The Black and the Blue

by Matthew Horace

  Some cops are ignorant. They figure that’s what they’re supposed to do. They figure an ass whipping is what they are supposed to do. We intervened, but we didn’t report it. If you did, on top of you being a black and a female, you would also be labeled a snitch. No one would work with you. You could have people not backing you up on your calls and assignments. When I first came on the force, if I got in the [police] car with people who had a reputation for doing [wrong] stuff, I would address it in advance. That’s not snitching. We had a guy who had a reputation for taking money on traffic stops. It may have been true; it might not have been true. I told him, “If you take money, I am going to tell.” I’m telling him up front.

  I was 34. I was a rookie, but I had lived a life before the police department. That made me different from a 21-year-old. They told me the same thing they told all rookies coming out of the academy: “Throw out that academy stuff, because it’s different on the street.” A 21-year-old is still young and dumb. You put them in the police department, whoever gets them after the police academy is raising them. You could be raised to be ethically sound, or you could be raised to take money. It takes years to change the culture, because it’s so ingrained with the people who are here, and they are teaching it down to the new officers.

  We are in the process, in Chicago, of trying to turn this big boat around the way society wants us to police now. Before, society wanted us to be warriors. Now, they’re telling us we don’t want warriors; we want guardians. We want you to be more of a guardian. A warrior goes out and wants to get arrests, to protect the law. If there’s a gray area, you fall on the side of the law and let the judicial system figure out how to handle it. We did an excellent job of that in the ’90s. Cook County jail was filled to the brim. Now we still do arrests, but not everything is an arrest. We’re supposed to get out on the streets and walk around and have more interaction with each community.

  The [Chicago Police Department] superintendent has been putting people in position to make this change. He’s trying to put people to make that change. [There is] one on the north side, [but] everybody else is part of the old network. To finish what he’s started, he’s going to have to be succeeded by someone with the same vision. I have lieutenants under the old regime, the old boys club. I have sergeants [in my department] who are from the old regime. I can’t pick my people because of union constraints. It takes a long time to change that culture.

  We’re putting in new policies on use of force. We started after the Laquan McDonald shooting. (Laquan McDonald was a 17-year-old mentally disabled black teenager armed with a knife who was shot 16 times—15 times while he lay on the ground—in 2014 by Chicago Police officer Jason Van Dyke. Van Dyke was on the scene for less than 30 seconds before opening fire and began shooting approximately six seconds after exiting his car. The first responding officer said that he did not see the need to use force, and none of at least eight other officers already on the scene before Van Dyke arrived fired their weapons.

  We’re taking common sense and writing it down for officers. You’re not a coward if you use cover. You don’t always shoot somebody with a knife: The law says you can do that—legally we can—but that doesn’t make it right. People’s lives have become more important. Now, we’re trying to get officers more training. We have new use-of-force training that is scenario-based. We get a debriefing afterward of what we should or shouldn’t have done.

  That’s been going on about a year and a half now. I love it. I get to hone my skills, see how I would react, and when we have the debriefing, there are some old ways that we can see don’t work. Most of the officers like it, once they get into it. Officers don’t like change. I remember how they complained about the automation of arrest reports. Now, they are saying, “I don’t know why we didn’t do this before.” But people have to realize that everything changes. The ones that see the bigger picture, they realize it and go along with it. It’s harder when you’re older. Officers get real cynical. They say, “It’s not going to make a difference.”

  Black people also need to be training officers on how they want to be policed. When I look at white officers, I know they might be afraid of black people. Their view of black people is what they see on TV and what they hear. We have neighborhoods in Chicago that are all white. Most of them are not used to seeing and interacting with black people or Latinos. If you watch us on television, most of what you see is black people as criminals. They have no morals. They have no culture, no self-respect, no compassion, no ambition. Now, I’ve worked with white officers who were much more understanding and gave black people more of a break than I would, and you have some black officers who were worse and more racist than the white officers. But I know I will have to teach a lot of [white officers] how to treat the people in that community.

  That block can teach officers how to treat them, how to talk to them, how to communicate with them. We have a block club where I live, and we always invite the police to our events. The difficulty is: It’s going to be hard for people who don’t have community. The people who are being treated the worst are the people who don’t have community. When you have community, you work as a collective and you can expect certain kinds of things. If the only time you come out is when the police do something you don’t like, then you don’t have a line of communication.

  The police officer is a person, too. You can talk to them, you can engage them. You can go up and talk to an officer and draw them out of the car. Get the officer talking. They’re pushing us to get out there and talk to them and engage, but if [an officer] keep[s] trying to talk to citizens and they don’t want to talk to me, I may stop pushing. That’s why [the rate of homicides we solve] is so low in some neighborhoods. The people won’t tell police information they need to solve some of these murders. The officers say, “They are killing themselves. They don’t want to help me. Fine. I’m still getting paid.” Now, the detectives don’t say that to me, but I can tell what’s going on. The community has to push, too.

  I can understand that some black people are afraid of police. When my three sons were teenagers, I was afraid of that stop by police. I had taught them what to say and I had told them the police are always right. Sure enough, they’ve been stopped. Even my dad has been stopped. He’s been stopped several times. He was retired and in his 60s and living in Roselle. [Roselle, Illinois, is 3.4 percent black.] He had been stopped so many times that, one time, he told me, he rolled down the window and when the officer came up, he told him, “Officer, I know you’re just checking on me and that’s why you’ve stopped me so many times, but I can assure you that I’m alright.”

  Do police racially profile? Sure. It’s not right, but we do it. One of my sons, my middle son, he was the passenger in a car when the police pulled them over. The police asked him for his ID, so they could check him for [arrest] warrants. Officers do that when they are looking for gang members. If you fit the profile—young black man—and you make a traffic violation, that could happen. Are we supposed to do that? No. Does it happen? Sure it does.

  My oldest son was driving, and a Naperville (Illinois) officer pulled him over. The officer told him he stopped him because his taillight was out. My son said, “Sir, I don’t think my light is out.” They walked to the back of the car and, no, his taillight wasn’t out. The officer said, “I’m sorry,” and my son went on his way. They were racially profiling him. It was Naperville. My middle son got picked up by police while he walking to work in Hodgkins. It’s a city right outside of Willow Springs. [Hodgkins, Illinois, is 1 percent African-American.] He was working at UPS. Every day he would make this long commute (from Chicago), and he walked part of the way. He was 19.

  The police picked him up off the street because they said he looked like somebody that committed a crime. They took him back to the station and they put him in a police lineup. They held him for two and a half, maybe three hours. Then they said, “You’re not the one.” They took him back to where they picked him up. He didn’t tell me a
bout this until much later. When he told me, I was nearly ballistic. I’m saying to him, “No! No! That’s not what they’re supposed to do.” They didn’t harm him; they didn’t hit him. He was okay with it. I said, “They just can’t pick you up and put you in a lineup like that.” What if a person had picked him out of the lineup? I might have hurt somebody. I would have just had to lose my job if that happened.

  In my opinion, officers feel threatened by these people who are rising up and are “against the police.” Police are saying all lives matter. I have a little of this feeling, too. I think Black Lives Matter raises our social conscience. They point out things that need to be heard. Black Lives Matter definitely was needed in Ferguson, but it’s needed, not just for the police. It’s needed for everything: the gang bangers, the drug dealers, the people who are out here shooting black people. I credit them with the push [that led] to our department turnaround, which we needed.

  But I have a 3-year-old who got shot yesterday. He got grazed in the back. Where is Black Lives Matter for him? If black lives matter, go to the drug dealers, go to the gang bangers—they are the ones taking black lives. Get up in their faces like you got up in ours [during a demonstration], calling our mothers names, taking their children up to the police and saying, “See that police officer. He might kill you one day.”

  We [The National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Officers] were working on black lives matter before Black Lives Matter was even thinking about black lives matter. Change has to come from somebody inside. The change has to be from the inside out. What NOBLE does, it takes the voice of the community inside law enforcement. We show that law enforcement does not have to be oppressive. NOBLE started because the white organizations weren’t giving the community a voice. Injustice does still exist, not just on the police side. Justice for the black community has still not come to fruition. But we’re much better with being forthright now.

  7.

  A CULTURE OF CRIMINALITY

  As I moved up the ranks in the Bureau, I worked with scores of police departments and state law enforcement agencies while managing hundreds of officers who were assigned to me as part of ATF operations. We routinely used local officers in our efforts to assist cities and states implementing violent crime initiatives. In Baltimore, I worked with the Baltimore Police Department and the city’s Baltimore City Housing Department police, chasing guns and drugs. In Maryland, I oversaw officers from state police and cops in 39 other counties. In Seattle, I coordinated cops in Washington state, Oregon, Alaska, Idaho, Hawaii, and the US territory of Guam. While acting special agent in charge in Denver, I managed police officers in Denver, Aurora, Grand Junction, and Colorado Springs in Colorado; Bozeman, Billings, and Helena in Montana; Phoenix in Arizona; and Albuquerque in New Mexico. Finally, I was the person in charge of the Newark Field Division. New Jersey has 466 police departments, and coordinating our operations with them had me hopping from Newark to Jersey City to Camden to Trenton to Atlantic City to Mt. Olive to Paterson and even to New York City.

  Throughout my assignments there was one law enforcement organization I avoided—the New Orleans Police Department. I was fortunate. In those early days of my career, pretty much all my colleagues in ATF, the FBI, and the other federal law enforcement agencies had quietly agreed that New Orleans had one of the most corrupt city governments and one of the most crooked law enforcement agencies in the country. We dreaded the idea of working with that department. The history of police malfeasance and violence in the Big Easy is long and stunning.

  In 1983, for example, a female police officer climbed into the back of an ambulance and beat a suspect as he was being taken to the hospital. In another incident during the same period, officers went on a weeklong rampage after a police officer was killed. They killed four people and beat and tortured 50 others. Officers broadcast threats over a police radio as a man suspected of the killing was being transported to the hospital. Police radio officers could be heard on the radio, saying, “Kill the son of a bitch” and “Is he dead yet?” The man later died of massive skull fractures. An autopsy determined he had been stomped to death. The city paid more than $4 million to settle lawsuits stemming from that case—but not one officer was disciplined.

  Meanwhile, the deputy head of the department that investigates gambling, prostitution, narcotics, and alcohol offenses was convicted of robbing bars and strip clubs in the French Quarter, even grabbing fistfuls of money from cash registers during raids.

  The chief of detectives was dismissed for working after hours for a Las Vegas–based gambling company and for operating an unlicensed private security business that was accused of cheating a visiting movie crew. The commander who enforced the department’s internal rules was accused of roughing up a motorist during a routine traffic stop. The lieutenant who headed the robbery division was charged with shooting at his son. Another officer was charged with kidnapping and first-degree murder. And in a shameless episode, an independent investigation revealed police officers were keeping recovered stolen cars instead of returning them to their owners. The department decided not to take disciplinary action against the offenders but would get the cars back to their owners.

  New Orleans’s police department is not alone in its history of misconduct. Departments across the nation have similar stories. In the 1990s, more than 70 Los Angeles police officers from one division were implicated in a litany of offenses, including unprovoked shootings and beatings, planting false evidence, stealing and dealing narcotics, bank robbery, and perjury. Only 24 officers were found to have committed any wrongdoing; 12 garnered suspensions of various lengths, 7 were forced to resign or retire, and a mere 5 were fired. As a result of their actions, 106 prior criminal convictions were overturned and the city paid $125 million to settle 140 civil lawsuits.

  In 2014, in my hometown of Philadelphia, six officers were arrested on an array of charges, including conspiracy, robbery, extortion, kidnapping, and drug dealing. The officers allegedly pocketed $500,000 in drugs, cash, and personal property, including Rolex watches and designer suits. The head of the police department called it the worst case of police corruption in his 40 years in law enforcement. The officers were later acquitted of the charges.

  Corruption exists no matter what the size of the department. In Bakersfield, California, a department with less than 500 officers, two detectives were found guilty of accepting bribes and routinely taking drugs and cash from dealers during traffic stops.

  Still, New Orleans’s story is the most glaring example of the unethical and violent behavior and bad practices that plague many of the nation’s police departments. It’s a glimpse into how far a department can sink into a culture of brutality and corruption.

  In New Orleans’s long history of bad cops, there are three names that exemplify the department’s level of depravity: Police Officers Len Davis and Antoinette Frank, and the Danziger Bridge.

  One of the department’s most heinous crimes began on the night of October 11, 1994. Kim Marie Groves, a 32-year-old mother of three who lived with her mother in a working-class, though drug-infested, neighborhood of New Orleans’s Ninth Ward, saw an injustice she felt she could not ignore. The next day, she went to the New Orleans Police Department to file a complaint. She told Internal Affairs investigators she had seen two officers punching a 17-year-old friend of her son in the stomach and hitting him in the back of the head with a gun while yelling, “Where is it at?” By the time the beating ended, the kid was bloody, bruised, and dizzy from a concussion.

  One of the cops was Officer Len Davis. She recognized him because they both had attended a training school for security guards. During that time, numerous New Orleans cops worked part-time jobs as bouncers and security officers to supplement their meager pay.

  Davis had a track record for brutality. Between 1987 and 1992, he had received 20 citizens’ complaints and was suspended six times—numbers that were cause for concern in most departments, but not NOPD. Instead, in 1993, Davis had been aw
arded the police department’s second-highest honor, the Medal of Merit.

  Two and a half hours after Groves went to the Internal Affairs office with her complaint, Davis knew about it. And he didn’t like it. “Be looking for something to come down,” he told his patrol partner, Officer Sammie Williams. Almost immediately afterwards, Davis had begun searching for a way to have Groves murdered.

  At 10 p.m. the following night, Davis contacted a local drug dealer, Paul “Cool” Hardy. A tape catches Davis dialing and mumbling, “I can get P to come do that whore now and then we handle the 30”—30 referring to the police code for a homicide. When they speak, Davis tells Hardy when and where he wants Groves killed.

  “All right, I’m on my way,” Hardy responds.

  At approximately 10 p.m., Groves said good night to two people on the corner of Alabo and North Villere streets. She was one block from home and her three children, 12-year-old twin boys and a 16-year-old daughter. Davis was monitoring Groves from his police cruiser.

  He telephoned Hardy again, described Groves, and gave final instructions: “A black coat, with faded jeans, with big bleach stains on the front of ’em, and the bitch [is] brown-skinned with light brown eyes. I got the phone on and the radio. After it’s done, go straight uptown and call me.”

  At 10:50 p.m., Hardy got out of a 1991 champagne-colored Nissan Maxima. His two accomplices remained in the car. It was a clear night, about 80 degrees. He walked over to Groves, raised his 9mm to the left side of her head, and fired. Groves’s children rushed outside and found their mother lying in a pool of blood, her eyes moving from side to side, and then very suddenly they stopped. She was gone.