Breaking Rank

by Norm Stamper

  “Get your butt into that bathroom right now!” he said. “I’m not telling you again, Norman.” I walked by the foursome at the bright blond dining room table. They were slapping cards, smoking and cussing, cussing and smoking, the men accusing the women of cheating and vice versa. I was only too happy to get my butt into the bathroom.

  I filled the tub with water as hot as I could stand and stepped in. As I sank down I imagined myself riding across wheat-colored hills with the marshal and Chester.

  We’re off to an abandoned shack where the bank robber is holed up. He’s wearing a black hat when he busts out and makes a run for it. I pull my rifle from its saddle holster and take cover behind a huge boulder. The bad guy is blasting away with a six-shooter in each hand. One of his rounds chips a chunk off the boulder, right next to my head.

  I scowl, stand up, take a bead on him. Blang! One shot and he’s down, writhing in the dirt. Matt walks over, picks him up with one hand, shoves him up on the extra horse we’ve brought along. He tells the crook to stop his bellyaching, tells him he’s lucky to be alive. “My deputy only meant to wing you.” He looks over at me and winks. “Nice shot, partner.”

  I stuck my head under the cold faucet and kept it there for a long time. It was essential to get used to cold water, and to learn to hold one’s breath underwater for as long as one could. One never knew.

  Shivering, I turned off the tap and started to reach for the tattered blue towel on the rack when something stopped me. I froze. The room turned gray and everything went all muted and flatlike. Everything except the tweezers. They glistened up there on the glass shelf above the towel rack. Pick me up, they said, and do something outrageous with me. So I did. I stuck the tweezers in the electric wall socket. I guess I figured it would put an end to something, which it did. It knocked out every light in the house. And sent a jolt up my arm and into my head.

  “Hey!” “What the . . .” Voices from the dining room. “Norman?” “Hey!” “Norman, are you okay?” Well, I was naked and quaking and a bit out of kilter from the dark and from the spooky feeling in my body, but I reckoned I was okay. I listened for his voice. It came soon enough, along with the thundering footsteps of his stocking feet. I squeezed into the far corner next to the toilet just as the door crashed open. He was one big shadow. He stood there for a second, then lunged. The belt slashed first across my face, and stung my eye. He brought it down again and again. And again. It felt like he was never going to stop. Someone, Uncle Don, produced a flashlight and that made it really awful, me naked in front of the grownups and all.

  Everyone was yelling at him to stop. There was quite a crowd in the doorway, Dad, his sister, his brother-in-law, his wife. My brothers knew better, they stayed put in their bunk beds. Anyway, all the yelling didn’t work. He just kept at it even when at one point Mom stepped between us and shouted some words I’ve forgotten, something unexpected. Dad pushed her. It was the only time I saw him lay an angry hand on her. Then Uncle Don stepped in. Dad turned on him like he was going to hit him. What a night. I’d never seen my father hit a grown-up. But he just said, “You stay out of this,” and went back to work.

  He hadn’t done it this long, ever. I started to cry, then cried even harder when I realized I was crying. Finally, the belt caught a jar of cold cream on the glass shelf and both the jar and the shelf crashed to the tile floor, shattering. Shards sparkled in the beam of the flashlight. We kept dancing, though, my father and I.

  It was weird. The only serious cut was to the top of my foot. But it was a bad one, gushing and spurting everywhere. Uncle Don jabbed the flashlight toward the wound, then to the pool of blood in front of the toilet. “Satisfied, Gene? Satisfied?” Dad stopped, then walked out of the bathroom. A second later he was back.

  “Gimme that flashlight, will you, Don? I gotta go check the fuses.” Dad and his brother-in-law, working together on a home improvement project.

  After Uncle Don and Aunt LaVella left, Mom shrieked at Dad that I had to be taken to the emergency room, but he kept saying no. It was understood that Mom couldn’t drive at night—she was unable to read the street signs, and she saw things jump out at her from the shadows. She kept yelling at Dad as she applied bandage after bandage to my right foot.

  A little later I hobbled off to bed, my foot swaddled in layers of gauze, two or three pairs of sweat socks, and white adhesive tape over the whole works. It resembled a cast. “Look,” I said to my brothers. “I have a broken foot.”

  “Wow,” said Roy.

  “Geezo,” said Brian.

  I removed my helmet, a violation of department policy, and sat down on the bed. Five kids swarmed me, the youngest fighting for my lap. A couple of them were giggling, asking if my gun was real, if I’d ever shot anybody. I answered their questions, then asked some of my own, trying to remember what our criminal law instructor had told us about questioning kids. I was pretty sure you could “lead” young children, if necessary, to get the story out of them. But I tried not to need to, so I asked questions like: What happened? Has something like this happened before? How did your mommy get tied up? Why was your mommy bleeding? How did you get that bump? Do you have any other ‘owies’?”

  That last question triggered a lifting of shirts, blouses, PJs. There were large belt welts on all but the youngest, a crawler sitting in the corner with snot rolling out of her nose and over her lips. “See, see?” “Lookie here!” “No, no, policeman, lookitmine, lookitmine!” “He done these ones yesterday.” “Oh yeah? He jes’ whupped me jes’ today.”

  “Who’s ‘he’?” I said.

  “Daddy,” they said in unison. “Daddy.”

  I’d noticed the number scrawled in crayon all over the crumbling plaster walls of the bedroom. It was impossible to miss: 232-6981. It looked familiar. When I figured it out I chuckled. I hadn’t yet memorized it, the phone number of the San Diego Police Department. “What’s this about?” I said, waving a hand at the walls. My own mother would never have called the cops, or given us the phone number. Cops were for writing traffic tickets, catching the bogeyman, bringing wayward boys home to their parents. But not for coming into your house.

  “Momma said that’s for when he does it the next time,” said the oldest, a boy with mocha skin and velvet-painting eyes. His welts were the worst. “I tried to call it but . . .”

  “You mean tonight?”

  “Yeah, but there wasn’t nobody on the phone.” Daddy had ripped the instrument from the wall.

  Finally, I had a tale worth telling at the nightly critique. I picked up the story at our arrival on Thirty-fifth. I told the story of our 415 family dispassionately. Like it was nothing.

  But it was not nothing. It was one of the most influential events of my police career. In that split second in the hallway, when I looked upon that mom and her kids, I knew I would never again question the “essentialness” of police work, or police officers.

  On Labor Day, days before his death in 1990, I wrote my father a letter. I hadn’t really talked to him about it, so I spent a paragraph or two telling him, as an adult, what I thought of his racial intolerance, his physical violence, his endless pronouncements of my unworthiness. I wrote that I’d forgiven him all that.

  But I also reflected on other things we’d never talked about: his grabbing a life-saving ring and jumping into the Pacific Ocean (he couldn’t swim) to rescue a downed pilot, for which he was awarded the Navy Cross in World War II; his lifetime of backbreaking construction work to feed and house his wife and four boys; his voracious reading which made him as well-informed as any talking head on the tube; his taking us to Padres ball games at Lane Field, and on Sunday drives to Mission Valley after stops at Niederhoffer’s for ice cream cones.

  I told him how deeply moved I was when I recalled, as an adult, his tenderness in nursing me when I was hurting. Not always, of course. But he’d stayed up with me all night during many early childhood bouts with the croup, making a tent of my bedding, filling it with steam, rubbing my che
st with Vicks. When I fell from a rope swing and severely sprained both my wrists he gave me two silver dollars he’d won in Vegas that weekend. And he rubbed bacon (bacon!) on my foot after I’d stepped on the tip of a pencil, driving its graphite tip deep into the bottom of my foot.

  I played hooky from work the day after I’d finished the letter. I took Dad to see a Harrison Ford movie, the letter in my pocket. We sat in a mostly empty cavern of a theater. When an unmarked police car appeared on the screen, Dad said, loud enough for everyone to hear. “That’s the kind of cop car you drive, isn’t it, Norman?” I knew it was my father’s way of saying he was proud of me. We were going to go to dinner but he was too tired so I took him home, to my brother’s house in Santee, and put him to bed. I gave him his morphine, and left the letter on the nightstand.

  The next day, I called the house. My son Matthew answered the phone. He told me he’d read the letter to Dad. My father had wept, and told Matt that he’d beaten me to toughen me up. He feared I was “too sensitive.”

  There were, of course, better ways to “toughen me up,” if indeed that’s what I needed. My father, like so many men, just didn’t know how to raise a boy. One of Dad’s brothers told me recently that their father, my “Pampa,” whom I’d idolized, had raised his family (the girls as well as the boys) with sticks, fists, and belts. It hurt to hear Uncle Larry’s accounts of my beloved Pampa. But as a grown-up, as a cop, I would have been surprised to hear otherwise.

  Why, I asked Lieutenant Jay Helmick at the critique, had those cops just stood there on that porch?

  “Because they weren’t cops, Stamper. Whether they were afraid of the suspect, or afraid of the brass, they didn’t act like cops, they didn’t act like men.”

  * An all-black sedan used during the day by detectives and at night by patrol officers who, before they begin their shift, reverse a placard, which reads SAN DIEGO POLICE, and is bracketed to both front doors.

  COP CULTURE

  CHAPTER 8

  WHY WHITE COPS KILL BLACK MEN

  Momma and Daddy were lucky, they had girls. I had boys. My boys are eleven and nine now, and I’m scared to death for them. It’s not that I’m afraid they’re gonna get jumped into a gang, or wind up doing or dealing drugs. No sir. My big fear is they’re gonna run into one of you people one night and they won’t be coming home. It’s like open season on young black men in our community, like they’re walking around with targets on their backs. I have a recurring nightmare, Chief: I get this call in the middle of the night, “Come on down to the morgue, Mrs. Johnson. We got one of your boys here. Police shot him when he tried to run.”

  —An African-American mother at a community forum

  It’s open season on us in The Heights, Chief. If you’re working the blacks you’re wearing a target, plain and simple. For me it comes down to this: kill or be killed. I got a wife and two boys. My sons need their father. I’m gonna do whatever it takes to make it home at the end of shift.

  —A white cop, and member of an officer-safety task force, two weeks later

  ANXIOUS ABOUT THE FUTURES of four young boys, a black mom and a white dad used identical metaphors in April 1985 to describe the “killing ground” that was, in their respective minds, the black community. There is no better case study of this issue than the Amadou Diallo incident in New York City.

  Mr. Diallo was approached by four NYPD officers one night in February 1999. The cops thought he might be a rape suspect. Frightened, not understanding what was going on, Diallo reached for his wallet to show the officers his ID. One of the cops yelled, “Gun!” and in less time than it takes to read this sentence, forty-one shots were fired, nineteen of them striking Mr. Diallo. Diallo was not a rapist. In fact, he had no criminal record.

  NYPD ruled it a “clean” shooting, meaning the killing of the twenty-two-year-old, non-English-speaking, unarmed immigrant was legally justified and within department policy. The Department of Justice found no civil rights violations. A state criminal trial ended in four acquittals.

  But an innocent man was shot dead. Why? Because Mr. Diallo was black. I believe the cops were afraid of him for that reason, and that reason alone. So frightened they couldn’t see straight, think straight, shoot straight. (If they’d been at their PD firearms range in the Bronx all forty-one of those shots, fired as they were at point blank range, would have found their target.)

  But why were they so frightened?

  President Clinton said at the time, “If it had been a young white man in a young all-white neighborhood, it probably wouldn’t have happened.” To determine whether the Diallo killing (or any other police action) was racially motivated you have to ask, Would the cops have behaved the same way if the man had been white?

  No. Diallo was killed because of his dark skin. A white man reaching for his wallet, under identical circumstances, including a language barrier, would have been given the benefit of the doubt.

  Simply put, white cops are afraid of black men. We don’t talk about it, we pretend it doesn’t exist, we claim “color blindness,” we say white officers treat black men the same way they treat white men. But that’s a lie. In fact, the bigger, the darker the black man the greater the fear. The African-American community knows this. Hell, most whites know it. Yet, even though it’s a central, if not the defining ingredient in the makeup of police racism, white cops won’t admit it to themselves, or to others.

  I’ve studied fear for years. I’ve learned how it affects our bodies, our perception, judgment, and actions. Recently, I tried to dig up empirical evidence to support my particular theory that white cops are afraid of black men.

  I researched the voluminous library of the National Institute of Justice (Bureau of Justice Statistics), scoured the reams of publications put out by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, consulted LexisNexis. I Googled till I was goggle-eyed. It’s just not there. You can find all kinds of evidence of citizen fears of the police. There are studies on officer stress, some of which focus on cops’ fears of being fired for doing the wrong thing (or not doing the right thing). There are studies showing that whites, in general, are likely to view blacks as more violent than whites. (One of those studies, recently completed by Dr. Anthony Greenwald and published in the July 2003 Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, actually went so far as to put computer “guns” in the hands of 106 undergraduate, mostly white, non-cop students. In 208 scenarios the students wrongly shot black “suspects” 35 percent of the time versus 26 percent wrongful shootings of whites.) But not until some brave soul conducts a valid, reliable study that focuses on actual white cops’ actual fears of actual black men will we have actual scientific proof of my assertion.

  So, why am I so certain that white cops are afraid of black men? Because I was a white cop. In a world of white cops. For thirty-four years.

  At first I was afraid of everyone, white, black, old, young. I got over most of these fears pretty quickly (which is to say I sublimated or repressed them). But not, however, my fear of black men. Not for a long, long time. As a rookie, I felt a peculiar and particular fear every time I stopped or ticketed or arrested a black man, a fear I did not feel when confronting white men under similar circumstances.

  From the earliest days of academy training it was made clear that black men and white cops don’t mix, that of all the people we’d encounter on the streets, those most dangerous to our safety, to our survival, were black men.

  One instructor began his presentation with: “Gentlemen, what you are about to learn may save your life.” He was there to talk to us about a particular problem he said we would encounter with a particular slice of the black male population in Logan Heights. He directed us to his chapter in the academy manual:

  This information is designed to acquaint you with the NATION OF ISLAM OR THE “MUSLIM CULT.” It should be noted at this time that your Police Department has always maintained a detachment from political, racial, and religious involvements. This policy has not changed as t
his is a sketch of a pseudo-religious organization whose creed is the anniliation [sic] of the white man . . .

  We learned that this “pseudo-religious organization” was composed of twenty- to thirty-year-old men called the “fruit of Islam.” That these men were “selected for their physical prowess and are adept at aggressive tactics and judo.” That they were “almost psychotic in their hatred of Caucasians and are comparable to the Mau Mau or Kamikaze in their dedication and fanaticism.” That “locally, members of this cult will kill any police officer when the opportunity presents itself, regardless of the circumstances or outcome.”

  Black men? “Almost psychotic” in their hatred of me? On the streets of my city. Dedicated to “anniliating” me? I wondered, but never asked, what the four African-American cops in that classroom thought of all this.

  We soon learned it wasn’t just the “Muslim Cult” we needed to worry about. It was all black men, something we were taught tacitly if not explicitly by other instructors who kept returning in their “real-world” tales to the streets of Logan Heights, to accounts of gunfights, fistfights, knife-fights—with black men. It got to the point where all they had to say was “The Heights” and you’d envision legions of black males who couldn’t wait for the chance to kill a cop.

  I was working The Heights one night as a rookie when my senior officer ordered me to pull up to the curb in front of a bar, aptly nicknamed the “Bucket o’ Blood.” “Get out of the vehicle,” he said. “Take your nigger-knocker with you.” I stepped out of the car, slipped my baton into its ring, and peered through the passenger window, awaiting instructions. “Go on inside,” he said. “Pick out the biggest, blackest, meanest motherfucking nigger in the place and pinch him.” I was halfway to the door of the tavern when he called me back to the car. It had been a test, a jest. He laughed his ass off. It took me five minutes to stop shaking.