden and James had conducted a criminal investigation in full view of the potential suspects and witnesses, their every move telegraphed through the department grapevine. Today’s newspaper account was only the most graphic example.
What the hell, thinks Worden, walking toward the men’s room with a cigar clenched between his teeth. At least the bosses can’t ignore the problem. When half your fucking case file is floating around in newsprint, it’s time to change tactics. Already that morning, Tim Doory has called twice from the state’s attorney’s office to set up a morning meeting with Worden and James at the Violent Crimes Unit offices.
Still pushing pieces around in his mind, Worden walks out of the bathroom just as Dick Lanham, the colonel in command of CID, rounds the corner on his way back to his office. Lanham, too, is in high dudgeon, a copy of the newspaper rolled up tight in o
ne fist.
“I’m sorry, Donald,” says the colonel, shaking his head. “You’ve got your work cut out for you now.”
Worden shrugs. “Just one more thing to deal with.”
“Well, I’m sorry you have to deal with it,” says Lanham. “I tried like hell to get Twigg to hold off on this thing and I thought he was gonna do that.”
Worden listens passively as the colonel launches into an extended account of his efforts to delay the news article—an account punctuated by his assertion that Roger Twigg is the most stubborn, arrogant, pain-in-the-ass reporter he has ever known.
“I told him what it would do to us if he put that stuff in the paper,” the colonel says. “I asked him to wait onit for a couple weeks, and what does he do?”
As a major, Lanham himself ran the IID and in that post had dealt with Twigg on a series of sensitive stories. So it is no surprise to Worden that the colonel and the reporter had a long conversation before the article was published. But would the colonel purposely leak this investigation? Probably not, Worden reasons. As the CID commander, Lanham doesn’t want an unsolved police shooting on the books, and as a former IID man, he certainly doesn’t have any problem with investigating other cops. No, Worden thinks, not the colonel. If Lanham was talking to Twigg, it was only to try to stall the story.