The Black and the Blue

by Matthew Horace

  12.

  THE JOURNEY FORWARD

  All new police chiefs claim the department and police procedures will be different under their leadership. Unfortunately, that is rarely true in major police departments. It wouldn’t take long for the public to find out whether Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson would follow through on his bold pronouncements on accountability. Just four months from assuming office, Johnson received his first test. In July 2016, a black teenager named Paul O’Neal carjacked a Jaguar convertible and led police on a high-speed chase that ended with him being shot and killed in the rear of a house in a residential neighborhood. In response, Johnson did something nobody had ever done. Johnson stripped police powers from three of the officers involved in the shooting within 48 hours and placed them under investigation. More importantly, Johnson released the police dashcam and bodycam videos of the shooting to the public within eight days. Those actions were unprecedented. They stunned many in the city, particularly following previous efforts to conceal the footage from other shootings, including Laquan McDonald’s. The media and the public applauded the department for how quickly it had released the videos. Some inside the department, however, weren’t quite as pleased. Some officers grumbled behind closed doors that Johnson had left their fellow cops dangling, that the early release of the footage allowed the public to prejudge the officers before all the facts were in.

  “I had to explain that releasing the video is not indicting the officers,” Johnson told me. “The video is not going to change, no matter when we release it. It will be the same footage. It’s better to be transparent than not.”

  The department took heat for what was caught on the body camera. Johnson was even shouted down by outraged demonstrators as he tried to hold a press conference a few days later. Many were outraged, and, after seeing the footage, it was understandable. The video showed one officer on foot turning and recklessly firing numerous shots at the speeding car, with complete disregard for bystanders. Other officers also fired at the car, all in disregard of Chicago police policy clearly stating that officers are not to fire into a fleeing car unless the officers’ or others’ lives are in danger. Too much can go wrong when firing at a moving vehicle. Officers could accidentally shoot bystanders. They could accidentally shoot someone else in the car who is not involved in a crime. They could kill or disable the driver who could then lose control of the vehicle and injure or kill someone in an accident. Nobody should have to be maimed or die for a stolen car.

  During the chase, the video showed O’Neal hitting two of the police cruisers, jumping out of the vehicle, and running into a backyard. One officer was helped by another to crawl over a fence into the backyard. Bad move. If the suspect had been armed, the officer was now alone and vulnerable in a closed environment. O’Neal wasn’t going anywhere. Other officers were on the way. They should have waited for backup. If the other officers didn’t get to O’Neal at that moment, they would get to him shortly. It’s a car. It’s a crime, but it isn’t worth the officer’s or the thief’s life.

  Police heard gunshots, but there was no video footage of the shooting because the officer who went over the fence and fired the shot did not have his body camera engaged, a violation of policy that Deputy Chief Eugene Williams said repeatedly happened among cops when he submitted his application to head the department. Based on the video released, only one officer had his body camera operating during the foot chase, which ended with O’Neal being shot in the back. As O’Neal lay facedown, handcuffed, and dying, one of the officers asked, “He shot at us, right?” He hadn’t. O’Neal was unarmed, and no weapon was ever found. The medical examiner ruled his death a homicide.

  Five months later, Johnson would be tested again. On the second day of 2017, off-duty officer Lowell Houser was arguing with his neighbor, Jose Nieves. Nieves, 38, and Houser, 57, had engaged in verbal skirmishes before. The Nieves family claimed Houser, a 28-year veteran of the department, had threatened to shoot Nieves before, and the family had complained to the Chicago police. There was a police record of their previous troubles. This time, Nieves was in the process of moving a sofa into his apartment, which, for some reason, annoyed Houser. During the argument that ensued, Houser pulled out a gun and shot Nieves several times. Nieves died. Johnson, dressed in blue jeans, a hoodie, and with a ski cap pulled down over his ears, hurried to the scene. It was a hell of a way to start the year. Johnson declined to make a statement to the media, which arrived on the scene after hearing of the incident over their police scanners. He told them that, for now, he had more questions than answers. Apparently, he found some answers relatively quickly. Less than 48 hours after the incident, Johnson had again stripped the officer of his police powers.

  Within three weeks, Houser was charged with murder. It was a dramatic turnaround in procedure for a department in which officers rarely faced criminal charges in shootings. The city had almost always cleared them of wrongdoing, even when the evidence clearly suggested misconduct. Perhaps it was no longer business as usual, some thought.

  Father Michael Pfleger has his doubts. He certainly has earned that right. Pfleger is an icon in Chicago. In the 40 years he has spent working on issues of violence and crime, poverty, education, addiction, alcoholism, domestic abuse, unemployment, abandonment, and incarceration, he has seen Chicago police superintendents come and go. He knows Johnson well enough to call him by his first name, and he’s skeptical that things are changing, because, for him, there is a fundamental flaw in the system.

  “I tell Eddie all the time that he’s a great cop,” Pfleger said as we sat in a secluded room at St. Sabina. “He’s a good guy, but it doesn’t trickle down. I see officers on the street and the way they talk to the brothers. It’s ‘motherfucker this’ and ‘motherfucker that.’ [Better policing] has to ripple down to the sergeants and the beat cops. When I see a cop saying ‘motherfucker this’ and ‘motherfucker that,’ I challenge him. I say, ‘Every cop he sees from now on, he’s taking out what he feels about you. You are creating this relationship in him.’

  “We have to see fundamental change. I talk to police officers all the time. Here’s what happens. The black cop is in the police car with a white cop who’s been around. The white cop says to the black cop, ‘This is how we do it out here.’ When the black cop says, ‘We don’t have to do it that way,’ the white cop says, ‘If you want to make it here, this is how we are.’ Then you see something like the Laquan McDonald video. When we all finally got to see what really happened to Laquan McDonald, I felt extremely angry. It actually validated for the world what people of color had been saying for years. I was angry that no one in the line of authority in dozens of offices and roles had the courage to do the right thing. Now, we’ve seen video after video after video and police get off free. The culture of racism in the police department is rampant, and until police start going to prison, that’s not going to change. There has to be a change in the attitude of police. Until that happens, I don’t think we have a chance to change anything in the community.”

  Pfleger said that with deep regret, because he believes in that change, so much so that he organizes days for gang members and cops to get together at his church to learn that each is human, with strengths and weaknesses, aspirations and doubts, and families they love and who love them.

  “We take 12 brothers from four different gangs, get 12 guys from the police, and they play basketball. Then, we go to the basement, close the doors, and, respectfully, we say, ‘Let’s hear each other.’ We do some role-playing where I’m the cop and you’re the brother on the corner and we change it back and forth. It’s enlightening for both groups. I want to see it change. I want to see trust between the two communities because it would be helpful, but we don’t have it now. The young people who know most of the information are reluctant. They are treated poorly by the police. So, they don’t trust the police, and you don’t give private information to people you don’t trust. They say, ‘If I talk, and I tell you what happened, now yo
u’re dropping my name on the street and my house is getting shot up.’ And I’ve seen that happen. I agree that both people have to come together, but it’s 60 percent on the shoulders of the police.”

  Pfleger, 69, is an oddity—a blue-eyed, blond-haired, 1960s-style activist who has spent his adult life working on issues related to African-Americans. He grew up just 10 minutes from where we were sitting in a traditionally homogenous white neighborhood. He got his first taste of the real world in the summer after his freshman year in high school, when he volunteered with a Native American population in Arizona for two weeks.

  “One day, it was really hot, and about 10 of us went to get ice cream. The guy at the store said, ‘You can come in, you’re white. They can’t. They’re Indians.’ I called my mom and said, ‘How can this be going on? This is America.’ She said, ‘Welcome to America.’”

  In August 1966, he heard that a man named Martin Luther King Jr. was coming to Chicago’s Marquette Park. Pfleger had read about him and wanted to see the man who was creating so much commotion. He and a friend rode their bikes to see. King was in Chicago to march for houses and apartments to be rented to African-Americans. The marchers were met with a hail of bricks and rocks. One brought King to his knees. The experience changed Pfleger’s life.

  “I had never seen that kind of violence and rage,” he said. “I saw all these white folks calling racist names, throwing rocks and bottles, and trying to turn over police cars. Some of them were families of some of my friends, people who went to my church, to my school. And King was not responding. He’s saying, ‘Brothers and sisters, we have to live together.’ I’m riding my bike home that day and I said, ‘There’s something about this man. Either he is crazy, or he has a power that I want to know about.’”

  Pfleger finished high school and attended college, “because I learned how much King valued education.” His plan was to complete his studies at the seminary and work with King.

  “Then King got killed, and my whole life fell apart,” he said.

  He moved to the West Side of Chicago and lived with a black family in the projects. He got involved with the Black Panthers, a black nationalist organization that promoted self-defense and started the free breakfast program that children enjoy in schools today. The organization was targeted by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. “Back then, nobody in the neighborhood was doing more to help the community than the Panthers. Not the churches, nobody.”

  He was named as the spiritual leader of St. Sabina in 1981 at age 31. Since that time, he has dealt with scores of issues, but none as troubling and intractable as the pervasive violence that has consumed parts of Chicago and so many other cities. In too many cases, it has been his job to try to hold together the survivors in its wake. He has worked to steer teens and young men and women away from the fates that consumed their siblings and friends. He has nurtured surviving families through the grief that leads to divorce, alcoholism, suicide attempts, and depression. He has watched as impoverished parents organize car washes to come up with enough money to bury their children, and then, years later, do the same thing all over again. And he’s presided over the funeral services of far too many young men whose lives were ended by a bullet, including the black boy he took in as a foster child. Pfleger held the child’s head in his lap as the blood oozed from his neck wound. All that pain has left a scar.

  “To me there is no greater symbol of evil than seeing a child in a casket,” he told me. “That has nothing to do with God. It’s pure evil. It angers me, and it breaks me down at the same time.”

  As we talked, there was a knock on the door. An assistant came in and ushered him away. He returned about 15 minutes later. “Sorry about that,” he said upon his return. “Somebody had turned in a gun to the church a few days ago, and a police officer had stopped by to pick it up. We have a give-back program. Bring a gun in, no questions asked. We hand them over to the police.”

  While Superintendent Johnson spends much of his time arresting black men, Pfleger is trying to save them from death, drugs, and the prison system. He works daily with “the brothers,” the young black men society has thrown away and left isolated and distanced from the world they see passing them by. Many have records. Almost everybody has done something wrong. Pfleger and the people who help him are trying to bring them into the world of possibilities that most of us take for granted. If he is successful, for many it will be the very first time. While Pfleger believes in redemption, there are no free passes. A few years ago, his church began issuing rewards for information leading to the arrest and conviction of people involved in murders.

  “We put out a bounty of $5,000 on their heads,” he said. “I hate the prison system, but if you shoot and kill somebody, you should not be able to go home and eat McDonald’s and watch television.” So far, the church has paid out nearly $150,000.

  As far as Pfleger and so many others are concerned, ultimately the answer to the insane, senseless crime embedded in cities like Chicago, Memphis, Baltimore, and Detroit lies at the feet of a society that out of racism and greed deserted communities of color. “We have consciously abandoned whole communities, and then we put police in to keep order, to keep them locked in those communities, to keep the natives quiet. Each of the areas has a common thread—double-digit unemployment, underperforming schools, more abandoned buildings boarded up. Individuals come back from incarceration and they can’t get jobs. There is a lack of economic investment and easy access to guns. (Phleger says he knows of two incidents where bags of guns were dropped off in black neighborhoods with a note for people to defend themselves.) It’s immoral.”

  “And if you look at the disparity in every major issue—unemployment, education, jobs, social services—race is always one of the primary factors. I was giving a talk one time to two white wealthy Northwest suburbs. And this lady asked me, ‘What do you think it is going to take for society to stop this?’ I said, ‘I’ll talk with you afterwards.’ When it was over, I said to her privately that in the last week, 12 black youth had been shot and killed. ‘When 12 white youth become shot and killed in the week, you’ll see an end to this.’”

  Could Pfleger be right? Could that be it? Could it be that we’re coming back to that same discussion that we’ve been wrestling with openly for four years and unconsciously for more than 300—black lives don’t matter?

  Pfleger thinks so, and so does former US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. He has returned to Chicago to join with Pfleger to try to rescue those most in need and, in the process, help all of us.

  “If even half of those 762 people who got killed in Chicago were the same color as me, and not the color of the police superintendent, the number of murders in Chicago wouldn’t be allowed to happen,” Duncan told me. “It’s impossible to say black and brown lives matter as much as white lives, when you look at who is getting killed in Chicago. If they were white, this would stop now.”

  They leave us all with a warning. If we won’t reach out to address the core issues fueling crime because it’s the right thing to do, because we believe that all lives matter, we might want to do something because our lives matter.

  “Violence has car keys,” Pfleger said. “I suggest people get involved before it knocks on your door. Just like drugs. It’s coming to your door. It’s coming for your child.”

  Philip Banks

  Former Chief, New York City Police Department

  Do black lives matter? No, they don’t matter. They matter to me, but absolutely, they do not matter. Point to any institution and tell me where black lives matter in any form or fashion. They don’t matter in law enforcement. They don’t matter in education. They don’t matter in health care. People do not care about black lives. This system does not care about black lives. When the crack epidemic hit [black neighborhoods], our total response was incarcerating people at record levels. It devastated black communities. Now you have the opioid epidemic. Police officers are now trained in how to administer an antidote for overdoses. If the
opioid epidemic was in the black community, those officers would not be trained to treat addicts, and if the crack epidemic had happened in white communities, those [special drug] laws would have not been enacted. The truth is, you can’t have a society that has inflicted so much harm on a group of people and then expect them to perform like everybody else.

  I grew up in Brooklyn and Queens, but I claim Queens as my home. My father was a police officer, but it wasn’t like he wore cop on his sleeve. It wasn’t like, “Oh, my father is a cop, we have to do the straight and narrow.” Instead, it was “You are going to act right, because I raised you right.” The biggest thing he cared about was education. I don’t ever remember getting a beating from my father, except when it was about school. When we got that beating, it was a vicious beating. It didn’t fit his personality. When I came out of college, I interviewed for a bunch of jobs. The starting salaries for most of them were a lot less than what the civil service jobs were paying. So, I took the bus driver’s test, I took the police officer’s test. My plan was to go to grad school and get a degree in finance. When I got into the police department, it became very interesting to me, so I decided to stay.

  I get enjoyment out of somebody asking me for a favor and me being able to do it for them. Don’t ask me why, but I enjoy that. As a police officer, I had the ability as a 22-, 23-, 24-year-old person to have a million positive impacts a day. That was a high for me. At that point in your career, you have a bigger impact on people’s day-to-day life at this stage than in other professions and even in any part of your career as a police officer. That got me. So, throughout my whole career, it has been customer service, customer service, customer service. It could be the smallest thing. You have a lady who comes into the precinct, and she’s having a problem with the landlord. She’s called the police. For me to take two minutes to understand what her problem is and tell her what she should do to solve her problem, to me, that is special.