The Black and the Blue

by Matthew Horace

  “This is 1981. I’m thinking, ‘If this was me, and I was in the car with my wife and my children, I’m going to react a certain way.’ And sure enough, the guy said to the officer, ‘Sir, tell me what I’m doing wrong, but I don’t appreciate you talking to me like this with my wife and family in the car.’

  “‘Well,’ the white cop started again, ‘I don’t give a shit what you think.’

  “Next thing you know the white guy was on the ground. The black guy had knocked him on his ass, because another N-word had come out of his mouth. So, I go up to the guy and I say, ‘I understand why you did what you did, but I’m going to have to arrest you because you assaulted a police officer.’

  “So, the officer goes into the station and tells the captain I wasn’t out there helping him. I tell the captain, ‘If this guy is going to be out there calling somebody a nigger, and then he needs a “nigger” to get somebody off his ass, maybe he shouldn’t be doing what he’s doing.’ The captain, a white guy, started laughing. All he had to do was tell the man why he got stopped and give him a ticket and let him go on his way. I would have reacted the same way, if he had talked to me like that.”

  I had my own encounter with a fellow law enforcement officer and the N-word. Ironically, my incident brings us to where we started, in Providence, Rhode Island. I am now an ATF officer, and this is about two years after I was nearly shot by the white cop while undercover. As part of our duties, we frequently worked surveillance in conjunction with other agencies. One night, we were working a joint case with the Providence Police Department’s Special Investigations Bureau. I can’t remember the particular case, but it was dangerous enough for me to wear my ballistic vest and bring a tactical rifle. At the police department, I was teamed up with another ATF agent. We left and decided we’d better grab a bite to eat. Once you get rolling on these operations, you never know what is going to happen. You may not eat until you’re done. You may end up following a suspect to another state. So, we stopped at Burger King. We went through the drive-through window and were heading out onto the street. I was driving. As I was pulling onto Broad Street, a carload of black guys zoomed past, almost hitting us.

  My partner yells out at the car, “Fucking niggers.” He quickly remembers who is sitting right next to him and says, “Oops.”

  I don’t say a word, but I am steaming. I’m trying to decide how to respond. So, I come up with a plan. I drive us to a really rough area in South Providence, a known hangout for gang members and drug dealers. I place the car in park and turn to him, “John, get out.” He refuses and I tell him again. “Get out.” People are starting to gather now and look at the Crown Victoria parked in the middle of the intersection.

  I then exit the vehicle and go around to the driver’s side with my tactical gear—big ATF letters on my ballistic vest, firearm in holster—and yell, “John, get the fuck out of my car before I drag you out!” He’s not moving, so I unhook his seat belt. By now, his face is turning red. I yell once more for him to get out. By now, people are really beginning to take notice. I was about to drag John out of the car, which could have been bad for me, but, fortunately, he got out, and I drove off. What happened next? Let’s just say our surveillance was not compromised, John got back to the office safely, and the issue was resolved to my satisfaction. I just knew one thing when I left that scene. That was the last time I wanted to hear a cop call a black person “nigger.”

  Brian Mallory

  Former New York Police Department Detective

  The things we did in the early ’80s, we would be in jail for today. Back then, there were no cell phones, no social media, no cameras on every street corner. If anybody was going to make a complaint, it was their word against the cop’s, and the cop always won. I had a very short temper back then. If I stopped a guy and a guy opened his mouth, he’d learn very quickly not to fuck with me. It might be a slap in the face, might be a jack, it might be a nightstick. If you opened your mouth, you would get it.

  Back then, the ends justified the means. We had roll call one day, and the captain comes down. Our captain never came out of his office. So, this was unusual. He says, “Who’s got sector Adam?” My partner and I raise our hands. He says, “The community council is complaining about kids selling pot on this corner. I’m coming by at 5 p.m. with some community council members. I don’t want to see anybody on the corner at 5 o’clock.”

  We’re two young cops from Long Island. Lots of the cops came from Long Island then and a lot still do. Long Island was like a different world compared to the neighborhoods in New York City. It was like a different country. On Long Island, there are towns that are predominantly white and towns that are predominantly black. Not very integrated. I went to a high school that had no black students. None. My college was somewhat mixed, but I didn’t have any black friends. I wasn’t discriminating against them. I just didn’t have any interaction with African-Americans. I didn’t have any interaction with African-Americans until I joined the police department. I didn’t have black friends until I was a cop, and those were fellow cops. A lot of white cops were like me. They didn’t have any interaction with minorities until they became cops.

  Anyway, we go out. About 20 minutes to 5 p.m., we pull up to the corner. There are five or six Puerto Rican kids selling pot. I yell, “Guys, off this corner until after 6 p.m. Don’t come back until after then.”

  One of the kids yells back, “Fuck you. This is a public street. We have a right to be here.”

  I look at my partner: “What did he say?” I’m a New York City police officer and he’s talking to me? His friends are there, and they are smirking. It’s 1983. I’m fresh, one year in the department and I’ve got this 16-year-old kid mouthing off. I get out of the car with my nightstick and club him until he drops. “Pick him up,” I yell to his friends, “and I don’t want anybody here for the rest of the fucking night.”

  You could never ever do that now. That would be problematic. At the very least, you would be fired. But the captain didn’t give a fuck what I did to keep the corner clean. He’s not saying break the law, but he doesn’t want to be embarrassed in front of the council members. He would have called us into the office and chewed our asses. Back then, it was a different city. If you let somebody talk to you like that in that environment, it wasn’t going to be the last time.

  I started as a uniform cop in Midtown. I did less than two years in uniform, because, early on, I effected a bribery arrest. I had arrested this pimp and while I was booking him, he offered me $500 to let him go and $400 a week to let him and his girls operate. I wore a wire and set up a meeting and got him on tape. I don’t know what happened to him. I know he went to trial, but the big thing was I got a bribery arrest.

  Back then, a bribery was the best arrest you could have. That was better even than a murder collar. That showed you had integrity. The police department had so much bad press over the years that they were looking for stuff like that.

  Then, I got into a shootout in 1986 in Midtown Manhattan and that put me on the fast track. A couple of days before Christmas, we got a call about a possible robbery in a jewelry store. We went in the store and two armed guys were robbing the store. So, there was a shootout. There were customers and employees working. One of the robbers walked out without any injuries. I shot the second one twice. They were both convicted and sent away. An employee in the store was hit in the crossfire and killed. I don’t want to say my bullet hit him, but there’s a saying we had as police officers: “The most important thing is to sign out and go home.” So, after that shooting, I pretty much had a free pass to go wherever I wanted to go. That put me on the fast track to detective.

  Back then, 42nd Street was a sewer. There was nothing there but porn theaters, drug dealers, prostitutes, pimps, and johns. I was very hard on pimps. I hated them. I had more respect for thieves than I did pimps. These guys would turn young girls out. You see a new one out and in a matter of weeks, she’s hooked on heroin. We were hard on them. Y
es, we would beat them up.

  It was hard arresting a pimp, because they knew how to skirt the law. So, we would take it out on them with their cars. We would slice their interiors up with box cutters, use slappers or nightsticks to break the glass and the dashboards. If they had soda or beer in the car, we’d pour it over the interior. We might lock their keys in the trunk of their cars. The vast majority of pimps were black, but that didn’t have anything to do with it. A pimp was a pimp. If you were a pimp, I didn’t like you, and you were going to have a problem with me and my partner.

  The customers crossed every nationality and every industry or job title. To slow down the traffic, we would take the girls’ wigs. When they dressed up for the night, all of them put on wigs. So, we would take their wigs so they couldn’t work. In the winter, we would take their shoes. You can’t walk around the streets with no shoes. Then, we would take the wigs and stick them under the turret lights on the top of our police vehicle and we would put the shoes on the hood of the car and we would drive slowly through the area so they could see us.

  One day, we got called in by Internal Affairs for a G.O. 15. That’s where you have to go before Internal Affairs to answer to complaints. They told us we had been under observation: “We’ve been following you for 30 days.”

  The first thing that went through my mind is, I’m going to get fired, because they have seen all the stuff that we’ve been doing. I’ll remember what they said until the day I die. “You two are very unconventional in what you do, but you’re extremely effective.” That was it.

  When I was put on the track to become detective, I was first transferred to the Organized Crime Control Bureau. That was 1986. I was in the Narcotics Division. Crack was the drug. Crack hit around ’85, and that is when everything went off the rails. Assaults were up, shootings were up, murders were up. You had these internal fights among dealers. So, you had a lot of shootings, and you had a population of people addicted to crack who had no income. So, what were they doing? They were committing burglaries, robberies, grand larcenies.

  That was a dangerous time—2,300 homicides in a city of 8 million people, and they were harder to solve. Most homicides are committed by someone who knows the assailant. Back then it was drive-by shootings or it was gang-related or a robbery that goes bad. That makes it harder to solve. Precincts 75, 77 in Brooklyn, or Precincts 32, 34 in Manhattan. They were looking at 100 homicides a year. You couldn’t even investigate them all, because they were coming so fast.

  It was a grind. Every day I did undercover work. You go out and either buy drugs or arrest people for selling drugs. It was so lucrative, they made so much money selling drugs, you couldn’t stem the tide. We would execute a warrant in the morning, knock the door down with the battering ram, arrest three or four people, and seize the drugs and the money. You would go back to the precinct, process the prisoners, voucher the drugs, stamp every bill as evidence, and then take them down to Central Booking. You would drive by the location on the way to Central Booking, and the door you knocked down would be up and the place would be back up and running. At some point, you got to realize it was a losing battle.

  You were making your arrest numbers for the month and you were getting lots of overtime but nobody was under the illusion that they were making the community any better. As a young cop coming into narcotics, it felt like I was in a war zone. We were cops from Long Island, now in Brooklyn, and it got to be an us-against-them mentality.

  From the day officers got on the scene, we were told, “Get your overtime, keep your head down, get promoted. It’s a shithole. It’s the fucking ghetto.” You would lose those wide eyes the longer you worked there. It was like shoveling sand into the tide. So, the attitude was “I’m going to come in, do my cases, do my time, and get out and that’s going to be it.” None of us were under the illusion we were helping anybody.

  As a young cop, most of what I saw didn’t make sense. Sometimes, it was clear the blacks were giving a heads-up to the drug dealers about us and I’m left thinking, Isn’t this their neighborhood? This is where they live. This is where their kids go to school, and we’re trying to clean it up. Why would they do that? Why are they helping drug dealers and not helping us? And the answer for us was, That’s just the way it is. Because for us it didn’t make any sense. They’re killing your kids and they are bringing this blight on the neighborhood and we’re the cavalry coming to help and you’re not helping us.

  But actually, we weren’t the cavalry. We were more like an occupying force. There were times we would go in and things would get physical. There were certainly times when there was collateral damage. People were in the building, they were in front of the building. We just came in to take doors down and arrest everybody. There was no connection between us and them. Sometimes you go in and knock down the wrong door. That was too bad. If a civilian was in the wrong place at the wrong time, “Sorry, pal.” It’s just another number. Let the judge figure it out.

  So, even though they weren’t selling, there were times when honest civilians who had never had negative interactions with the drug dealers were having them with the cops. Cop tosses him and searches him. The black guy says something. Now, you expect that guy to look up to the cop and give you information. But he’s thinking, That’s the guy who frisked me and made me look like an asshole in front of my girlfriend. That’s the guy who called me “nigger.” That’s the guy who kicked me in the ass.

  It was like the end of the Vietnam War—they are telling us to take out a complete village to save the village. I didn’t see it then, but it’s much clearer to me now. At the time, certain things were embedded in us in the police academy. The first day I was in the police academy, the instructor came up and we’re all 21, 22, 23 years old, and for a lot of us, it’s our first job. He looks out and he writes on the board, CYA, and he says, “If you don’t remember anything, remember this. Everything you do, every time you engage, every time you go out there, cover your ass.” That puts you on the defensive the first day. It’s us against them. That was the first message in the police department: Cover your ass.

  Lots of stuff started in the academy. You learned that even if a cop did something bad, you didn’t report him. Again, it’s us against them. You learned very early on, the Internal Affairs Department and everybody in it is an enemy. Internal Affairs was only going to hurt you. Nothing good was going to come out of that. That’s the golden rule. You’re never going to call Internal Affairs. If you do, now you’re a rat. In the police department, you’d rather be called a coward or a racist than a rat.

  If the shit hits the fan and you call for help, and everybody knows you’re a rat who reported another cop, are they all going to come help you? Are they going to come as fast? As an active cop, those were all things you thought about. There’s nothing scarier than if you chase somebody into a building and you have no idea who’s on the other side of the door. The last thing you want to worry about, when you call for backup, is whether they were coming.

  Internal Affairs is a much more accepted part of the police department now. Some people look at it as a necessary evil. Now, going to Internal Affairs is almost part of a career path. In the old days, why would guys fucking volunteer to be assigned to Internal Affairs when you know you’re going to be investigating cops, or you got fucking jammed up for something you did and you got transferred to Internal Affairs, and you are going to fuck other cops over because of something you did?

  I wasn’t naive to think cops weren’t doing things wrong. Like doctors or lawyers or anybody else, there are always going to be bad guys. I can’t tell you that I never worked with anybody who was taking money and doing something wrong. Some guys are just criminals and they just use the badge as a way to make money. Other guys are what I call “situational.”

  I worked with this one guy. He was a great guy. I didn’t know it, but he had two families. He had a wife and a kid on Long Island and a girlfriend and a kid in New Jersey. When I started, we got paid $17,900. I
was a young single guy, so I was fine, but I would think, How do you survive on fucking $17,900 with two kids and two women?

  Anyway, this guy worked the red-light detail [high prostitution area]. He had to write a certain amount of traffic summonses. You had to do 25 summonses a month as a uniform cop. That was your quota. My partner and I were very active. So, we each wrote 100 summonses a month. This is when I was trying to make detective and get into anticrime. This guy was making his quota, but he started taking $50 from cabbies when he pulled them over for red-light summonses. It worked for the cabbies because it wasn’t on their record and he needed the money.

  But he got caught. One of the cabbies complained, and he lost everything—his job, his pension, his benefits, his reputation. It’s stupid. I understand the pressure and the temptation, but it’s stupid. I’ve been collecting my pension for 20 years tax-free. I’ve collected $1 million. I have full medical coverage for my wife, my kids. How many $50 do you have to collect to make up for that?

  3.

  WHO MATTERS MOST?

  “I wonder if because it is blacks getting shot down, because it is blacks who are going to jail in massive numbers, whether we—the total we, black and white—care as much. If we started to put white America in jail at the same rate that we’re putting black America in jail, I wonder whether our collective feelings would be the same, or would we be putting pressure on the president and our elected officials not to lock up America, but to save America?”

  —Former Atlanta police chief Eldrin Bell in 1990 at the height of the war on drugs

  During the war on drugs campaign, when I was up and down the streets and ghettos of the United States, busting down the homes of black and brown people, I never questioned that although we were tearing up these neighborhoods, we had not touched the homes and hoods of white users and dealers in this cleanup of America. I was too busy locking up folks, granted, but what we saw in the media and what most Americans—white, black, Hispanic, Asian, and me—had come to believe, was that most of the nation’s cocaine users and dealers were white. Furthermore, they were white people who lived in nice neighborhoods and had decent jobs.