“I do not know many African-American men who do not have a very similar story to tell, no matter their profession, no matter their income, no matter their disposition in life,” he said. “Imagine the frustration, the irritation, the sense of a loss of dignity that accompanies each of those stops. I have felt the anger, the frustration, the sadness, and the humiliation that comes with feeling like you’re being targeted for nothing more than being just yourself.”
As part of my effort to further explore this issue, I traveled to St. Louis and Ferguson, Missouri, where the police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in 2014 sparked rioting and reignited the decades-old conversation about the shootings of African-Americans by police. Brown’s death was followed quickly by the killings of other African-Americans by police. They galvanized this new discussion. I wanted to understand what sparked the incident in Ferguson. What had been happening in a town of only 21,000 people that has pushed us to where we are now? What I soon discovered was that, for black residents in Ferguson and in St. Louis, the relationships between African-Americans and the police were nearly identical.
As I met people, I encountered a wonderful young woman named Amy Hunter. She gave me a deeper understanding of just how personal and deep the fear, the anguish, and the anxiety about police stops goes for African-American parents.
She is the manager of diversity and inclusion at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, one of the city’s major medical institutions. Hunter lives in the upscale University City neighborhood of St. Louis, where median incomes run about $100,000 and where crime is largely an afterthought. There are no drug houses on the corner, no drive-by shootings, no gang bangers at every turn. Still, she and her then-husband made a pact that they would give them “the talk,” the conversation many black parents have with their children about the special procedures they must follow when they are invariably stopped by police.
“We sat them down and told them how to behave if the police should stop them,” Hunter told me over the dining room table of a friend in an even wealthier St. Louis suburb. “We told them, don’t smart off, regardless of what they say. Do exactly what they tell you to do. We just want you to come home safe. We will handle whatever happens. We don’t want to have to identify your body because you’ve been shot by a police officer.”
Hunter was also one of the hundreds of protesters who lined the streets of Ferguson night after night following the shooting of Michael Brown. By her count, she was on the street nearly every day following the shooting, including the freezing-cold nights when they protested against the backdrop of the city’s Christmas decorations that read SEASON’S GREETINGS. She was tear-gassed and held at gunpoint with M-16 rifles pointed at her chest.
I asked her why an upper-middle-class woman who didn’t live in Ferguson and who had not experienced what its residents endured at the hands of police would be so dedicated to the Ferguson protest. I reminded her that she had told me her sons were now grown and doing quite well. It certainly must not have sat well with her employers that she was out there every day, putting herself at risk, I observed. Why would she do something like that? She looked at me with a kind, almost patronizing look, and then she told me a story.
When her sons were 12, she dropped one off to hang out with his friends in an area in University City called the Delmar Loop. The Loop is a popular entertainment district filled with specialty shops, restaurants, and music venues. Unless he was touring, local resident and rock-and-roll pioneer Chuck Berry performed there almost weekly until his death in 2017. When Hunter’s son arrived in the Loop, his friends were drinking. He knew that was a no-no, so he decided to walk home. He lived less than a mile away. When her son was about five houses away from home, he would later tell his mother, he saw police following him. Ultimately, he said, he was stopped, questioned, and searched. The police told him they stopped him because he matched the description of a man carrying a machete. “He was 12,” Hunter said. “He was 5 feet tall.” She recalled how flustered her son was when he arrived home, frustrated and trying to make sense of it all.
“He was asking all these questions because he was trying to understand it,” she said. Her son told her he had done as she instructed, but he still couldn’t understand why the officer stopped him.
“He said, ‘But, Mom, I’m wearing khaki pants and a polo shirt and a belt and it’s tucked in, and I have on Sperry Top-Siders.’ It was as if he thought his clothes could save him from the experience. But there’s nothing he could wear that would save him from that, and I knew it. So, he said, ‘Mom, I want to know, is it because I’m black?’
“I said, ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’” Her son continued to ask questions, she said. She could tell that he was troubled by the experience—the fear of being stopped by men with guns, the uncertainty of the outcome, the vulnerability. And as he talked, she could see that he was trying to hold back the tears that were welling up in his eyes.
“He looked at me and said, ‘Mommy, I just want to know how long this will last.’ And then I looked at my 12-year-old son, now with tears rolling down my face, and I said to him, ‘For the rest of your life.’”
She looked down for a few seconds and then back up at me. Now, she had tears in her eyes.
“That’s why I went to Ferguson,” she said. “I want this to stop.”
Tony April
Captain, Alaska State Trooper
When I was growing up, I couldn’t stand cops. I would see a cop and they would come into my neighborhood and treat everybody like criminals. Cops would call us niggers or boy. “Get off my street, boy,” “Nigger, get out of here.” They were always insulting us, saying something to demean us. It was like being on a plantation; the neighborhood was all black and almost all the cops were white. They liked to wear these mirror sunglasses, and they wore their shirts tight. Everybody hated them. Their profanity: “Fuck this, fuck that.” Our perception was that if you were a cop, you killed black people to get promoted. That’s the way we looked at it, because that’s what it seemed like was happening.
In 1979, they beat a black man to death. He was on a motorcycle and they chased him. So, when I was a kid, there were two things I said I would never do. I would never join the military and I would never be a cop. I ended up doing both.
I grew up in Miami in a neighborhood called the Goulds, right down the street from a housing project called Cutler Manor. We had a big family. There were 10 of us—6 girls and 4 boys. I was sixth out of the bunch. We had two loving parents. My mother, Jimmie April, stayed home and looked after us. My father, Robert Claude April, was a no-nonsense guy. He’d kill you in a minute if you messed with his family.
I finished basic training in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and where do you think they stationed me, a kid from the Goulds? Anchorage, Alaska! They sent a Florida boy who had never even seen snow to Anchorage, Alaska, the coldest place in America. That was crazy. The only good thing about it was that I met my wife there.
In 1991, I joined the Alaska National Guard and in 1994, I started working for the Alaska Department of Corrections. That was a tough job. I worked in the segregation unit where inmates were locked down 23 of 24 hours a day, where they could not come out of their cells. The prisoners were mostly whites and Alaskan natives. There were lots of skinheads and white supremacists—and me.
I had one inmate, every day he’d say, “Hey, nigger, bring me my food” or “Nigger, bring me my paper.” I’d walk by and he’d spit on my shoes. My biggest thing was to avoid reading their [criminal histories]. It revealed what crimes they were in for. I didn’t want to read their jackets so I wouldn’t develop a bias against them. I wanted to see them as human beings.
I joined the Alaska State Troopers in 1997. As a trooper, you spend 15½ weeks in the academy and then you go through 3½ months of field training. When I was in the academy, everybody told me, whatever you do, you don’t want to go to Palmer, Alaska, for field training. They had a reputation for [terminating recruits]. Of course, I was s
ent to Palmer.
One day, I came back to the station and saw a trooper who I later learned was completing an application background check on another applicant. I asked, “What are you doing?”
“Trying to keep people like you off the force,” he shot back.
Near the end of my probation period, my evaluation read so bad that it seemed like I didn’t know how to walk and chew gum at the same time. The sergeant in charge threatened me: “I’m going to fire your ass in two weeks.” I thought about quitting right then and went home to tell my wife that I was done! But a fellow trooper who was white said, “Don’t quit. That’s just what they want you to do.” So, I stayed.
They assigned me to Bubba Cox, who was the hardest FTO (training officer) that we had. He was a no-nonsense, no-soft-spots, straight-shooter guy. Bubba and I went on a call one day. He told me to handle it. But this white guy began talking to Bubba and totally ignored me. Bubba interrupted him, “Sir, this is the officer you should be talking with. He is handling this call.” The guy ignored the comment and just kept talking to Bubba. Finally, Bubba said, “Okay, we’re done. If you don’t want to talk to him, we’re out of here.” And we left.
The last day of my training, Bubba and I pulled up at the station. I didn’t know if I had passed or failed. “Before you get out,” Bubba said, “I want to let you know, I didn’t give you a damn thing. Everything you got you earned.” I’ll never forget, Bubba had a little tear that streamed down his face.
Two years later I was chosen as Trooper of the Year.
2.
BEING BLACK IN BLUE
I was 28 years old and hadn’t done a damn thing wrong, but there I stood in fear for my life on a hot afternoon on a Providence, Rhode Island, street. A white man in blue jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers was pointing a very large gun at me and threatening to turn my head into a canoe.
“Get your ass on the ground right now,” he said. “Don’t you move a fucking inch.”
He didn’t say “nigger,” but he might as well have. The barrel of his gun looked as wide as New York City’s Lincoln Tunnel. From the nature of his commands, I figured he was probably a cop. If not, I was in real trouble. Bad guys don’t give commands. They just shoot. The probability of him being a police officer, however, just made things worse. On this afternoon, I was a federal law enforcement officer in the middle of a case, and I was about to be shot by another law enforcement officer who thought that since I was the only black man around, I must be the criminal.
It was the summer of 1990. George H. W. Bush was president, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, and HIV/AIDS was so new that contracting the disease was considered a death sentence. The Honda Accord and the Ford Taurus were the top-selling cars. Hip-hop and rap music had taken hold; so, as part of my job, I was dressed in a Coca-Cola T-shirt, some cool jeans, and my Fila sneakers, doing my best to look like a cross between Ice Cube and LL Cool J.
America was in the midst of the infamous war on drugs, and as a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, I was at its center. Making things right, or so I thought.
Like most African-Americans, I had no idea then that this “war” would devastate black communities as much as, if not more than, the narcotics. By the early 1990s, however, cocaine use had reached epidemic proportions. The industry was driven by sales and consumption in white America. White Americans made up 80 percent of the users and sellers, but cocaine’s most visible and devastating effects were seen in African-American communities, where cheap crack cocaine reigned.
Twenty-four-hour violence washed over black neighborhoods as drug dealers and addicts put down roots. Addicted women—mothers, young teenagers, professionals, and nonprofessionals—were reduced to trading oral sex for meager sums to feed their addictions. Families were ripped apart. Neighborhoods, including the one where I grew up, were ravaged. I was reminded of the impact of the crack epidemic every time I visited my mother and father in our North Philadelphia row house. A community of once neatly trimmed lawns now included boarded-up houses that were used for sex and getting high. There were three drug houses on my parents’ block. Street corners where some of us idled away parts of our adolescence were now controlled by dealers and their runners and lookouts. Crack zombies, adults searching aimlessly for their next high, meandered down vacant twilight streets. My mom sometimes couldn’t sleep because she feared what might happen. Every time I visited my parents and saw what cocaine had done to my neighborhood, I knew I was definitely doing the right thing. Get the drugs. Get the dealers. Get the guns.
Part of my new job with ATF was working undercover, which is always dangerous and always tricky. My assignment on this particular day was to purchase a gun and drugs from a Latino man we had been tracking for a while. He wasn’t Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, but he was a major player on the local drug scene. A conviction on drugs alone could result in significant prison time, but under the new federal sentencing guidelines, possession of a weapon brought enhanced, longer sentences. So, we wanted both.
In our strategy meeting before the bust, we had gone over the plan. After I purchased the drugs and the weapon, I would walk a safe distance away and give the arrest signal through a microphone wired to my body. Everything went as planned. I had the guns and the drugs. I was walking away. “Move in now,” I said into my microphone. Mission completed. It’s time for a beer. But as my team members made the arrest, a plainclothes Providence police officer, not involved in the operation, heard the radio traffic—“Move in, move in. Suspect on the move”—and descended on me.
The suspect’s description and mine couldn’t have been more different. I was the wrong color, the wrong size, and the wrong ethnicity. The cop, however, had apparently heard all he needed. There was a suspect, and, me being a black guy under 30, I was him. Fortunately, another Providence police officer who was part of the undercover operation intervened. The officer apologized, though, I admit, I wasn’t in the mood for offering forgiveness after coming that close to possibly losing my life. My guys had to pull me back to keep me from punching him out.
What I experienced that day in a 10-second, near-death exchange encapsulates what it is like to be “black in blue” in America, the dichotomy, the fragility, and even the peculiar dangers of being an African-American law enforcement officer. You are part of the law enforcement team, but not so much so that there aren’t risks. Like your white colleagues, you are sworn to protect and serve, but soon after taking the oath, you discover that your duties include protecting the minority communities you serve from racist, bigoted, or biased actions of fellow police officers—black and white.
You wear a uniform that represents decades of inequity, insensitivity, and brutality imposed on African-Americans. Consequently, your own communities often eye you with suspicion and distrust, even disregard. Yet, nowhere is your presence more desperately needed than in disenfranchised black communities that are misunderstood and devalued by the rest of society. Where your white or even Latino counterparts often see fear and potential criminals at every turn, you see a historical African-American narrative of people struggling against the odds to create a better life for their families. You differentiate between the teenagers who just want to play basketball and the real predators. You know the financial and environmental pressures of that single mother who is doing her damnedest to raise her children on a meager income in a community with an indifferent education system, dramatically limited services, and few recreational opportunities. She doesn’t always succeed, but she’s trying. You see grandmothers and aunts and uncles and cousins and fathers, where some just see suspects. These circumstances may mirror the reality of officers of all races and ethnicities, but in America, skin tone tends to color our vision, no matter what our background.
As a black cop, it becomes part of your job to navigate this maze, and serve differing cultures for the sake of the greater good. And, while doing so, you know that missteps allowed for your brethren and fellow of
ficers are not allowed for you. Your mistake could end your life.
That may sound like an exaggeration, but Natalia Harding knows this story all too well. Harding lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is a slight woman, regally adorned with carefully coiffed gray hair. We sat in her neat, compact living room and she told me how her son, Omar Edwards, had wanted to be a cop since he was 5 years old. “I don’t know where it came from,” she said as she showed me photos from his youth. “Nobody in our family ever had much to do with police,” Harding recalled. She said that when he was 10, he began hanging around the 73rd Precinct station house on East New York Avenue in Brooklyn. He would help out and ask officers what the codes on the police radio meant. In 2007, he graduated from the New York Police Academy at age 23 and became “one of New York’s finest.” He was so proud of his achievement that he wore his badge around his apartment the whole day. “He loved the job,” she said. “He was so proud of what he was doing. He felt like he was making a difference.”
Two years later, Omar, now a newlywed of only three weeks and the father of two small children, was dead. He was shot and killed by a white police officer who saw Omar chasing a man who had broken into Omar’s car, and assumed he was the bad guy. Omar had wrestled with the thief, but he broke free, and Omar, his gun drawn, gave chase. Not until officers tore open Omar’s shirt as he lay handcuffed and dying on the street, did they see his police academy T-shirt and realize that the black man they had shot three times, once in the back, was one of their own.
What happened to Omar is a painful reminder to every black law enforcement officer that we are different. We live by different rules.
The truth is, it’s amazing that so many African-American men and women are cops, considering our collective and personal history with police. The gulf between our communities is as old as the racist laws and mores that police officers have been called on to enforce against African-Americans, Asians, and Latinos in America for more than 100 years, from Alabama to Arizona, California to Connecticut, Maryland to Montana, Texas to Tennessee, West Virginia to Washington state, and not just in the South.
The Black and the Blue Page 4
