The Black and the Blue

by Matthew Horace

  With all of Harrison’s efforts, crime has gone down. The independent monitors who oversee the police department’s progress under the Justice Department’s consent decree recently completed two annual surveys: one that judges how New Orleans residents see the department and a second to see how officers view their leadership and the department’s direction. Sixty-four percent of New Orleans citizens said they think the department is more competent than it was a year ago, up from just over 50 percent earlier. Just as important, 79 percent of the officers in the department said they approve of the department’s leadership and believe that it is headed in the right direction.

  I asked Harrison how a chief knows he has at least turned the corner in reform. “There are a number of things,” he said. “First, crime will be going down. If crime is going down, citizen satisfaction is going up. If citizen satisfaction is going up, that means officer job performance is going up. We have to be able to say we no longer need federal oversight and we can prove that we no longer need to be under a consent decree. We need to continue to get high marks from the citizens who are giving us favorable satisfaction reviews. We’ve got to increase our staffing back to the original numbers of about 1,500 police officers. We’re down to 1,165 police officers right now. We want to make sure that we are seven minutes or less in response to an emergency call. We are updating our equipment on a consistent basis so that officers can do their jobs.

  “But one of the biggest things is for the city not to put the entire burden of reducing crime on policing. We all know that lack of jobs, poor education, poor parenting, no cultural activities and recreation, and failing faith-based institutions lead to crime. Crime starts and feeds on the lack of all these things, and that part has nothing to do with police presence. I think we have changed the conversation with many of our politicians, so they know that we need to do our job, but they have a job to do, too.”

  Harrison is a case study for how departments across the nation should be looking at our profession differently. We must consider law enforcement models far beyond what we have traditionally made part of our processes.

  For instance, what types of early warning systems are in place in departments to identify officers who may go rogue? Should police officers and sheriff’s deputies be tested for their psychiatric stability every five years on the job? Traditionally, officers are given a psychological evaluation only once in their careers, during the hiring process. Dealing with the worst of our society on a daily basis can take its toll. Some handle it better than others. Statistics show that police officers commit suicide at a rate that is twice that of the nation’s average. How can we do more to support the officers and the communities they serve?

  Should there be statewide or national hiring standards? Should there be a consistent age for police hires? In some states you can be a cop at 21 and in others you have to be 25. Some departments require associate’s degrees, others require bachelor’s degrees, and, for others, a high school diploma is sufficient. These are just a few of the important questions facing law enforcement in the world of 21st-century policing.

  Chris Magnus

  Chief, Tucson Police Department

  I did not let people know I was gay when I first started as a police officer. I doubt I would have been successful coming up through the ranks as a gay man. Based on the environment, it was super unlikely. I heard the language. I knew what other cops thought about gay men. Even today, it’s still very difficult. Police departments are not easy places for folks who do not fit a very traditional portrait of policing.

  There are arrests that I’ve made that I think back on and sort of wince. I did not police the way, today as a police chief, I expect my officers to police. My use of force was questionable at times. I grew up arresting everybody who looked at me the wrong way. I took a hard line. I was involved in way too many fights and I made way too many arrests. Lansing, Michigan, had a lot of disorderly offenses on the books that gave cops a wide latitude to arrest people. We had failure to obey; hindering, obstructing, opposing, and providing false information. We used all of that often as justification to search people. You can always find a reason to arrest somebody. At the time, I didn’t know better. I thought that’s how you do police work.

  There are two kinds of police chiefs. There are people who see their job as holding down the fort, crisis management, keeping the trains running on time. I know a great many of these folks. They are professional people. They see their job as maintaining a status quo approach to policing and their agency.

  Second, there are people in varying ranks who have been looking for an opportunity to do something different. They are often held back or not really given an opportunity. They get pushback against change. People react with fear, anger, and there’s a lot of passive-aggressive behavior. Officers who want change must figure out who are their allies. There’s trial and error in figuring out which people are going to partner with you. Police officers know police chiefs come and go. They don’t know how long a chief will be around. If they go along with his plans for change, they may be offending people they’ve got to work with throughout their careers.

  Ultimately, cops are pragmatic, and if chiefs can show them how change works better and how it makes things better for them, officers will ultimately go along with it. Chiefs have to show how new use-of-force techniques and models keep officers out of civil and criminal liability, and keep them out of trouble with their bosses. The average cop is far more concerned about what their sergeant thinks [about their performance] than what I say as chief. Chiefs must get their sergeants to engage and help officers understand, “If you’re going to be successful [in this police department], you have to be engaging with the community.” We have to get more sophisticated about what we’re expecting from our officers, [the behavior] we’re encouraging and what we’re rewarding.

  There is a photograph of me holding the Black Lives Matter sign in Richmond (California). I moved from Lansing to a nearly all-white community in Fargo to a city that was 85 percent people of color, low income, high levels of violence, and high levels of mistrust of the police. We had built a very broad relationship with the community and with different neighborhood groups. There had been a whole series of very ugly marches in Oakland and Berkeley following the shooting of Michael Brown.

  In Richmond, we heard there was going to be a demonstration. We prepared for potential problems, but what we did was, my entire command staff just went out and talked to people who were in the march. Between us, we knew the majority of the folks who were there. If I didn’t know somebody, my deputy chiefs or captains did. It is harder to be hostile toward police you’ve gotten to know and have built a relationship with over the years. We approached it along the lines of building bridges and opening lines of communication.

  One of my captains said to me, “Chief, people have been out here for a long time, and they are getting hungry.” So, we went out and got pizza and gave it to the people. People had their kids with them. We still had some people looking at us like, “Fuck the police,” but at the same time people were taking pictures with us. One woman asked to take a selfie with me. She held up her sign and we took a picture. I did not in a million years expect it to get the attention that it did. Of course, black lives do matter.

  It is unfortunate that there are people who see this continuum of black lives matter and police lives matter as being on either end of the equation. It’s such a false equivalency. It’s not a matter of one being on one end of the spectrum and another being on the opposite end. There’s nothing that says people who care about the past and the future of people of color—and [who] realize that we have a lot of bad history and that it takes a toll in many ways and that there are still a lot of bigoted attitudes—are antipolice.

  We can acknowledge that and it’s not saying what police do is not important, or that police officers’ lives are not important. There is nothing that says addressing the first means you’re not committed to the second. The great majority of
the black community want a good relationship with the police. They have a lot of respect for what cops do. Are there people who are not helpful in their behavior and rhetoric? Yes, there are. But most black people, in no way are they antipolice or anti–law enforcement.

  Richmond was a community where we were taking as many as two guns off the street a day. There are a lot of communities where guns are part of the fabric. Here in Tucson, people would argue that guns are part of a way of life. It’s fair to say that, in Richmond, it was very hard to avoid guns, particularly because of gang activity and a sense of personal danger. A lot of folks, their whole word is a small and dangerous place. Carrying a gun for them is as much a defensive act as anything else. When I got to Richmond, it was a very, very violent city; a lot of homicides and a lot of shootings. [Richmond, a city of 115,000, had 38 homicides the year Magnus took charge. With 1,078 violent crimes the year before, it was considered one of the 10 most crime-ridden cities in the United States, with a per-capita murder rate that earned it the reputation of the Bay Area murder capital.]

  We could have been shooting people every day, but we tried to create a culture that said, “You’re a professional police officer and committed to the idea that life is sacred. The people you might be arresting, they’re the sons and daughters of somebody in that neighborhood. You want to be a little more thoughtful. You want to be more selective in your use of force.” Our goal was to train officers so they understood that they had multiple tools and strategies to deal with dangerous individuals, other than just shooting people. We really focused on scenario-based training. We looked at providing them with de-escalation training.

  On a daily basis, my officers were involved in foot chases with people who were armed. I would never encourage my officers to put themselves in harm’s way, but there are different ways to pursue somebody. You can box people in. You can slow something down, so you’re not just reacting out of panic and fear. These are issues related to training. You need training and then more training to reinforce the training.

  There’s value in a weird way of coming from the perspective of being a gay man. I know what it’s like to be discriminated against, to be treated in a way that’s very unkind and bigoted and mean-spirited. I don’t claim to know what it’s like to be black or Hispanic, but it gives me a glimpse into other people’s experience.

  9.

  A MURDER IN CHICAGO

  The day I flew into Chicago, most of the East Coast was still enjoying unseasonably warm fall weather. It was 50 and 60 degrees back home in Pennsylvania. Chicago, instead, was living up to its reputation. It was cold and wet and windy as hell. The next day would bring snow. Aside from my numerous flights in and out of the Windy City as an ATF agent, I had not spent much time there professionally. I was in Chicago now to understand the dynamics of police and race in a city that had registered more murders the previous year than the nation’s two largest cities, New York and Los Angeles, combined. I was set to talk with Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson; activists like Father Michael Pfleger, who has been wrestling with the city’s violence for 40 years; and Arne Duncan, former CEO of Chicago’s public schools and secretary of education under President Barack Obama. And I was there for Laquan McDonald.

  Of all the police shootings of African-Americans, McDonald’s is one of the most telling I’ve found about police misconduct and bias. It shows the extent to which police, with the tacit approval of public officials, will lie to protect each other. McDonald was a mentally unstable 17-year-old black boy, shot and killed by a police officer just two months after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Nine of the 16 bullets that hit him were in his back; nearly all the shots were delivered while he was on the ground and at least 10 feet away from the officers.

  Chicago police officers and city officials engaged in a massive, one-year cover-up to hide how McDonald was killed. Once revealed, it led to the murder indictment of one officer, conspiracy charges against three others, the firing of the police chief, voters’ removal of the county prosecutor, and political fallout that even now threatens to derail the career of the city’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel.

  Despite all the media attention paid to crime in Chicago, it is not America’s most dangerous city. St. Louis, Memphis, and Baltimore vie annually for that dubious distinction. Detroit is not far behind, nor is Newark. Even the nation’s capital is worse. Chicago didn’t even rank in the top 10 as of the writing of this book.

  It may not be as dangerous as the others, but it feels dangerous. It’s not because of the blocks and blocks of derelict buildings, like parts of Baltimore and St. Louis. Chicago has one of the nation’s most attractive skylines, an extensive and inviting system of public parks, a gorgeous and accessible waterfront dotted with public beaches and friendly bike and running paths that stretch along every neighborhood bordering Lake Michigan. However, what I noticed in Chicago is the sense that people seem to be consciously and unconsciously mentally navigating their way through a minefield of violence. It is tucked inside casual conversations. It lies among things said and unsaid, how daily activities are altered, how neighborhoods are avoided, and how interactions with strangers must be carefully negotiated.

  My introduction to Chicagoans’ unique everyday conversation began almost immediately upon arrival. As usual, I texted a ride-sharing service for my trip from the airport to my downtown hotel. A courteous African-American woman named Cynthia pulled up. Cynthia was in her mid-30s. She works full-time as a middle school teacher at a Chicago public school. Big smile, smartly dressed, nice personality. She eased her Toyota Prius away from O’Hare International, nosed it into highway traffic, and we began the usual passenger-to-driver banter to fill the silence. At one point, she asked me what had brought me to town. I answered. Then began one of the many stories I would hear over the next few days about people’s personal encounters with the city’s crime.

  “Pop, pop, pop—they shot into my house,” Cynthia said. “Somebody was shooting at somebody on the corner. I heard it from inside. Pop, pop, pop, and now I’ve got bullet holes in my house. Those bullet holes remind me every day to be careful. It’s like that in a lot of places. Everybody in my family knows the drill. You hear gunshots, you hit the floor.”

  “Maybe you should move,” I said.

  “Nope, not me,” she replied. “That’s what they want me to do. That’s part of the problem. They want us to move. People are selling their houses cheap, and white people are snapping them up. Then, because it will be mostly white, the neighborhood is going to change, and things are going to get better. Next thing you know, you’ll see white women jogging, pushing a stroller with a Labradoodle running on the side. Nope. I’m not selling my house. I’m going to get through it.”

  Later, I would slide into the back seat of another ride-share, this time with Martin, an African-American man in his mid-40s. I had just concluded an appointment on 79th Street on Chicago’s South Side and was heading back downtown. Martin wore eyeglasses and sported a thick black beard. A black wool cap was pulled down over his ears against the cold. We headed north on the Dan Ryan Expressway, and just before the turn down the Stevenson Expressway toward the city’s famous Lakeshore Drive, Martin got talkative. When he’s not working this job, Martin told me, he is a bus driver for the Chicago Transit Authority. The agency operates all the city’s rapid transit. Martin brushes up against the city’s danger in both jobs. As a ride-share driver, he hears the gunshots often as he ferries people through the city’s 77 neighborhoods. They are discomforting, but he’s not afraid. He is fearful when he drives the bus.

  “When you’re driving a bus, you don’t know what to expect,” he said. “All kinds of people are on the bus—kids, old people, gang members, professional people, crooks. They get on the bus, they are cussing, hollering, mad. We don’t have metal detectors. So, someone could be carrying a gun. I don’t know. I can look at them and think I know, but I don’t. So, I have to be careful.

  “I have to watch
the road and watch the inside of the bus at the same time. I’ve got to watch my back. Right now, it’s so crazy. If a person gets on the bus and doesn’t put in the fare, if I ask them and they still don’t pay the fare, I’m not going to ask them again. I’m going to let it go, because I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know who I’m talking to, and I’m not trying to get shot.”

  Another ride-sharing driver, Carlos, picked me up late at night when I needed a ride from a location on 87th Street. Carlos was in his 40s, balding with eyeglasses. He looked like a college professor but worked during the day as a state social worker. For him, the problems that plague Chicago’s poor children are immediate—overburdened, underemployed parents; limited child health care; nearly nonexistent mental health care; parental abuse and neglect; abandonment; foster homes; uneducated children; high dropout rates; juvenile delinquency; drugs; and gangs.

  I was coming from The Rink Fitness Factory, a Chicago landmark known to locals as The Rink on 87th Street. I went there to see what my friend Saletta said would be a uniquely Chicago experience and to speak to some longtime Chicago residents. Saletta had managed a rival skating rink on 76th Street when she lived there. She’d moved to Chicago from northern California and moved away three years later.

  “My daughter was born in July and I moved the next May, because the shootings increase in the summer and I didn’t want to be around for that,” she said adamantly. “That’s not a place where I want to raise my child. It’s too hard. I don’t want to have to be conscious of every step I take all the time. I have a friend, I actually hired him to work with me at the rink. He says in the summer, he sleeps on the floor because they shoot in the alley behind his apartment and he’s afraid of a bullet coming through the window. So, he moved his mattress to the floor, so a bullet wouldn’t come through the window and hit him.”