by Ben Shapiro
“‘White supremacy comes in many forms.’ Direct quote, MSNBC today.”
“They’re nuts.”
“Nuts, but effective.”
Aiden shook his head. “Ricky, you worry too much. They want you gone. They want you disappeared. We took care of that for them.”
“Oh really? And what about the Terrorist Mama here?”
Aiden growled, “You mean the woman who saved your life? Without her, you’re waiting for that mob to burn you down.”
Ricky shook his head again. “You think they won’t? Man, you don’t have a clue.”
Soledad said, “So we keep moving. They’re short on manpower and supplies. They have better things to do.”
“No,” said Ricky. “They don’t. We matter. Don’t you see? The headlines matter. For you and me, we look at the country and we say, ‘Hey, look, big problems to solve.’ They look and they see people to exploit. You. Me. Aiden, once he pulled his head out of his ass.”
Aiden laughed. “Pretty cynical. So what do you suggest?”
“We scatter.”
They went silent, the sound of the motors whirring on open road permeating the night.
“No,” said Soledad finally. “We stick together. That’s how they’ve kept us under their thumb all this time. No more. If they track us down, they track us down. But we’ll stand together, or we’ll fall separately. If it’s good enough for Benjamin Franklin, it’s good enough for me.”
“You do realize,” Ricky said wryly, “Franklin took off for some French whoring for most of the Revolutionary War.”
It thundered overhead, and the clouds opened up.
“Shit,” she heard Aiden say. “Just what we need.”
A bolt of lightning flashed across the sky, temporarily blinding Soledad just enough that she swerved. Then she straightened out, following the other two. In the distance, thunder sounded. A bit of rain like this, she thought, and we’d never have had to bomb that damn building to make our point.
Another flash of lightning.
In the distance, she spotted a dark dot against the lightning. Not a cloud. Something solid.
Aiden spotted it, too. He hit the brakes, hard. So did Ricky. She skidded to a halt beside them.
“Turn off your lights! Get off the road!” Aiden grunted.
The three of them accelerated into a graded irrigation ditch by the side of the road. “That’s a military drone,” Aiden said. “Too small to be anything else.”
“They could be looking for someone else,” Ricky said.
“Like hell,” Aiden shot back.
The drone glided low through the sky; it couldn’t be more than ten thousand feet from the ground. It flew over them, and they crouched down as it did. “Did it see us?” Soledad asked.
“Not yet,” said Aiden. “But I’ve never seen anything like that over here. Last time I saw something like that was Afghanistan. We used to call them in sometimes. What the hell is a Predator doing all the way out in the middle of Tennessee?”
“I don’t know, bud,” said Ricky, “but I think we ought to get out of here.”
Aiden gunned his engine, drove directly for the tree line. Soledad and Ricky hit the gas and swerved to follow, carving a mud swath into the weeds behind them. She leaned forward over the handlebars, trying to will the machine forward. “Don’t look back!” Aiden yelled. He was forty yards ahead of them now, picking up speed, almost at the tree line.
Soledad looked up anyway. The drone was almost above them now, and dropping closer for a better look. “Peel off!” Soledad shouted to Ricky, who nodded and began veering off to the right, back toward the road. She stopped her bike dead, then flipped it around and drove to the left.
The drone stayed on Aiden.
Soledad didn’t see the drone fire the Hellfire missile—she wouldn’t have had time for that. The explosion at the tree line blew her completely off the motorcycle. She covered her head, hit the ground feet first, then tumbled into the irrigation ditch.
She peeked over the edge.
The first twenty feet of trees had been completely obliterated. The embers of the splintered, burning trees floated through the air. On the ground, its rear wheel spinning, Soledad could make out the twisted metal of Aiden’s bike. Near it, she could see what looked like a white lump of flesh. A mangled arm. A torn fragment of a maroon scarf she’d handed him to wipe off his handlebars.
She felt an arm on her shoulder. “Get to your damn bike!” Ricky shouted into her ear. “They’re coming back around!” She tried to get to her feet, but her left leg wouldn’t respond. Looking down, she could see the black ooze of blood creeping through her pants.
Ricky swung her roughly onto his back, then pushed himself onto the cycle. He cranked the throttle. “Aiden,” she moaned. “Son of a bitch.” Behind them, the drone dropped to attack altitude.
Detroit, Michigan
“Good news, Mr. Williams,” said Tommy Bradley. “Things have been taken care of.”
Levon smiled. “Thank you, sir.”
“What’s better,” said Bradley, “we got the Terrorist Mama as well, plus a deserter from the SWAT team designated to take her down. So this will play really well in the press. We’d like you to thank the administration to the media, if you would.”
“Absolutely, sir.”
“Just so you know, Levon, the president is very proud of what you’ve done there. You’ve kept people under control in a bad situation. It won’t be forgotten.”
“About that, sir.” Levon coughed. “I can only keep them tamped down for so long. My people are agitated about that attack, still. O’Sullivan being dead, that helps. But they still think the mayor is a shill for white privilege.”
Bradley went quiet on the other end of the line. The other shoe was about to drop, and he knew it. He didn’t expect Levon’s boot. “I don’t know how long I can keep these people under control,” Levon continued. “I’m going to need some authority to reconstitute the police force.”
“I can tell you the president isn’t going to use federal forces, Mr. Williams.”
“I’m not asking for that. I’m asking for you to swing some weight with the mayor. He had a deal with Big Jim. He told him he’d be remaking the police department to better reflect the community. You were going to send the attorney general to oversee the situation. There’s no need for that now, but a word from you and the mayor will get out of the way. Just tell him to appoint me to a civilian oversight board, and let me bring some good people into the force.”
Levon could hear Bradley hesitate. He pushed harder: “Your man has a reelection campaign coming up. Pardon me for saying so, but it seems to me that in the aftermath of what just happened, and with your big jobs program coming up, you’re going to need every minority vote you can get. Every black vote. Michigan’s a swing state.”
“So what are you proposing?”
“I’m just saying that there will be an awful lot of grateful people here if they knew President Mark Prescott stood with the community in reshaping its racist police department. You let me reconstruct the police department, I can guarantee voter turnout will be extremely high anywhere we tread our feet.”
“Anywhere you tread your feet?”
“Mr. Bradley, have you ever been to Eight Mile? On one side, there’s garbage. On the other side, there’s money. That money’s there because they lived off that garbage. Did you really think my people were going to sit still and let them sneer at us over their ivy gates?”
Bradley blurted uncomfortably, “If that’s a threat of violence, Mr. Williams, we can’t countenance that.”
“It isn’t. It’s a warning. We’re going to need to keep the peace. Only one way to do that. We need more badges, and people who trust those badges. Call it a pilot program. Better, have the mayor do it. Maybe he’ll do it to save his job. One call. Tha
t’s all it will take.”
“Why do you need us to intervene at all?”
“Because if I make the same…offer to the mayor, he’ll call the governor, and the governor will call the president, asking for help. You really want that?”
“Mr. Williams, you make a convincing case,” said Bradley. “I’ll be back in touch later today. Oh, and Mr. Williams? Let’s keep this between us.”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” said Levon, grinning.
Within days, the applications began piling up on Levon’s desk. He’d moved over to the mayor’s office, taken up virtual residence there, along with his secret political weapon, Regina Malone.
His first meeting, with the head of the police union, Lieutenant Billy Baron, had gone poorly: the man was old school blue and didn’t want to hear about changes to the department. He pointed out that they all had contracts. Levon, enjoying his newfound power, let the man stew for a few minutes. Then he told him he had every intention of honoring the contracts—there just might be a few more cops riding desks. The new boys, he said, would take over the streets. No more Ricky O’Sullivans.
Now things were running smoothly, though. Levon slotted personal interviews with each of the possible new officers. Each was slotted for ten minutes. Meanwhile, Levon worked with a committee, appointed by Mayor Burns but confirmed by Levon, to rewrite the use-of-force policies within the department. The mayor insisted that his civilian commission was blue ribbon, and that its recommendations be adopted.
Levon carefully crafted the new language. “The community expects,” the manual now read, “and the Detroit Police Department requires that officers use only the force necessary to perform all duties, and that multiple areas of consideration be assessed before any force is used. When force is used, it must be proportional. Such areas of consideration include, but are not limited to: medical condition, mental illness, physical limitation, drug use, emotional instability, and race.”
Under the “race” definition, Levon wrote, “Racial and cultural stereotypes have been utilized to dangerous effect in the past by members of this department. Racial profiling has led to disproportionate stops of those of African-American descent, and to disproportionate arrests and use of force against those of African-American descent. To that end, officers must take into account the prevailing cultural norms of any area they police, and respond to the cultural sensitivities of both suspects and the more general community.”
When told of the new strictures, dozens of officers quit right away. “Good riddance,” Levon told the mayor. “Less pensions for you to pay.” When Billy Barton walked into Levon’s new office and slapped down a list of four hundred officers willing to quit over the new standards, Levon looked him dead in the eye. “Well,” he said, “I supposed it can’t be helped. Change has casualties.”
The media embraced Levon’s new standards as groundbreaking. Racial sensitivity, they said, had never been used as an actual policing criterion, but nowhere was that criterion more necessary than Detroit. “Had Ricky O’Sullivan been taught and held accountable under these standards,” Levon said, Regina standing beside him, “perhaps Kendrick would still be alive today. Showing attitude to police officers is something a Detroit cop should have understood, had he been properly trained. Don’t call our kids thugs just because you don’t understand the experiences they’ve had growing up. They’ve seen cops pull over their dads, drag them off to jail. We have an entire generation of missing men in our community. Sensitivity is the key.”
More officers dropped out.
And Levon began to build his force. He began with those nearest to him. At first, he thought to use only men and women with no criminal record. That would prevent anyone from claiming that he wanted to undermine the nature of the force. But he soon realized that too many young black men had spent time behind bars. He quickly changed the rules, with the mayor’s approval: now anyone who had been convicted of a nonviolent felony—most of these were drug crimes—could be considered for employment.
“Policing only works,” Levon told CNN, “if the police reflect the community. It just isn’t effective to say that our law enforcement ought to be clean as the driven snow. Given the amount of racism against our community, and the disproportionate imprisonment of young black men, we cannot insist that everyone have a clean record. It’s just not realistic. We’ve ensured that nobody with a violent criminal past can join the force, but as our country becomes more tolerant of marijuana, and as we reexamine the legacy of the failed war on drugs that has robbed so many black sons and daughters of their fathers, we see this program as a way of both rehabilitating young black men and strengthening law enforcement. Think of it as converting people from criminality to standard-bearers for a new, more tolerant America.”
More plaudits. More resignations.
The final blow to the police enrollment standards came in the area of education. The standard for the department had always been a high school degree or an equivalent. Now, with the applications pouring in, Levon had to face the fact that not enough applicants had graduated from high school—many had dropped out. Again, he cited racial disparities in changing the policy, explaining that every trainee would be given remedial education necessary to do the job. “How can you expect people to work their way up the ladder if we don’t give them the chance to get on the first rung?” he asked.
Within a week of the new policies going into effect, the constituency of the police academy had turned over by 40 percent. The old department had been more than 60 percent black; now it was nearly 90 percent black. It had also grown younger by approximately ten years on average. It would take a few months to siphon in the new recruits, but the force would change dramatically.
When Levon made the cover of Time, his picture emblazoned over the headline “THE NEW FACE OF LAW ENFORCEMENT,” he knew the time had come to make the next move.
That move came against Detroit Energy, which supplied most of the power to the entire southeastern Michigan area. For years, thousands of Detroit customers had failed to pay their bills. They simply assumed that the city would pick up the tab—which, for years, the city did. But as the tax base shrunk, DTE took it on the nose, and began enforcing its own rules, cutting off the power to some 25,000 customers per month, many of them in the Detroit metropolitan area.
The mayor understood his new role now. Levon knew that. The mayor knew that. He had become a rubber stamp, content to receive media paeans for pushing Levon’s prescriptions into law. When Levon told the mayor that the next step would have to come in the form of energy fairness, with winter approaching, the mayor acquiesced.
Mayor Burns held a press conference, Levon at his side. “Detroit Energy,” the mayor said, “has been defrauding its customers for years. Leaving them at nature’s whim instead of working with them to help them through tough times. For years, the people of Detroit have paid their taxes and their bills, and the money has made its way north of Eight Mile, outside the Detroit city limits. We’ve got thousands of kids here getting ready to bunk down in freezing homes, just because a hard-working single mother can’t afford the bills this month. Who are we as a society? Are we going to give each other a hand up? Or are we going to give way to our baser natures, our greed?”
That bright and sunny Tuesday morning, the CEO of Detroit Energy, Gerald Montefiore, found himself accosted by dozens of cameras. Montefiore was an overweight, well-tailored, shorter, elderly gentleman with a Monopoly-man mustache. Glaring into the cameras, he told the mayor and the city of Detroit, “No one has the right to steal, even if they vote to steal. And the mayor’s new paramilitary force, his new police force, they can’t violate the law just because they have the guns.”
Levon responded on behalf of the mayor’s office. “Our new police force represents the community of Detroit,” he said solemnly. “And we can’t be bought by any corporation. The city of Detroit is not for sale. America is all
about the fair shake, all about caring for the least of us. Every citizen has a right to running water, clean air, and electricity. If Detroit Energy refuses to make its product available to everyone, we will be forced to take measures to enforce the rights of the people of Detroit.”
Montefiore refused to attend a meeting with Levon and Mayor Burns. Instead, he sent his lawyers. Levon refused bluntly to even get in a room with them. “Eels,” he told Burns. “You just let me take care of this.”
The mayor had no choice but to comply.
That night, electric lines all over the city went down. Actually, that wasn’t precise enough: electric lines just outside the city went down. The suburbs surrounding Detroit were plunged into blackness. Grosse Pointe, Dearborn, Ferndale, Oak Park—they all went dark at approximately 8:00 p.m., right in the middle of dinner. The calls to Detroit Energy began flooding the company; calls to the police force skyrocketed as criminals took advantage of the cover to begin looting.
Levon’s police were conveniently busy elsewhere.
Within forty-eight hours, Detroit Energy had turned back on the power throughout Detroit. “We have seen the error of our ways,” Montefiore told the media. “Crime springs from despair; despair springs from poverty. The only way to combat poverty is to allow young people, students, hard-working parents to keep receiving their electricity. Electricity makes a better life.”
He didn’t mention the billion-dollar check the city of Detroit signed, based on borrowing against junk bonds. Neither did Levon. Neither, of course, did the headlines.
New York City
Brett couldn’t stop sweating.
It wasn’t that Prescott’s threats scared him. Not after the public scandal with Dianna Kelly, bullshit though it was. Not after Afghanistan. Not after Iran. Not after spending years apart from Ellen. Prescott would be better off burying the whole situation politically, avoiding the backlash, making some payoff to Omari. This would blow over.
