The Black and the Blue

by Matthew Horace

  Now, if there is resistance, we start moving to the next level, which is stuff that doesn’t look good on video. We are now using intermediate force. Officers may have to use punches and kicks to restrain an individual. They can use batons or chemical sprays or Tasers to get the person under control. In some of our tactical takedowns, such as SWAT or special response teams, we’ve fired a bean bag round from a shotgun. It’s not lethal, but if you get hit with one, you’re going down. Under intermediate force, you may need to swarm an individual and take the person down to the ground. I’ve used this tactic numerous times. None of this stuff looks pretty, but the person is alive. The infamous beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1992, which ultimately set off the worst riot in the nation’s history, was shocking to watch. It was excessive, horrific, and criminal, but in the end King was still alive.

  In Crutcher’s case, Betty Shelby skipped the use of intermediate force and went from verbalization immediately to the last step on the continuum—the lethal force that took Crutcher’s life. They did use a taser, but he was shot almost simultaneously. With so many officers on the scene, they could have rushed him and taken him to the ground. But they didn’t. If they feared he was going into the car to get a weapon, they could have retreated to a safe distance and fired on him the moment his hands disappeared into the car. They didn’t do that, either. Again, there was no evidence that Crutcher had a gun or that he was violent.

  None of these situations are as simple as my textbook explanation. These encounters can take place over 30 minutes or longer, during which the officer has time to go through the continuum at a methodical pace, or they can happen in an explosion of less than 60 seconds. I’ve had it happen to me. You are trying to guide someone with an empty hand and the person pulls away. You then decide to make a hard grab and be more forceful, and boom, the individual swings at you. Now, you may have to use your baton across the femoral artery on the person’s thigh or the brachial artery on the person’s arm or kick the person in the back of the knee to bring the individual down.

  But these are tactics I’m telling you about, when the real problem is the perception of African-American men, and, to some degree, African-American women, as inherent threats by their mere presence. In police parlance, it initially comes across the police radio with these three words: “suspicious black male.” I have heard this term too many times throughout my years in law enforcement, spoken as if the two last words in the phrase automatically prompted the first word in the description.

  When I was on the police department in Virginia, I was often dispatched to calls of a “suspicious black male” and, in response, I would ask via the radio, “What is he doing?” My question was simple. Just what is he doing that makes him suspicious, other than being a black male? Generally, when I did this, my mostly white fellow officers would key the radio microphone to make a clicking sound in a show of sarcastic disapproval at my question, and a supervisor might call me to ensure that I was responding to the call. Most times these calls involved nothing more than a black man waiting for a bus; he was just waiting for the bus in the “wrong” neighborhood. Another time, a black guy was passing out flyers. Another time, a kid and his girlfriend had a tryst planned in a secret meeting place during the day. It was always innocuous stuff. It’s not that we shouldn’t investigate “suspicious” people, but what makes them suspicious?

  For example, I was called to investigate a report of a suspicious white male. In this case, the call said, “suspicious white male, no shoes, no shirt, dirty blond hair.” What made him suspicious was not that he was a white male, but that he was shoeless and shirtless in the middle of December, a sign that he might have been high on PCP, because PCP users were always hot.

  I approached him and told him I needed to speak with him. He replied, “Fuck you, nigger.” I immediately called for backup because PCP imbues users with extraordinary strength when they are high.

  If we have an inherent fear of or bias against blacks, they are always going to be suspicious. Even as a federal agent, I have been on surveillance or supporting an operation and have had an officer approach me and say that neighbors called about a “suspicious” vehicle, which meant it was a black guy driving a car. I’ve been the man in that suspicious vehicle.

  When I was assigned to Seattle, Washington, as assistant special agent in charge of other ATF agents and police officers in seven northwestern states and Guam in 2002, I lived in a golf course community in Mill Creek. It was a great little community just north of Seattle. The community had about 1,000 homes developed in manicured clusters that centered around a world-class golf course. My subdivision had 103 homes and there were two African-American men in this neighborhood. There may have been a total of six black men in the entire community.

  I had been living in Mill Creek for a little over a year when I was driving my newer-model Mercedes-Benz through the development and noticed flashing lights behind me. The way the community was engineered really didn’t allow you to speed. So, I was confused and concerned. Why was a sheriff’s deputy stopping me? The officer asked me for my driver’s license and registration. I gave it to him and asked what I had done.

  I also presented my federal ATF credentials, to which he responded that he didn’t recognize my vehicle as one with which he was familiar. At this point, I’m thinking, Is he familiar with every car and every person in the development? He could have followed me, had my tag run, and realized that I lived in the community and that both my license and registration were current. But let’s assume that I didn’t live in the community. Let’s assume that I was lost or visiting a friend or admiring the homes or checking out the neighborhood because I might want to move there. That’s not probable cause to stop me. None of those activities make me “suspicious.” And, just for argument’s sake, what crime would a guy in a newer-model Mercedes be up to in this neighborhood? A burglary? A robbery? A drive-by shooting? My car was worth more than anything I could steal. What rational reason could he give for stopping me?

  None.

  I subsequently made an appointment with a commander in the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Department and explained who I was and what had happened. I also told him which vehicles my wife and I drove, including my federal undercover vehicle, and advised him that I never expected to be stopped by anyone in his department ever again unless I had committed a violation. And I wasn’t.

  Not once have any of my white friends and colleagues told me they have been stopped under similar situations. Why not? Because African-Americans live with a double standard and our actions are interpreted differently than those of our white counterparts.

  Not long ago, I was walking into a hardware store in my suburban Pennsylvania community and stood in line behind a white man with a holstered firearm. He was clean-shaven and well-dressed, in khaki pants and a polo shirt. I assumed that he was a local police officer. Nobody was alarmed or anxious by his presence. I thought to myself, even if he were a cop, how could every person in the hardware store know that he was? Perhaps the employees, but certainly not all the customers.

  Here’s the other side. In 28 years of dutifully carrying a firearm as part of my job, I’ve never walked into a commercial establishment with my weapon openly displayed. Scores of black law enforcement officers I have known for years do the same. We would never want that call to go into dispatch that a black man with a gun was in the store. Even if we were wearing khaki pants, penny loafers, and a tennis sweater, I would fear that the law enforcement response would not be a positive one. There is a boogeyman effect when radio traffic says, “black man with a gun” that escalates the response, no matter what the conditions.

  John Crawford, for example, was casually shopping in a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio, on August 13, 2014, with his pregnant girlfriend. As Crawford’s girlfriend wandered off to one part of the store, he headed toward the other and the two began a conversation via cell phone. At some point in their conversation, Crawford, 22, casually picked up a toy gun from
a store shelf with his left hand while still talking on the phone with his right. A white shopper, Ronald T. Ritchie, saw him with the toy rifle and called the police. He told the dispatcher a black man was armed with a rifle and was menacing customers in Walmart.

  “He’s pointing it at people,” Ritchie said.

  Ritchie then told the police dispatcher he was watching as it appeared Crawford was trying to load the gun. He also told police Crawford was pointing the rifle at children. With Ritchie on the telephone continually describing a situation to the dispatcher, police rushed to the store. They made their way into Walmart, down the aisle, and within one second of their approaching Crawford, he was shot dead. After the shooting, Ritchie’s wife, who was with him in Walmart, posted on Facebook how she saw Crawford load the weapon and menace people.

  Tragically, the entire incident was built on a lie and the fear of a black man with a gun. Walmart surveillance footage showed Crawford never pointed the toy rifle at anyone, never waved it around in a menacing manner, never even pretended he was going to shoot it. Instead, it was by his side as he walked the aisles and talked on the phone with his girlfriend. In fact, footage showed Crawford was pointing the rifle to the floor and was on the phone when Ritchie told the dispatcher, “He just pointed it at, like, two children.” Crawford encountered two sets of parents and their children. Neither showed alarm or even excitement in response to Crawford’s presence. The second parent, Angela Williams, a 37-year-old white woman, however, died of a heart attack as she tried to pull her two children to safety in the chaos of the shooting. The local coroner ruled her death a homicide because the panic of the shooting caused her heart to go into arrhythmia. Her teenage son blamed her death on Ritchie. “I hope that he’s happy with himself,” he said after the incident.

  Afterward, a special prosecutor was appointed to review the case, and presented evidence to a grand jury that the officers who shot Crawford had done nothing wrong. The same special prosecutor declined to prosecute Ritchie after a local judge later found there were grounds for Ritchie to be charged with a crime for the erroneous statements that led to Crawford’s death.

  Three months later, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was playing cops and robbers 200 miles upstate in Cleveland with a toy gun a relative had given him. He had been inside a local community center for a while until officials there shooed him outside into the November cold and snow of a local park. Rice walked around the park pointing his toy weapon at imaginary villains. Someone saw him and called the police to report a black man in the park pointing a pistol at random people. The caller twice told the police, “It’s probably fake,” referring to the pistol. Toward the end of the two-minute call, the caller said, “He is probably a juvenile.” The dispatcher, however, never relayed that information in the request for officers to respond.

  Instead, police were told via radio only “of a male black sitting on a swing and pointing a gun at people.” Two police officers, Timothy Loehmann, 26, and Frank Garmback, 46, heard the information and sped to the park. Garmback drove the car recklessly within six feet of Rice, clearly bad tactical procedure. If Rice had been an actual shooting threat, Garmback would have put the officers at risk of being shot by placing them directly in the line of fire with no protection. As the car came to a halt, Loehmann immediately exited the vehicle, gun drawn, and shot Rice within seconds of leaving the car while shouting directions for him to drop the gun.

  Rice died a day later.

  As in the case of Crawford and hundreds of others, an unarmed black male was dead, and nobody was at fault. Following a grand jury hearing, police officers were not indicted for any criminal conduct.

  Ironically, a year later just 45 miles away in Akron, Ohio, a white male, Daniel Kovacevic, strolled through black neighborhoods with an assault rifle slung across his back. Kovacevic wore a black ski cap pulled far down on his head that covered his hair and sunglasses that hid his eyes. Residents called the police. He was not shot. Instead, officers can be seen on a video explaining to black residents that Kovacevic was just exercising his constitutional right in Ohio to openly carry a weapon without threat of violence from others or the police, just as any person in Ohio does… except for John Crawford and Tamir Rice.

  As jury after judge after jury has refused to find officers guilty of anything, including misdemeanor charges, in deaths of unarmed black men and boys, America is saying to us that it is officially reasonable to be afraid of a person just because he is black. And because you fear him, it is okay to kill him.

  For me, the most startling example of the boogeyman effect was illustrated in a recent study on justifiable homicide. Only 2 out of every 100 homicides in America are ruled justifiable by law enforcement. For a homicide to be justified, it must be a “homicide that is committed in self-defense, in defense of another and especially a member of one’s family or sometimes in defense of a residence, in preventing a felony especially involving great bodily harm, or in performing a legal duty and that is justified under the law,” according to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary.

  That 2 percent figure holds true virtually for every racial scenario except for when a white person shoots a black person. For instance, when Hispanics killed black men, 5.5 percent were ruled justifiable. When whites killed Hispanics, 3.1 percent, or 3 out of 100, were justified. When blacks killed blacks, the number was 2 percent, and when blacks killed whites, less than 1 percent were found to be justifiable.

  But when a white male killed a black man, the number skyrocketed; 16 percent were deemed lawful, eight times the rate for African-Americans.

  By now, most of us have seen the statistics that show the disproportionate stops of African-Americans on highways, streets, and in neighborhoods. We have seen the statistics that also show that stops of white drivers are 30 percent more likely than stops of African-Americans to reveal drugs and contraband. Yet police still suspect African-Americans at double, triple, even five times the rate of white Americans. And the race of the officer doesn’t seem to matter. In Baltimore, where black cops make up 52 percent of the police department, one man was stopped and questioned more than 20 times without any charges ever being filed. Each specious stop deepens the divisions between the African-American community and the police. And each encounter creates a possibility that somebody—police officers and/or citizens—will be harmed.

  I’ve had this discussion with lots of my white friends, and most nod their heads in acknowledgment, but I can tell many of them don’t truly believe it, even coming from me, a cop. One person told me that when hearing of these encounters, he has always assumed the person did something wrong to cause the police officer to respond in a deadly manner. A friend’s wife told me, during a discussion of the shooting of a black man, that she simply rejected all this talk that these incidents were somehow related to race. “How can you say it had anything to do with race unless the policeman said something racist or he was wearing a KKK shirt or something?” she asked.

  I understand that, for most of my white friends, it just isn’t part of their reality. However, when one African-American they know—a friend, a colleague, a coworker, a celebrity, even a United States senator—states this is a reality, why is it so hard to believe? I point to US Senator Tim Scott (R-South Carolina), a staunchly conservative black Republican and one of only three African-American members of the Senate. Scott and I have never met. We are as different as cornbread and Kool-Aid.

  He is from a small Southern town. I grew up in urban northwest Philadelphia. He was raised by a single mom who struggled mightily and successfully to raise him and his two brothers. I had the good fortune of two parents who both worked good-paying jobs. He graduated from a private, mostly white religious college, steeped in the teachings of the Southern Baptist Convention. My higher education was at a public, historically black university that was formed because for years African-Americans were not permitted to attend most white colleges and universities.

  He is a strong and outspoken supporter of Attorney Gen
eral Jeff Sessions, who wanted to bring back the days of harsh sentencing and police tactics initiated during the war on drugs that devastated black communities. As I will discuss in the next chapter, I was in the forefront of that mistaken policy with the Bureau of Alcohol and Firearms and helped lock up hundreds of thousands of black men and women as the nation marched off in the wrong direction. I never want to go there again. Scott is staunchly to the right. I am more middle of the road.

  Despite our differences, we are bound together by the threat of law enforcement because of the color of our skin and our gender.

  Scott passionately told his own story on the US Senate floor in 2016, following a series of highly publicized police shootings. He talked about the fear, anxiety, and shame he felt the very first time he was stopped by an officer. “The cop came up to my car, hand on his gun, and said, ‘Boy, don’t you know your headlight is not working properly?’” He said that, even as an elected official, he had been stopped seven times in one year, on one of those occasions because the officer said he thought Scott was driving a stolen car. Yes, he said, he was speeding twice, “but the vast majority of the times, I was pulled over for nothing more than driving a new car in the wrong neighborhood or some other reason just as trivial.”

  He recounted how his brother, who had achieved the highest rank in the US Army for an enlisted man, was stopped during a trip from Texas to visit family in Charleston. The police officer told his brother he stopped him because he was driving a Volvo, and black people don’t usually drive Volvos. For that reason, the officer told him, he thought the car might be stolen. Scott told of a young black man who worked in his office and drove a “nice car,” a Chrysler 300. He had been pulled over so many times that he sold the car to stop the harassment. Near the end of his speech, Scott, a black man far to the right politically of the vast majority of other black men in America, uttered words that spoke for all of us.