We Are the Cops, page 22
When politics was brought up during these interviews, I heard strong opinions, thoughtful comments and also some anger. In an office in downtown Manhattan, I sank further and further back into my plastic chair and listened as an experienced detective unloaded a couple of decades’ worth of deep dissatisfaction on me. What started off as a cosy chat turned into a full-blown rant about the changes he had seen, including the poor attitudes – in his eyes – of the new recruits and the current trend for officers to align themselves with specific religious and racial groups.
Other officers were also struggling to understand the attitude of the younger cops, especially their views of how more experienced colleagues approached dealing with members of the public. One officer explained it by telling me how the new, younger generation of cops had been brought up watching news reports of alleged police brutality (something that could possibly be timelined from the 1991 Rodney King incident in Los Angeles). He thought attitudes to policing were changing and there was a far more liberal generation of cops joining the force than before, one that had a different view on how the police should police.
Personally, I feel that social media is having a dramatic effect on the police and how the police are being perceived. With the advent of camera phones and the Internet, the police are being observed and scrutinised like never before. Social media can be such a powerful force - as witnessed during the ‘Arab Spring’, for example - and it is giving people a voice, an audience, anonymity and a soapbox; all this regardless of whether what they have to say is correct or not, right or wrong. People - including cops – can be tried and convicted around the world over a 30 second video clip filmed on someone’s phone. Social media has opened up a whole new dawn in how communities, political groups and individuals challenge authority and speak out. It’s not all bad but it’s not all good either. Exposing wrongdoing is a good thing but there needs to be some balance and sometimes I feel that the police need to catch up – and quickly. They need to be ready to defend their departments and their officers’ actions where appropriate. And there were other issues that surprised me, when they were brought up – a black officer’s opinion on racism, for example. Surprising because he wasn’t talking about white officers being racist towards blacks but rather how he himself – a black officer – could be racist. Or the police officer who told me that he didn’t like cops (something I actually heard a number of times). And then there were the allegations of crime statistics being massaged, political correctness and bosses who had forgotten where they had come from.
Not everyone is happy about the past and not everyone is happy about the future, and there are those who aren’t happy about the present, either, but just like the public and the media, cops too have a lot to say and their experienced and educated opinions are certainly worth hearing. And hear them I did.
You are your police; your police department should represent your community. I’m not saying that if you had more black officers, crime would be less, but with a department this size and our city being probably fifty per cent black, I think we only have six black officers out of forty-five. We’re still behind the curve and I’m talking about different races; I’m talking about Lebanese, I’m talking about Iraqi, Hispanic, whatever. When you can start counting on your fingers how many you have, I think that there needs to be a bigger drive.
But we’ve gone out to colleges and wherever we know there are more African-American – or minorities – and attempted to recruit them. So as long as you’re attempting to recruit them, that’s a good thing. And I think you get departments now that are attempting to do that, and the same with recruiting females.
But even in a city where you had a majority or at least half a police department that’s African-American, like Detroit, the citizens don’t respect the police any more than before. They won’t speak to a white officer but if they have information, they won’t speak to a black officer either; it just goes with the general face of police work.
Me – as a black officer – I’m considered an ‘Uncle Tom’, a sell-out. If I go to lock up somebody, they’ll say, ‘Oh, you’re acting just like a white officer.’ No, I’m just enforcing the law and if that has to do with whatever colour you put on it, well, it’s an easy way out to say that you’re just doing this because you work for the government or a police department.
With more black officers in departments, you’d think that you’d have less police brutality cases among African-Americans or any other minority or you’d think that you’d have less stereotyped pretext stops but I don’t think you do, because police are still police. I think you do stereotype at some point. It’s one thing to be racist and go out and do your job based on colour, but on the flip side of it if I’m in a predominantly black neighbourhood and I see a white guy walking down the street at six or seven in the morning, I will stereotype, because I see that white guy and I think, ‘He’s going to buy drugs’ or ‘What is he doing here?’ It’s weird when you look at it that way but stereotyping is in all police officers – black and white.
I had a truck, a nice Chevy, with some nice rims on it and between white and black officers in Detroit I was stopped equally. If I was stopped six times in that truck, it was three times by white officers and three times by black officers. And the six times I got stopped in that truck, it had nothing to do with a traffic violation; it was just a pretext stop based on my colour. They didn’t know I was police and whatever reason they gave for stopping me, I can tell you that it was baloney.
So you have to be careful when you say someone is stereotyping or someone is racist, because you can still be racist and you can still stereotype among your own people. Even as a black officer, I can still stereotype against a black person. And that’s what’s swept under the rug, whereas it stands out if you’re white and you’re pulling me over because I’m black, or whatever. But on the same thing, it doesn’t give me a pass just because I’m a black officer and I pull over a black person when I don’t have probable cause or reason. That is something that is definitely under-reported, because, ‘I’m black; I can’t stereotype.’ Yes, you can and people forget about that.
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I have to thank my partner for this. There had been a robbery and at roll-call we were given the location and description of the vehicle. They’d robbed several people of their jewellery and they thought it might be drug-related. The vehicle had a Maryland registration plate and we had to be on the lookout for it.
So when we turned out to go on patrol, my partner kept saying, ‘Come on, let’s go look for this vehicle.’
I was like, ‘Are you serious? What are the chances of us finding this vehicle?’
Let me go back. Prior to that roll-call, three days previously, we actually pulled over that vehicle. We did a car stop and it was during a controversial time where officers had taken some guys out of a vehicle and were being charged for it – it was in the media that the officers had racially profiled them. Well, when we had pulled this vehicle over it was for turning without a signal.
After we walked back from the car, my partner said to me, ‘There’s something dirty about these guys.’
I said, ‘Well, what are we going to do?’
And he said, ‘A few days ago I would have pulled them all out of the car and searched them because there’s something not right. They’re acting strange.’
I said, ‘I agree with you but what are we going to do?’
They were two male Hispanics and one black male. But we were concerned because of this recent thing in the media about racial profiling, so we didn’t want to take the chance. They had Maryland plates on the car, we issued them a ticket and just let them go. Two days later at roll-call, we hear that the same car and the same guys were committing robberies with a firearm – two firearms, actually.
So we went out and that’s when my partner said to me, ‘We need to go back to that area.’
And I said, ‘What are the chances of finding this car now? Are you serious? These guys aren’t going to be driving around.’
He kept breaking my chops about it so we went down there and took a drive. We literally drove down the block, drove into the sector area and drove right by them.
So he starts screaming, ‘There’s the car! There’s the car!’
We pulled the car over, we called backup to help us and as the back-up patrol car was pulling up, it was coming towards us, head on. We had the car stopped and we were behind the car.
The passenger of the police car – one of our partners – got out of the car and said, ‘He’s reaching for the gun!’
We hadn’t even gotten to the window, the guy had the gun in his hand and we thought that he was going to try to shoot us, so we all pulled out our guns. He dropped his gun on the floor of the car and just put his hands out and we ended up arresting them all for robbery. They were wearing the jewellery that they had robbed. It ended up being a good arrest.
The thing is, we could have had them three days prior to this but we walked away. If we had pulled out our guns and arrested them, we might have stopped three more people from getting robbed. But because we were afraid of being seen to be racially profiling, we didn’t stop them. It had nothing to do with them being Hispanic or black; it was their actions in the car that were making us feel suspicious. But the public, when you take a male black, a male Hispanic out of their car and put them on the hood of the vehicle, the public perception is, ‘oh, he’s doing that because he’s black’ or ‘because he’s Hispanic’ – the two ‘white cops’, you know?
So we effectively didn’t do our job because of racial profiling. Because it was in the media at that particular time and we were afraid that we would be the next ones in the media and end up losing our jobs or be brought up on charges and questioned by internal affairs.
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I think crime is slightly on the rise. However, the figures are definitely fiddled and they’ve been fiddled since the early 90’s with the creation of CompStat – Comparative Statistics – which is a brutal freaking interrogation by the bosses downtown asking precinct commanders why they’ve had a rise in crime in their precinct. And that rise in crime could be by just one case.
The cops on the street would take a report, which would then come into the command. But before we detectives even got to look at it, somebody else would be reclassifying it as a lower crime. We would battle with them because according to police department guidelines there are only two people who are allowed to reclassify a crime – one is the precinct commander and one is the squad commander. They are the only two people allowed to reclassify a crime but suddenly you had civilians doing it.
What would happen is, we would get the complaint or report in the morning and we would hand them out to whoever would catch the case. The case detective would then call up the complainant and ask, ‘Can you tell me what happened?’
And the complainant would say, ‘Yeah, but I already spoke to someone.’
‘You spoke to who? And what did they say?’
We’ve already put it on our sheets saying that it’s a robbery and you’d go downstairs and you would talk to this civilian who’d say, ‘Oh, no, no. We’ve already reclassified it to a grand larceny – a theft.’
‘But I spoke to the victim. It’s clearly a robbery.’
‘No, it’s a grand larceny now.’
So robberies became grand larcenies. Grand larcenies became petty larcenies. Like, you’ve got to be shitting me.
Every police department is the same.
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Talk about discretion. I used to tell my guys, ‘Look, a street officer has the most discretion of anybody on the police department. The higher you go up in the ranks, the less discretion you have – because you don’t have that freedom of decision making that you do on the bottom level. You’re the one that’s out there; you’re the one collecting the information; you’re the one that has to make the decision.’
Now, obviously the officers are going to get into situations where they’re going to say, ‘Sarge, I need your input.’ And then maybe the sergeant is going to say, ‘I need the lieutenant down here.’ But that doesn’t happen very often. Mostly the officer on the street makes his own decisions.
So when you come right down to it, the patrol officer on the beat has the most discretion of anybody in the chain of command. Even the Chief doesn’t have as much discretion as the patrol officer does! The Chief answers to the Mayor’s office and every reporter that’s standing outside his office wanting a statement from him about this or that or one thing and another. And it just goes down the chain like that, from the Mayor to the Chief, then the Assistant Chief – they’re all worried about their asses, in case some newspaper reporter writes some bad story about them. But not the patrol officer – he doesn’t have those worries or concerns.
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The NYPD really believes in the separation of worker and rank. Most bosses, as they go up the ranks, they forget where they came from. They forget what they did to get where they are. And that’s probably the truth. Whether they forget or not, they just change. The higher you go up, in order to really succeed you have to become a company man. It’s all ‘do as I say and not as I do’.
Not everyone is like that, though. I’ve worked for some real lunatics – I mean some complete lunatics! And they were great lunatics.
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I’ve been with this department for my entire career; started as a patrolman and now I’m the Chief.
I won’t lie to you, it can make it uncomfortable when you have to administer discipline or you have to assert your authority and let your guys know that they screwed up and then discipline them. It’s not fun but it’s something that I won’t hesitate to do. More times than not, they understand my position – as long as you’re fair about it. You can’t do things one way for one set of people or friends and then all of a sudden you’re coming down extra hard on others – because you can lose respect and the faith of your men that way. They may not like it at the time and there may be a little bit of sour grapes but I think, over time, they realise that you have been fair and they come right back in line.
And you can’t worry about it. Not everyone that you supervise is going to like you. They’re not going to carry you out of here on their shoulders when it’s time to retire and say, ‘All hail to the Chief!’ You hope that they would but I am sure there are some that won’t like you for whatever reasons, if they felt that they didn’t get promoted and they got passed over or you had favouritism or they just didn’t like your philosophies on how you wanted things done. Those are certain issues that you have to deal with and you have to accept.
One of the other things you have to be real cognitive of is how you try to sell something to your guys and gals, or how you try to get them to behave or conduct business in a certain manner. They’re looking at you – they’re like your kids. You tell them not to do something but if you’re doing exactly what you’re telling them not to do – or not doing what you’re telling them to do – they pick up on that.
They’ll be the first ones to call you out and call you a hypocrite or say, ‘I remember when…’ You know? ‘I remember when you were out here riding around and we used to do this and that and now you’re in this position of authority, you’re telling me not to do it.’
So that’s something that you have to be careful and mindful of as you’re coming up through the ranks. Some of them may have thought that you were a marginal-at-best, type employee and yet you’re telling them to be this super-cop. So that’s something that can take away or diminish the respect of the people that you supervise.
But when it’s done and over, if you’ve done everything according to the best of your ability and in a respectable manner, then you should be able to go home and sleep well at night.
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There was a point where I made a decision to stop taking promotion exams because being a sergeant was great. I enjoyed being a sergeant. I was a first line supervisor so I was out there with my troops – with the guys. I could respond to calls and be as involved as they were. So I loved being a first line supervisor. Then I looked at the lieutenants and as far as I’m concerned they’re the most worthless level on the police department. They’re like fish out of water. It’s like being in limbo. You have the captain who’s in charge of the precinct, you have the lieutenants who supposedly supervise the sergeants and then the sergeants supervise the guys on the street. So the sergeants are the ones that really run the show. Lieutenants don’t know what the hell to do with themselves. They’re usually totally lost.
I have always had a belief that the so-called military chain of command that police departments have is a dysfunctional organisational structure, because you have all these chains and all these levels of command and at least two levels are totally useless. You could get along without them and nobody would miss them.
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We would never write anything down. You’re supposed to do ‘stop, question and frisk reports’. We would never do them. The only thing the bosses cared about was how many summonses you wrote in thirty days – like moving violations, traffic and so on. You had to give a book of summonses a month. The rule of thumb was – to stay out of trouble – you had to give a book of summonses and make at least two collars (arrests) in a month. But I decided I’m not giving any summonses and I would just collar everybody. I made a lot of collars.
Regular police officers have to write a book a month. It’s a quota. You have to. If you don’t, they deny you days off, they fuck with you. They’ll deny that there’s a quota but there absolutely is a quota.
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If you didn’t live in Detroit, you’d think it was absurd that people have as many shootouts with police as they do here. Working here, your mindset has to be that it’s commonplace, so you have to accept it. Because if you didn’t, you’d be sitting here for hours, worrying, ‘Why are they shooting at us?’ If your mind couldn’t grasp it, it’d drive you nuts.
