Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets

by David Simon

  MONDAY, FEBRUARY 8

  Donald Worden sits in the coffee room and scans the metro section of the paper, half listening to the roll call taking place in the outer office. Wordlessly, he sips his coffee and takes in the headline:

  LEADS ELUSIVE IN DEC. SLAYING OF FLEEING SUSPECT; FOCUS ON OFFICERS SHIFTS TO CIVILIAN.

  The article itself begins with a question:

  Who killed John Randolph Scott, Jr.?

  Baltimore homicide detectives have asked the question hundreds of times since December 7, when Mr. Scott, 22, was shot in the back while being pursued on foot by police.

  For several weeks, the investigation appeared to be focusing on officers who had been in the area when the young man-fleeing from a stolen car that had been chased by police-was gunned down in the 700 block of Monroe Street.

  But now, investigators appear to be considering another possible suspect-a civilian who lives in that neighborhood, and whose mother, girlfriend and son have been questioned before the city grand jury, according to police sources.

  Worden lets his eyes drift slowly down the entire column, then turns the page and begins reading the jump on 2D. It only gets worse:

  A police source said that a man living near Monroe Street has been extensively interrogated in connection with the death… The same man-pointed out to police by another resident of the area-had told investigators that he saw a police car leaving Monroe Street the morning of the shooting at a high rate of speed, with its lights out.

  No evidence was found to substantiate that claim, the source said, and now investigators believe the man may somehow be responsible for the shooting-or at least know more than he has been willing to divulge.

  Worden finishes his coffee and hands the newspaper to Rick James, his partner, who rolls his eyes and grabs the newspaper from the older detective.

  Wonderful. For the first time in two months they catch a break in this star-crossed case, only to have Roger Fucking Twigg, the morning paper’s veteran police reporter, spray it across the front page of the city section. Lovely. For two months, no one in the neighborhood around Fulton and Monroe will admit to knowing anything about the murder of John Scott. Then, a week ago, Worden finally digs out a reluctant witness-possibly an eyewitness-for the grand jury. But before prosecutors can lean on this man, pressuring him to testify under threat of a perjury charge, the Baltimore Sun calls him a suspect. Now it’ll be hell getting this guy’s story into the grand jury room, because if he reads the newspapers-if his lawyer reads the newspapers-prudence suggests that he invoke the Fifth Amendment and remain silent.

  Twigg, you miserable bastard, thinks Worden, listening to D’Addario run through the day’s teletypes. You did me. You really did me on this one.

  That Worden has come up with any kind of witness is testament to how hard he has worked the case. Since the discovery of John Scott’s body in early December, he has conducted four separate door-to-door canvasses of the area around the 800 block of Monroe Street, with the first three efforts producing little. It was only on the fourth canvass that Worden learned from a neighbor the name of a possible eyewitness, a resident of the 800 block who had parked his car on Monroe Street next to the mouth of the alley and had told several others that he had been outside when the shooting occurred. When Worden got to the man, he found a middle-aged laborer who lived with his girlfriend and elderly mother on Monroe Street. Nervous and reluctant, the man denied that he was on the street when the incident occurred, but he admitted that he heard a gunshot, then from his window saw a police car leaving the 800 block with its lights out. He then saw a second police car turn onto Monroe Street from Lafayette and stop near the mouth of the alley.

  The man also told Worden that after police began gathering in the alley, he had called his son to tell him what was happening. Worden then interviewed the son, who remembered the phone call and remembered further that his father had been quite specific: He had seen a police officer shoot a man in an alley across the street from his house.

  Worden went back at the witness, confronting him with his son’s statement. No, said the man, I never told him that. He stood by his previous account involving the two cars.

  Worden suspected that his newfound witness had seen a good deal more than the arrival and departure of the radio cars, and the detective had two possible explanations for the man’s obvious reluctance. First, the witness was genuinely afraid of testifying against a police officer in a murder trial. Second, there never was a radio car that fled down Monroe Street with its headlights out. The witness had instead seen a confrontation between John Scott and another civilian, a neighbor or friend, perhaps, whom the witness was now trying to protect. For that matter, the confrontation could have involved the witness himself, who had parked his own car at the mouth of the alley a few minutes before the shooting.

  Technically then, this morning’s newspaper article is correct in asserting that the witness can also be considered a potential suspect. But what Roger Twigg does not know-or has not been told by his sources-is that this new witness was not discovered in a vacuum; other evidence is leading Worden back in the opposite direction, back toward the police.

  It’s more than the shirt buttons found at the edge of the alley. And it’s more than the fact that too many of the officers involved seem to be having trouble keeping their stories straight. The most unnerving piece of evidence in Worden’s case file is a copy of the Central District radio tape, which had been sent to the FBI for audio enhancement. Deciphered by the detectives and transcribed weeks after the murder, it revealed a strange sequence of radio transmissions.

  At one point on the tape, a Central officer can be heard broadcasting a description of the suspect seen running from the passenger seat of the stolen car.

  “It’s a number one male, six foot, six-foot-one, dark jacket, blue jeans… last seen at Lanvale and Payson…”

  Then, a Central District sergeant, a seven-year veteran named John Wylie, cuts in. Having followed the chase into the Western District, it is Wylie who first found the body of John Scott.

  “One-thirty,” Wylie says, giving his unit number. “Cancel that description at the eight-hundred block of Fulton… or Monroe.”

  One of the officers involved in the early chase breaks in, assuming that the suspect is in custody: “One twenty-four. I can ID that guy…”

  Moments later, Wylie comes back on the radio. “One-thirty. I heard a gunshot before I found this guy.”

  “One-thirty, where is that, the eight-hundred block Monroe?”

  “Ten-four.”

  Then, several moments later, Wylie can again be heard on the radio tape, acknowledging for the first time that there is a “possible shot victim in the alley.”

  The transmissions presented Worden with an obvious question: Why would the sergeant cancel the description for the suspect unless he believed the man was already in custody? The buttons, the radio tape-such evidence led not toward a civilian suspect but toward the pursuing officers. And yet for every officer working a post anywhere near Monroe Street, Worden and James had checked and rechecked the run sheets-required departmental paperwork that chronicles every uniform’s entire tour of duty from one call to the next. But all of the radio cars in the Central, Western and Southern districts appeared to be accounted for at the time of the shooting. The officers involved in the chase of the stolen Dodge Colt and the subsequent bailout had already given an account of their movements in supplemental reports, and the two detectives reviewed those as well. The investigators had found that most of the officers had encountered one another during the incident and could confirm each other’s reports.

  If the shooter was another police officer who fled before Sergeant Wylie arrived, there was nothing in the paperwork that could identify him. In all, fifteen Western and Central officers had been interviewed, but they could offer little, and Wylie, for his part, insisted that he had seen nothing before or after hearing the gunshot. Several officers-including Wylie and two others who
were among the first to arrive at the shooting scene-were ordered to undergo lie detector tests. The results showed no deception for all officers with the exception of Wylie and one other, whose results were deemed inconclusive.

  The polygraph results, coupled with Wylie’s premature broadcast canceling the description for the suspect, led both Worden and James to conclude that, at the very least, the Central District sergeant had seen something before he discovered the body. But in a two-and-a-half-hour interview with the detectives, Wylie insisted that he had heard only the single gunshot and had seen no other officers near the alley on Monroe Street. He did not know why he would have canceled the description of the suspect, nor did he recall doing so.

  Wylie asked the detectives if he was a suspect.

  No, he was told.

  Nonetheless, it was during that interview that the detectives asked the sector sergeant to consent to a voluntary search of his house. Wylie agreed, and the detectives confiscated his uniforms, service weapon and off-duty revolver for examinations that would also prove inconclusive.

  Am I a suspect? the sergeant asked again. If so, I want to be advised of my rights.

  No, they told him, you are not a suspect. Not now. With the sergeant insistent that he had seen or heard nothing apart from the gunshot, what had remained for the investigators was the possibility that some other cop or a civilian had witnessed the shooting or its aftermath. Now, just as that possibility had become very real, a single column of newsprint was threatening to drive their only witness back underground.

  Still, if it was a cop who killed John Scott, Worden believed that the incident probably added up to something less than intentional murder. It was, he reasoned, a fight in an alley that went bad, a tussle that ended when a patrolman-rightly or wrongly-used his weapon, or perhaps another.38 he grabbed from John Scott. A second or two later, the suspect is on the ground, a gunshot wound to the back, and the cop is spitting up adrenaline, panicking, wondering how in the hell he’s going to write his way out of this one.

  If that was the scenario, if a patrolman fled from that alley because he had no faith in the department’s ability to protect him, then it was an inevitable act. If that was the case, then Monroe Street was the last, twisted curve on a piece of bad road on which the Baltimore department had been traveling for a long time. Donald Worden had been there for the beginning of the journey, and he had seen the full swing of the pendulum.

  Only once in that long career did Worden himself fire a weapon in the line of duty. It was a wayward shot, a.38 round-nose with an almost vertical trajectory, spinning high above any conceivable target. That was twenty years earlier, on a summer day when he and his partner caught a robbery on view in Pimlico, witnessing the ever-elusive communion of a criminal with his crime. After they had duly chased the perpetrator for a greater distance than the average cop considers reasonable, Worden’s partner began firing. Worden, feeling an obscure need to show solidarity, then sent his own missile into the ether.

  Worden knew the man they were chasing, of course, just as the man knew Worden. For these were the halcyon days of the Big Man’s twelve-year tour in the Northwest, when a rough cordiality still existed among the players and Worden was on a first-name basis with anyone in the district who was worth arresting. When the gunfire ended the foot chase and they caught up to their suspect, the man was shocked.

  “Donald,” he said, “I can’t believe it.”

  “What?”

  “You tried to kill me.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You shot at me.”

  “I fired over your head,” Worden said, chastened. “But look, I’m sorry about it, okay?”

  Worden never did manage a taste for gunplay, and the embarrassment of that one stray round never left him. For him, the real authority was a cop’s shield and his reputation on the street; the gun had very little to do with it.

  Still, it was entirely appropriate that Worden was the detective assigned to the murder of John Randolph Scott. In more than a quarter century on the street, he had borne witness to more than his share of police-involved shootings. Most were good, some were not so good, a few were genuinely malevolent. More often than not, the outcome was decided in seconds. Often, too, the act of compressing the trigger was precipitated by little more than instinct. Usually the suspect needed to be lit up, sometimes he didn’t, and sometimes there was room for debate. Sometimes, too, the suspect should have been shot and shot repeatedly, but somehow wasn’t.

  The decision to use lethal force was inevitably subjective, defined not so much by empirical standards as by what an officer was willing to justify in his own mind and on paper. But regardless of the circumstances, one ethic remained constant: When a cop shoots someone, he stands by it. He picks up a radio mike and calls it. He turns in the body.

  But times had changed. A quarter century ago, an American law officer could fire his weapon without worrying whether the entrance wound would be anterior or posterior. Now, the risk of civil liability and possible criminal prosecution settles on a cop every time he unholsters a weapon, and what could once be justified by an earlier generation of patrolmen is now enough to get the next generation indicted. In Baltimore, as in every American city, the rules have changed because the streets have changed, because the police department isn’t what it used to be. Nor, for that matter, is the city itself.

  In 1962, when Donald Worden came out of the academy, the code was understood by the players on both sides. Break bad on a police, and there was a good chance that the cop would use his gun and use it with impunity. The code was especially clear in the case of anyone foolish enough to shoot a police. Such a suspect had one chance and one chance only. If he could get to a police district, he would live. He would be beaten, but he would live. If he tried to run and was found on the street in circumstances that could be made to look good on paper, he would not.

  But that was a different era, a time when a Baltimore cop could say, with conviction, that he was a member of the biggest, toughest, best-armed gang on the block. Those were the days before the heroin and cocaine trade became the predominant economy of the ghetto, before every other seventeen-year-old corner boy could be a walking sociopath with a 9mm in the waistband of his sweats, before the department began conceding to the drug trade whole tracts of the inner city. Those were also the days when Baltimore was still a segregated city, when the civil rights movement was little more than an angry whisper.

  In fact, most of the police-involved shootings of that time had racial overtones, the deadliest proof of the notion that for the black, inner-city neighborhoods of Baltimore, the presence of the city’s finest was for generations merely another plague to endure: poverty, ignorance, despair, police. Black Baltimoreans grew up with the understanding that two offenses-talking up to a city cop or, worse, running from one-were almost guaranteed to result in a beating at best, gunfire at worst. Even the most prominent members of the black community were made to endure slights and insults, and well before the 1960s, the contempt felt for the department was close to universal.

  Things within the department weren’t much better. When Worden came on the force, black officers (among them two future police commissioners) were still prohibited from riding in radio cars-legally prohibited; the Maryland legislature had yet to pass the first law allowing blacks access to public accommodations. Black officers were limited in rank, then quarantined on foot posts in the slums or used as undercovers in the fledgling narcotics unit. On the street, they endured the silence of white colleagues; in the station houses, they were insulted by racial remarks at roll calls and shift changes.

  The transformation came slowly, prompted in equal part by increased activism in the black community and by the arrival of a new police commissioner in 1966, an ex-Marine named Donald Pomerleau, who took the helm with a mandate to clean house. The year before, Pomerleau had written a scathing report on the BPD, issued under the independent aegis of the International Association of Chiefs o
f Police. The study declared the Baltimore force to be among the nation’s most antiquated and corrupt and characterized its use of force as excessive and its relations with the city’s black community as nonexistent. The Watts riot that had shaken Los Angeles in 1965 was still fresh in every civic leader’s mind, and with all of the nation’s cities living under threat of summer violence, Maryland ’s governor and Baltimore ’s mayor took the IACP assessment seriously: They hired the man who wrote it.

  Pomerleau’s arrival marked the end of the Baltimore department’s Paleozoic era. Almost overnight, the command staff began stressing community relations, crime prevention and modern law enforcement technology. A series of citywide tactical units was created and multichannel radios replaced the call boxes still used by most patrolmen. Shootings by police officers were for the first time investigated systematically, and those reviews made some difference; together with community pressure, they discouraged some of the most blatant brutality. But it was Pomerleau himself who successfully fought a prolonged battle against the creation of a civilian review board, assuring that in cases of alleged brutality the Baltimore department would continue to monitor itself. As a result, the men on the street in the late sixties and early seventies understood that a bad shooting could be made to look good and a good shooting could be made to look better.

  In Baltimore, the drop piece became standard issue in the police districts, so much so that one particular shooting in the early 1970s has become a permanent part of department lore, a touchstone for a particular era in Maryland ’s largest city. It happened on one of the side streets off Pennsylvania Avenue, when a sudden spasm of violence struck as five narcotics detectives were preparing to hit a rowhouse. From the darkness of an adjacent alley someone started shouting, yelling to another cop about the man behind him, the man with a knife.

  In a rush of adrenaline, one detective fired all six, though he later swore-until he checked his gun-that he pulled the trigger once. He ran into the alley to find the suspect lying on his back, surrounded by five knives.