Fast-forward 25 years from my encounter in Arlington to a cold December evening in Baltimore. That’s when two Baltimore cops got their 10-96, even though the people who needed assistance had never asked for police. It was a Sunday night in 2011, and the family of Franklin Williams needed help. Williams was schizophrenic, and he was off his medication, as are about half of mental patients daily, experts say. The family suspected so, because Williams, 37, had begun acting the way he did when he had one of his rare psychotic episodes. He had begun to drink lots and lots of water that day. He took baths and smoked cigarettes to calm himself and quiet the voices in his head. He was strange, but not violent.
When his 65-year-old mother came home, she found that he had locked her out of the house. Williams’s mother called her niece, who was a nurse. She would know what to do, she thought. The niece dialed 911 and asked the operator to send someone to the southwest Baltimore home to take Williams to a hospital. The anxious mother was expecting medical professionals, perhaps an ambulance with people familiar with schizophrenia.
Instead, she got Sergeant Don Slimmer, a 10-year veteran, and Officer Brian Rose, who had been on the force for five years. When the officers arrived, a neighbor led them through their connected row house to the backyard, so they could have access to the back of Williams’s home. One officer climbed through a back window and let the other one through the back door. The officers cleared the downstairs and made their way up the stairs. They stopped in a small hallway with bedrooms on either side. The officers could see Williams in the bedroom on the left. He was slumped over in a chair. Their guns were drawn. One of the officers yelled, “Police.” That startled Williams, who stood up. Williams was a big man. When he stood up, it rattled the officers. He walked toward them as they commanded, and they shot him. Williams did ultimately get to a hospital, as his family requested, but it was a shock trauma unit in an Emergency Department. His attorney, Robert Joyce, told me Williams was so badly wounded he was dead on arrival. He had been shot 11 times, once in the head, but the doctors miraculously pieced him back together after several weeks of surgeries. He is permanently disabled from the incident.
The officers claimed Williams came through the doorway armed with a knife and attempted to attack them. He hadn’t. That was a cover story. The cops hadn’t noticed Williams’s 12-year-old nephew across the hall; he saw the shooting and testified in court about what he saw. He told jurors that Williams didn’t have a knife and he didn’t lunge at the officers. In fact, Williams was standing inside his room when police shot him. Joyce noted to the jury that, after being shot, Williams’s body was slumped inside the doorway and all the blood was inside the room.
The jury ruled for the family and awarded it $600,000 to care for Williams. The courts later cut the award down to $200,000. The cops were found to be at fault, but while that is true, it was the city, the state, the nation, all of us who are to blame. On average, each day, one mentally ill or disabled person is killed by a law enforcement officer because these officers are being asked to do a job that they simply cannot and should not be assigned to do. People who are mentally ill and the homeless are the most glaring examples of “criminal” cop encounters because of failed systems.
While in the St. Louis area trying to understand what happened in Ferguson before and after the death of Michael Brown, I stopped by the office of Adolphus Pruitt, the head of the St. Louis Chapter of the NAACP, to talk about his city’s issues with crime and cops, poverty and police. Pruitt is an interesting guy. He had made so much money in construction in the first half of his life, that he decided to take a stab at tackling what ails the city and African-Americans as his second career. As we talked, he slid a piece of paper to me across his desk.
“Read this and tell me what you see,” Pruitt said.
It was an annual murder report from the St. Louis Police Department’s statistics section. It broke down the homicides by the usual categories: race of the victim, race of the assailant, age of the victim, age of the assailant, which neighborhoods the murders had occurred in. However, this document added some more information: whether the victims and assailants had used drugs or alcohol before the incident; gang affiliation, if any; previous criminal record, etc. St. Louis doesn’t have nearly the number of murders as Chicago. In 2016, it reported 188, a paltry number compared to the 762 in Chicago. But when it comes to murders based on how many people live in a city, people are being murdered in St. Louis at more than twice the rate they are in Chicago. I quickly scanned the paper and shrugged. Of 188 murder victims, 159 were black. African-Americans, who made up about half the city’s population, accounted for almost 90 percent of the people who were killed.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve seen this before in lots of cities. That’s true in just about every major city with a large black population. African-Americans make up a disproportionate number of the murder victims.”
A sly smile crossed Pruitt’s lips.
“Nope, look at it again,” he said. “You’re missing it.”
I stared down at the paper. Only 18 of the victims had been gang members and only three of the incidents were gang-related. Not it. Nearly all the shooters were the same race as the victim, a long-recognized pattern for homicides. Not it. Most of the victims were male. No news there. Forty-three of the victims and 13 of the suspects were on probation at the time of the murder. Fifteen of the murders were the results of domestic discord.
“Most of the victims have a previous criminal history,” I mumbled to myself.
“You’re missing it,” Pruitt said. “Look at the education level.”
I was stunned. Not one of the murder victims had graduated from high school. Not one. The pattern was virtually the same for the people who killed them. Of all the factors on the page, it was the number one indicator of who was getting shot and who was doing the shooting. Pruitt handed me documents for the previous year and the one before that. The numbers were virtually the same in every report. Year after year, young black men were divorced from regular society, uneducated, largely unemployable, and unable to envision a future beyond robbing, stealing, dope dealing, and killing each other, while raining havoc on the rest of the city in the process.
The relationship between education and criminality exists across America. According to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, only 1 out of every 35 high school graduates was in jail or prison. Conversely, 1 out of every 14 white high school dropouts was in custody and 1 out of every 4 African-American dropouts was behind bars.
To be honest, you don’t need a study to tell you that. Just ask any public school teacher. Schoolteachers can look across their classrooms, some as early as the fourth grade, and identify the students who will probably end up in prison or dead. They are the ones in impoverished families who can barely pay attention in class because they are quietly traumatized by unsettled homes and tumultuous neighborhoods, kids being bounced around foster care, the ones with a parent struggling to support too many children on too little money or those without present parents or stable guardians at all.
I’ve witnessed it as a volunteer mentor to middle school kids through my 100 Black Men chapter. Once a week, I drive from my home to Newark where I meet with six eighth-graders at Chancellor Avenue School whom school officials have identified as “at risk.” The fathers of three of the six were gunned down in the streets of Newark. The father of a fourth died four months before I met him. He barely knew his father, because the father had spent most of his adulthood in and out of jail, but when I asked the kid what he would change about the world, he said, “I wish my dad was still alive.”
The six arrive at each counseling session drowsy and tired because they live in households, they explained to me, with so much activity they rarely make it to bed before 1 a.m. One suffers with obvious signs of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Consequently, he is constantly missing out on activities and getting in trouble. They are not bad kids; they have bad conditions.
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And if they drop through the cracks, like millions of similar children, they become a police problem, because that is who we turn to when our systems fail.
Arne Duncan, former secretary of the federal Department of Education and previous superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools system, has seen it time and time again while working with public school systems. I met Duncan during a presentation to Chicago business owners about how they could help reduce the city’s soaring violent crime rate by hiring and training some of those high school dropouts. Duncan had returned to Chicago to form an organization that would put black kids lost in the shuffle on a path to employment. He is working with Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson and Catholic priest Father Michael Pfleger.
Duncan explained that decades of neglect and failure to buttress faltering families and children had stunted the development of the vast majority of the men and women with whom he worked.
“Many of our guys are in the family business,” Duncan said. “This is the world they grew up in. It is violent. It is dangerous. Most of them are tired of getting shot at and tired of getting shipped off to jail. There is this terrible myth that they are making all this money selling drugs. They aren’t. We discovered that the guys who are doing the shooting are making $80 a day. Most would get out of that business if we could pay them $12 or $14 an hour. Transformation isn’t easy, but we can’t arrest our way out of this.”
As I think about law enforcement, a lot has changed. No longer are our departments homogenous bastions of white males. Many are led by African-American and Latino men and women. Still, in many departments, the percentage of cops of color is not representative of the community’s populations. The numbers are a far cry from the days when black officers stood while white officers sat, when black officers were not allowed to arrest white citizens or ride in police cars, when referring to them as “niggers” or refusing to work with them because of their color was not cause for reprimand.
Yes, a lot has changed. And change is good, but it’s not necessarily progress. If black men and women continue to die disproportionately at the hands of police, as they have over the past few years, we haven’t made progress. If the relationship between communities of color and law enforcement remains as toxic as ever, we haven’t made progress. Additionally, it begs the question of whether African-American and Latino officers are just as complicit in the continuing problem of biased enforcement as their fellow officers. For me, it points to a fundamental issue.
The wrongs inside police departments are not about a handful of bad police officers. Instead, they reflect bad policing procedures and policies that many of our departments have come to accept as gospel. To fix the problem requires a realignment of our thinking about the role police play and how closely they as a group and as individuals are knitted into the fabric of society. Do they stand apart from societal norms or will they uphold their motto of “To Protect and Serve”? Are they to be looked at as the men and women who sweep up the refuse left by our refusal or inability to tackle societal problems, or are they partners in our efforts to provide a vibrant and supportive community for all? The decision is ours.
EPILOGUE
Sixty miles south of my home is a small municipality in New Jersey called Bordentown Township. The population is 11,367, according to the 2010 US Census. Two very important things happened there in 2016. One alarmed me; the other gave me hope. The first was the arrest of the town’s former police chief, Frank Nucera Jr., who had just stepped down after years on the force. Nucera was charged by the FBI with committing a federal hate crime and violating a person’s civil rights while he was chief. Nucera, I would learn, is a confirmed racist. Once, when discussing a situation where he believed an African-American had slashed the tires on a patrol cruiser, he told a fellow officer, “I wish that nigger would come back from Trenton and give me a reason to put my hands on him. I’m tired of ’em. These niggers are like ISIS. They have no value. They should line them all up and mow ’em down. I’d like to be on the firing squad. I could do it.”
According to taped conversations, Nucera routinely made such statements to his officers, referring to African-Americans as “niggers,” “nigs,” and “moulinyans,” an Italian slang for nigger. He liked to intimidate local African-Americans by positioning police dogs at the gymnasium entrance during high school basketball games or by having his officers walk the dogs through predominantly black apartment units. If his officers weren’t tough enough, he’d lead by example. When a black 18-year-old and his 16-year-old girlfriend were being arrested for allegedly failing to pay a hotel bill, even as they swam in the hotel’s pool, Nucera approached the male teenager from behind, grabbed his head, and slammed it into a metal doorjamb. “I’m fucking tired of them, man,” he said after the incident. “I’ll tell you what, it’s gonna get to the point where I could shoot one of these motherfuckers. And that nigger bitch lady [the 16-year-old’s aunt], she almost got it.”
I have known lots of New Jersey police chiefs. I was a member of the New Jersey State Association of Chiefs of Police. I knew incompetent chiefs, corrupt chiefs in New Jersey and other states, as well. Still, I was stunned that someone as morally and intellectually bankrupt as Nucera could have headed a police department in New Jersey, or any state for that matter, in these times. It would be easy to say Nucera was a bad cop, an aberration that fortunately has been excised from the law enforcement body, but who he is and what he was speaks to the explicit or tacit approval of racism and bias by mayors, city officials, and other police officers who have worked with officers like him. Nucera had been a member of the Bordentown Police Department for years. He was promoted through the ranks to become chief. Consequently, in all those years, his racism was no secret to those who worked with him day to day. In the end, it was even rewarded. His rise to the position of chief is disheartening.
Still, as sickened as I was by Nucera, there was a wrinkle of hope: his arrest. It made me think that maybe, just maybe, we are ready to rid our departments of noxious cops, dangerous police behaviors, and bad police policies that put people in danger and do a disservice to all Americans. Nucera, it turns out, was done in by one of his own men. A white police officer in his department was so offended by his racism that he went to the FBI and agreed to secretly record his conversations. Those recordings led to his arrest.
The courageous officer’s actions hint at a relatively small, but significant attitudinal shift among individual officers. That shift communicates a new attitude in law enforcement: that we recognize the role police have historically played as oppressors and occupiers of African-American communities, and we want to change that relationship.
President Barack Obama began the dialogue when he convened law enforcement from across the country to develop a guide for policing in the 21st century. Terrence Cunningham, however, as head of the International Association of Chiefs of Police in 2016, signaled to law enforcement officers everywhere that its leadership has decided it is time for a change.
“There have been times when law enforcement officers, because of the laws enacted by federal, state, and local governments, have been the face of oppression for far too many of our fellow citizens,” he told his 16,000 members in San Diego. “The laws adopted by our society have required police officers to perform many unpalatable tasks, such as ensuring legalized discrimination or even denying the basic rights of citizenship to many of our fellow Americans. While this is no longer the case, this dark side of our shared history has created a multigenerational—almost inherited—mistrust between many communities of color and their law enforcement agencies. We must forge a path that allows us to move beyond our history and identify common solutions to better protect our communities. For our part, the first step in this process is for law enforcement and the IACP to acknowledge and apologize for the actions of the past and the role that our profession has played in society’s historical mistreatment of communities of color.”
Despite Cunningham’s statement, cops like N
ucera prove, unfortunately, the past is not always past. Nor does his statement soothe the pain of the families of victims of police shooting and abuse such as Walter Scott, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Tamir Rice, Laquan McDonald, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, and Sandra Bland, or of Fred Watson and his children.
Still, it’s refreshing to have law enforcement acknowledge past misdeeds regarding African-American and Latino communities and point toward a new direction in police behavior. Additionally, some police departments, in most cases prodded by US Justice Department consent decrees after an individual police officer’s action revealed systemic abuse, are moving toward a system of law enforcement, in which police officers are judged by how many people they positively serve, rather than solely by how many arrests they make and how many summonses they issue.
What departments are discovering is that while, yes, there are bad police officers, the real problem is bad systems—inadequate training, reward, and promotion issues; lack of community engagement; and mismatched expectations between what patrol officers see as their jobs and what the communities see as the police officer’s responsibility.
Organizations and groups like Black Lives Matter have pushed the conversation forward by focusing all of us on the centuries-old problem of black men and women, girls and boys being routinely disrespected, discounted, harassed, jailed, and shot down indiscriminately by police.
But if black lives matter, all of them must matter, not only the ones whose lives are snuffed out by police. If Michael Brown’s life mattered, then so did Richard Jordan III, a 10-year old-who loved to play football and was slain in a drive-by shooting in Memphis, Tennessee, at 4:30 p.m. on November 13, 2017, while in a car with his family, and 1-year-old Robin Keefer, who was fatally shot four days before Richard Jordan, also in Memphis, as she played in her family’s apartment, and Robin Keefer’s 2-year-old sister, Laylah Washington, shot and killed five months earlier, also in another drive-by.
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