Working

by Studs Terkel

  I’m in this Loop traffic. I don’t even consider this a job. It’s like R&R, rest and recreation. My day today is like—(whistles) it’s a no-no. It’s nothing. I get up, I eat, and I blow the whistle. It’s not very exciting. I’m looking at it now as a fellow who goes to the office and he’s not very enthused. Because I wear a uniform people that are garbage will say I’m a pig. They don’t look at me and say, “This is a human being.” They look at my dress. I’m a representative of the law, of you, the citizen. You created my job, you created me. To you, I am a robot in uniform. You press a button and when you call me to the scene you expect results. But I’m also a man. I even have a heart. (Laughs.)

  RENAULT ROBINSON

  He is thirty. He has been a members of the Chicago Police Department for nine years. He is the founder of the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League.

  I became a police officer because of the opportunity it afforded a young black who didn’t have a college education. I started out working in vice and gambling, a special unit in a black area. I worked in plain clothes, in undercover assignments—trying to stake out dice games, bookies, policy wheel operations, narcotics, prostitutes. I would write the report and another team would make the arrests. It was very easy for me to find these things in the community, because any black can find ’em. I really worked as a spy. At the time—I was twenty-one—I thought it was great to be a young police detective, being able to lock people up. A lot of young blacks are misdirected when they first join the force. I soon became disenchanted.

  I watched the double standard at work, blacks being treated one way and whites the other. I learned one thing: whites control the vice and gambling in this city. They make most of the money out of it and very few are arrested. The people being arrested are blacks.

  My supervisor would say, “We need two policy arrests, so we can be equal with the other areas.” So we go out and hunt for a policy operator. If our narcotics enforcement was down, we’d find an addict and we’d pressure him to show us where his supplier was. We’d bust him. We’d pay him some money so he could buy from another supplier and we’d bust him too. Usually the addict had one guy he didn’t like. He was willing to trade the guy off for fresh cash. The police department has a contingency fund for these purposes. We’d pay the guy fifty or one hundred dollars depending . . . We’d get a warrant, or if we didn’t have time we’d lock him up anyway. It would be impossible to work without informers. How’d you know there’s a house of prostitution across the street? A policeman grabs a guy off the street: “I’m gonna pay you X amount for information.” These types come up to you sometimes. They make a good living informing.

  You arrest a narcotics peddler three or four times, you know what he’s doing. There’s a way of putting him out of business if you wanted to. If you think about the people operating policy, bookies, narcotics—hundreds and hundreds are employed in these illegal trades. It’s full-time work. A lot of people would be out of business if they broke these things up. What the police do is just enough to let the public know they’re out there. There’s no fight between the professional criminals and the police. There’s no police brutality here. They know the police, they got the bond money in their pocket or a lawyer who’ll be down there. We maintain an image, that’s all. To look as though we actively pursue organized crime. It’s a farce. The fight is with the normal citizen who goes astray once in a while.

  A vice officer spends quite a bit of time in court. You learn the judges, the things they look for. You become proficient in testifying. You change your testimony, you change the facts. You switch things around ’cause you’re trying to get convictions. You figure he’s only a criminal, so you lie about it. The judges are aware of it. The guy who works in plain clothes is usually ambitious and aggressive and will take the time to go to court.

  A lot of times for certain disorderlies, the policeman won’t show up and the judge will throw the case out. What he did was just inconvenience the guy. He didn’t even care about it. He just wanted to get the guy, sort of built-in I’m-gonna-punish-you kind of thing. He still gets his points.

  About sixty percent of police-citizen conflict starts in a traffic situation. It’s easier to stop a person on the pretext of a traffic violation than to stop him on the street. It’s a lot easier to say, “Your tail light’s out.” “Your plate is dented.” “You didn’t make that turn right.” You can then search his automobile, hoping you can find some contraband or a weapon. If he becomes irritated, with very little pushing on your part, you can make an arrest for disorderly conduct. These are all statistics which help your records.

  Certain units in the task force have developed a science around stopping your automobile. These men know it’s impossible to drive three blocks without committing a traffic violation. We’ve got so many rules on the books. These police officers use these things to get points and also hustle for money. The traffic law is a fat book. He knows if you don’t have two lights on your license plate, that’s a violation. If you have a crack in your windshield, that’s a violation. If your muffler’s dragging, that’s a violation. He knows all these little things.

  They’re sure the person who has stolen a car is probably driving, the person who is transporting stolen merchandise is in a vehicle, the person selling dope has it in his car. In their minds, the average black person driving down the street falls into one of these categories. (Laughs.) So if they stop the average black driver, in their mind the likelihood of finding five or six violations out of a hundred cars is highly possible. If you stop fifty cars, find five, stop a hundred, find ten. After you’ve stopped a thousand, you’ve got 950 people who are very pissed off, 950 who might have been just average citizens, not doing anything wrong—teachers, doctors, lawyers, working people. The police don’t care. Black folks don’t have a voice to complain. Consequently, they continue to be victims of shadowy, improper, overburdened police service. Traffic is the big entree.

  If it’s a bunch of kids, they get stopped automatically. If it’s a black in a Cadillac, he gets stopped.28 He’s gotta be selling dope or something. If it’s a white woman and a black man in a car in a black community, they’re automatically stopped, ‘cause she’s gotta be a whore. If it’s a long-haired white kid, he’s gonna be stopped, ’cause he’s probably a communist.

  It’s not restricted to just the black community. There are a lot of white youths. Many of them know they were never stopped for violations before they let their hair grow long. Many whites know that before they put a bumper sticker on their car, PEACE IN VIETNAM, they were never stopped by the police.

  The young black is the big police hang-up because his tolerance of police brutality has grown short. They say, “The new niggers don’t respect us any more the way the old niggers used to. We used to holler at ‘em and shout at ’em and kick ’em and they went along with it.” Young niggers ain’t going along with it and that’s what bugs them more than anything in the world. That’s why more young kids are being killed by police than ever before. They won’t accept dehumanizing treatment.

  You have to remove salesmanship from police work. Don’t put me on a commission and say, “Every time you stop a guy, you get X amount of points.” It takes a certain amount of points to reach a certain plateau. You can’t go back to the boss and say, “I didn’t see anything.” He says, “I know they’re out there. Go out and get ’em.” So the policeman has to create a little something.

  So many points for a robbery, so many points for a man having a gun. When they go to the scene and the man with the gun has gone, they’ll lock up somebody anyway, knowing he’s not the one. The record says, “Locked up two people for UUW”—unlawful use of weapons. The report will say, “When we got there, we saw these guys and they looked suspicious.” They’ll get a point even if the case is thrown out of court. The arrest is all that counts.

  There are more cops in the black community than in the white. The eighth district, lily-white, is the largest in the city: thirty-two square m
iles, 237, 374 people, all right? This district, black, five and a half square miles, has more police patrol than the eighth. The crime rate’s highest in this area because we’re underprotected. We’ve got more and more policemen here, yet the crime rate rises. Evidently something’s wrong.

  I worked in a white area on the West Side—briefly. Being black, in plain clothes, people might mistake me for a burglar and shoot me. It’s better for me to be in a black area. Of course, people couldn’t mistake me there. (Laughs.) Very few black officers work in white areas. They have a few, so they can say; “No longer are we segregated.”

  The majority of the policemen in the station where I worked were young whites. The older white officers were trying to get off the street, trying for a soft job in a station somewhere. They were tired. It’s the young white officer who’s in most of the black areas. They want to go there. It gives them the opportunity to be where the action is. They don’t want to go to white districts because they’re considered slow.

  A large amount of young white officers are gung ho. It’s an opportunity to make a lot of arrests, make money, and do a lot of other things. In their opinion, black people are all criminals, no morals, dirty and nasty. So the black people don’t cooperate with the police and they have good cause not to. On the other hand, they’re begging for more police service. They’re overpatrolled and underprotected.

  The young white guys turn out to be actually worse than their predecessors. They’re more vicious. The average young white policeman comes from a working-class family, sometimes with less than a high-school education. He comes with built-in prejudices. The average young white cop is in bad shape. I think he can be saved if a change came from the top. If it could be for just eight hours a day. They may still hate niggers when they got off duty. They may still belong to the John Birch Society or the Klu Klux Klan. So what? They could be forced to perform better during the eight hours of work.

  I myself didn’t work with the young ones much. They were just too much. I worked with older, seasoned cops on the vice squad. They hated blacks, but we worked together, we drank together. They lived in Gage Park and on the Northwest Side,29 so we didn’t visit each other’s homes. One of them—he and I would talk frankly about how we felt. He’d say, “I don’t like your people, but I can work around you. Maybe I’m wrong in feeling that way, but that’s how I was brought up. I got basic feelings about my kids going to school with blacks and it can’t be talked away. You can’t talk me out of my fears.” I respected him for his opinion and he respected mine. We got along.

  Those who were enlightened had one major hang-up. If they did the right thing, they’d be ostracized by the other cops. A lot of these guys have mixed emotions, but they’re neutralized. If they’re by themselves, they perform quite well in the black community. But if they’re with another white who wants to do it the rough way, and they object, their names go on the list—trouble makers.

  The job makes those who aren’t really bad bigots worse after a while. You could take a tender white boy, give him a badge and a gun, and man! he becomes George Wallace over night. You have to change the rationale by which they work. We must have a system where they get points for helping people rather than hurting them.

  You can take the worst bigot in the world, and if he works in a steel mill, he can’t take it out on anything but a piece of steel. If these white guys show they can’t work with black folks, put ‘em in an auto pound. Let ’em guard the lake, put ‘em on factory detail. Don’t take their job away from ’em. They gotta eat, they gotta feed their families.

  About five years ago he organized the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League “to improve relationships between the black community and the police. We felt, as policemen, we were the only organized group that could do something about it. Everything else seemed to be failing. We felt as black policemen we could effect a change. The police department would like to get rid of us. I’m still on the force. I don’t know for how long. I got suspender a numbers of times. My losses totaled about fifteen thousand dollars.”

  He served a thirty-day suspension, “which will be another thousand.” The charge: conduct unbecoming an officer. He had been passing out League literature to black policemen at the station and was arrested on the spot for disorderly conduct. “White officers pass out leaflets all day long. There are twenty-four white groups and not one was ever arrested or bothered. If you go into any police station right now you’ll find at least five or six different brochures on the bulletin board about organization activities.”

  He has been suspended for “Traffic violations” numerous times. “I got five tickets, written the same day. It was impossible.” He was recently fined two hundred dollars for parking illegally—a matter of tickets and arithmetic. He had been suspended for failing to follow the “proper medical role procedure.” He has just been informed that dismissal charges have been instituted against him by the superintendent. The circumstance: He was attending a play at a local theater in the company of his wife and a colleague. He had been invited by the management to comment on the work; thus, his presence. Fifteen policemen sought to eject him and his party. They refused to leave. In court, the charge was disorderly conduct. His wife and his friend were acquitted, he was found guilty.

  He has, for the second time, been assigned to the Traffic Division, pending charges. When the League was formed, he Suddenly had been transferred from his plainclothesman job in the black area to the Loop.30

  They seldom put young blacks in the Traffic Division. I directed traffic in the Loop for a short time. The white driver would say, “I want to turn down this street. My office is on this block.” I’d say, “You can’t turn down the street between four and six o’clock.” He’d say, “Why the hell can’t I? I’m a taxpayer.” He’d argue, “I’m going to tell your boss, you son of a bitch.” This wouldn’t be stood for on the South Side. A black said something like that, he’d be knocked down or thrown in jail. They don’t expect you as a black officer to do that in the Loop. I’d have been in trouble and I’d have been wrong. The citizen has a right to object. But that’s only in the Loop or in white neighborhoods. Of course, if a black driver in the Loop said that, he’d have been locked up.

  You aren’t allowed to write tickets around city hall. You aren’t allowed to write tickets on cars of people who own stores in the Loop. If a cop finds my car, I get a ticket if it runs out in one minute. In the Loop, they want you to give certain people fifteen minutes’ courtesy parking. If you violate that rule, they stick you on some abandoned corner where you can’t write tickets.

  I wrote fifty-three tickets around city hall and they moved me away. I wrote a list of tickets on another street and they moved me further away. I was actually ordered not to write tickets. I thought that was what I was supposed to do. The supervisor said, “Just don’t write any tickets.” The sign said: No Parking at Any Time. Courtesy parking isn’t free. These people pay somebody for it.

  We have a black officer who looks white and works in a white district. They don’t know he’s black. He’d come to our meetings and say, “You wouldn’t believe the things they say. ‘Give the whites the benefit of the doubt. If a guy says he left his license at home, drive by his house so he can get it. Don’t misuse these people ’cause they’ll just complain and we’ll get hell. Don’t give people a ten-dollar ticket for going shopping. It’s only going to be five or ten minutes.‘” In our area: “Give ’em tickets. Don’t come back and tell me you didn’t.” Just outrageous double standards and nobody ever talks about it. The media always plays down the treatment blacks receive at the hands of the police.

  Your average day? You’d go to roll call and sit through a half-hour of irrelevance. A guy is reading notices. Watch this, watch that. Up the tickets. John Doe got suspended for thirty days. Mr. John Doe has been given special parking privileges around his store. After that, you’re given an assignment and a partner. That gets to be hairy, because most white guys are wondering what black they�
��re gonna get with. The black guy wonders, Which one of these fools am I gonna get today?

  They give you a different partner just about every day. You ride around, patrol the area, answer calls, write tickets—it gets pretty dull. You and him don’t talk to each other for eight hours. The white guy feels, I’m with this black to put on a charade of integration. Black cop is saying to himself, The only reason I’m with this white cop is to protect his life while he’s riding around in the black community. He messes with everybody and they put me with him to ward off the bullets. You say nothing to each other at all. Can you imagine that for eight hours?

  Some of the guys wouldn’t mind it much if they had to work with the same guy every day, ’cause they would get to know him. The problem is there are so few blacks and so many whites who don’t want to work with them. So they keep rotating, and it’s a different black with a different white every day.

  The black community usually regards the black officer with suspicion. There are some black policemen that are just as bad as the white. As the years have gone by, more and more tend not to be that way. That was what was accepted. You were rated good as a policeman if you pushed people around. We’re creating a new atmosphere. Deal with people on a human basis rather than a military one. There’s a tremendous difference now in the attitude of black police.

  ANTHONY RUGGIERO

  He is an undercover investigator for a private agency. “My outfit has forty, fifty undercover agents. They have three surveillance teams, eight polygraph operators, and I don’t know how many backgrounds investigators. And they got a good thirty guards. Mike, my supervisor, is the liaison man. Every time we’re gonna make a move, we let him know. He’s our contact. I report to Mike every day. We use a phone if something comes up quick.