Gone are the days in Baltimore when the police didn’t get court pay for just any arrest, when they were judged instead by the greater standard of how they controlled their posts, when a beat cop culled information and tried to solve those genuine crimes that ought to be solved, when detectives still bothered to follow up on street robberies and assaults. Now, the worst of the Western District regulars have become brutal mercenaries, cementing their street-corner reps with crushed fingers and broken noses, harvesting the corners for arrests that serve no greater purpose than to guarantee hour after hour of paid court time at Wabash. And among this new breed of patrolmen are quite a few who are known by touts and dealers to be corrupt, who routinely keep some of what comes out of the pockets of arrestees. Win or lose, for them the war on drugs means pay day.
There’s a racial irony at work, too. By the late seventies and early eighties, a predominantly white police department acquired enough racial consciousness to be wary of the most egregious acts of brutality. But on the Fayette Street corners today, it’s a new generation of young black officers that is proving itself violently aggressive. A white patrolman in West Baltimore has to at least take into account the racial imagery, to acknowledge the fact that he is messing with black folk in a majority black city. Not so his black counterparts, for whom brutality complaints can be shrugged off—not only because the victim was a corner-dwelling fiend, but because the racial aspect is neutralized. Not surprisingly, some of the most feared and most despised Western District officers along Fayette Street—Shields, Pitbull, Peanuthead, Collins—are black. They seem to prove just how divisive and alienating the drug war has become, and how class-consciousness more than race has propelled the city’s street police toward absolute contempt for the men and women of the corner.
Take, for example, the notable career of David Shields, a black officer who was allowed to run up four brutality complaints in little more than two years, yet stay on the street all of that time. A few months more and Shields claimed his first body—a twenty-one-year-old slinger from Monroe Street whom he chased into an alley and shot, the fatal bullet striking the victim from behind. And though the police review of the shooting cleared Shields, there wasn’t a soul on Fayette Street who believed that the knife on the ground actually belonged to the slinger, or that the young man was dead for any other reason than that he had run from one of the Western’s hardest and angriest soldiers. Finally, when one of the brutality complaints was sustained by an internal investigation and Shields was hit with a civil suit for brutality against a Fayette Street resident, the department moved him to desk duties. Shields may be the extreme in the Baltimore department, but many of those policing Fayette Street—black and white—routinely go out of their way to show contempt.
Take Pitbull Macer, who one day stood in the middle of Baltimore Street with his hand around Black Ronald’s neck, choking the tired, yellow-eyed tout, demanding that he cough up drugs that, in this rare instance at least, Black Ronald did not have. And Pitbull, still unsatisfied, pulled out Ronald’s wallet and let the contents—ID cards, telephone numbers, lotto tickets—tumble into the street as confetti, then drove away, leaving the man picking his papers out of the street in absolute humiliation.
Or Collins, perhaps, who one afternoon got out of his radio car, took off his gun belt, handed it to a fellow officer and offered to kick the shit out of fifteen-year-old DeAndre McCullough because the boy had taunted him with a hard look.
“You gonna beat a boy,” Fran Boyd had yelled at him, shaming him back into the radio car, “and you a grown man.”
Or a nameless Southern District patrolman, the one Ella Thompson saw on Baltimore Street, who grabbed a sixteen-year-old on a loitering charge at Baltimore and Gilmor, then punched him in the face as the boy stood cuffed against the radio car. “The boy said something to him,” Ella recalled. “And he just knocked him down.”
To watch this younger generation of police is to get no hint of the sadness involved, no suggestion that the men and women of the corner are tragic and pathetic and, on some basic level, as incapable as children. In Baltimore as in so many other cities, the great crusade is reduced to a dirty war, waged by young patrol officers and plainclothesmen already jaded beyond hope.
And yet the war grinds on. Not only because the police and prosecutors are vested in the disaster, but because the entire political apparatus is at the mercy of public expectation. In Baltimore, the mayor and council members and agency heads hear it at every community forum, every neighborhood association meeting from one end of the city to the other:
“I can’t walk to the market anymore.”
“They’re out there on the corner twenty-four hours a day.”
“I’m a prisoner in my own home.”
Even along Fayette Street, where so many of the residing families are drug-involved, there is a vocal minority, a long-suffering network of old-timers still clinging to pristine rowhouses. They’re the tired few who show up at the Franklin Square community meetings, who come out to the candidate forums, who are still willing to believe that government, if it truly cared, could end their nightmare. And they vote.
What is a police commander, a city councilman, even a mayor going to tell such people? The truth? That it can’t be stopped, that the thing is beyond even the best of governments? Is an elected official going to stand up and declare that all the street sweeps, the herding of the corner pigeons, the thousands upon thousands of arrests have accomplished nothing in places like Fayette Street? Is he going to take the risk of admitting that for the sake of public appearances and a salve to our collective conscience, we are squandering finite resources on a policy that can never work?
The district commanders, the narcotics captains, the plainclothesmen—at every rank in the Baltimore Police Department, they still defend the prevailing logic, citing as evidence those beleaguered souls who show up at the community forums and demand action. These people are desperate, they tell you. They need help. We’ve got no choice but to chase the fiends, if only to give these people a break. So like clockwork, the government sweeps the corners and sends the bodies to Wabash. But in Baltimore, not only is the street-level drug arrest not a solution, it’s actually part of the problem.
It’s not only that the street-level drug arrests have clogged the courtrooms, devouring time and manpower and money. And it’s not only that the government’s inability to punish so many thousands of violators has stripped naked the drug prohibition and destroyed government’s credibility for law enforcement. More than that, in cities like Baltimore, the drug war has become so untenable and impractical that it is slowly undermining the nature of police work itself.
Stupid criminals make for stupid police. This is a stationhouse credo, a valuable bit of precinct-level wisdom that the Baltimore department ignored as it committed itself to a street-level drug war. Because on Fayette Street and a hundred other corners like it, there is nothing for a patrolman or plainclothesman that is as easy, as guaranteed, and as profitable as a street-level drug arrest. With minimal probable cause, or none at all, any cop can ride into the circus tent, jack up a tout or runner, grab a vial or two, and be assured of making that good overtime pay up at Wabash. In Baltimore, a cop doesn’t even need to come up with a vial. He can simply charge a suspect with loitering in a drug-free zone, a city statute of improbable constitutionality that has exempted a good third of the inner city from the usual constraints of probable cause. In Baltimore if a man is standing in the 1800 block of Fayette Street—even if he lives in the 1800 block of Fayette Street—he is fodder for a street arrest.
As a result, police work in inner city Baltimore has been reduced to fish-in-a-barrel tactics, with the result that a generation of young officers has failed to learn investigation or procedure. Why bother to master the intricacies of probable cause when an anti-loitering law allows you to go into anyone’s pockets? Why become adept at covert surveillance when you can just go down to any corner, line them up against the liquor
store, and search to your heart’s content? Why learn how to use, and not be used by, informants when information is so unnecessary to a street-level arrest? Why learn how to write a proper search warrant when you can make your court pay on the street, without ever having to worry about whether you’re kicking in the right door?
In district roll-call rooms across Baltimore, in drug unit offices, in radio cars parked hood-to-trunk on 7-Eleven parking lots, there are sergeants and lieutenants—veterans of a better time—who complain about troops who can’t write a coherent police report, who don’t understand how to investigate a simple complaint, who can’t manage to testify in district court without perjuring themselves.
Not surprisingly, as street-level drug arrests began to rise with the cocaine epidemic of the late 1980s, all other indicators of quality police work—and of a city’s livability—began to fall in Baltimore. The police department began using more and more of itself to chase addicts and touts through the revolving door at Wabash and the Eastside District Court, so there were fewer resources available to work shooting cases, or rapes, or burglaries.
For the first time in the modern history of the department, rates for felonies began falling below national averages. In one six-year span of time—1988 to 1993—the clearance rate for shootings fell from 60 to 47 percent, just as the solve rate for armed robbery fell below 20 percent for the first time ever. Arrests for rape declined by 10 percent, and the percentage of solved burglaries fell by a third. Alone among felonies, the arrest rate for murder remained constant in Baltimore, but only because the high-profile aspects of such crimes prevented department officials from gutting the homicide unit as every other investigative unit had been gutted. In a department where competent investigators were once legion, the headquarters building was threadbare; the coming generation of police was out on the streets, running the corners, trying to placate community forums and neighborhood associations with an enforcement logic of sound and fury that signified nothing.
In those same years, the war on drugs failed to take back a single drug corner, yet the city’s crime rate soared by more than 37 percent to all-time levels. In 1990, the city began suffering 300-plus murders a year—a rate unseen in Baltimore since the early 1970s, when baby-boom demographics and the lack of a comprehensive shock-trauma system could be blamed. Baltimore became the fourth most violent city in the nation, and its rate of cocaine and heroin use—as measured by emergency room statistics—was the worst in the United States. By 1996, the cumulative increase in the city’s crime rate was approaching 45 percent.
In time, fewer and fewer of those living near the corners were fooled. On Fayette Street, those paying attention had lived with the drug war and the drug culture long enough to discern the range that separates sin and vice. To them, it said something that the kid who had shot three people this month was still on the street, or that the crew that had been breaking into area stores and churches was at it again, hitting the Apostolic Church on Baltimore Street just this week. It said something that the stickup crews were working Fulton Avenue and Monroe Street with impunity, that no one bothered to even report armed robberies anymore because they knew there would be no follow-up investigation. And it said something, too, that the only police activity they did see all week was down at Mount and Fayette, where the Western District day shift was, yet again, rounding up a handful of the usual suspects.
Fran Boyd stretches her thin legs across the dashboard of her brother’s tired Pontiac, crossing her bare feet at the ankles and resting them just above the steering wheel. She’s slumped into the passenger seat, singing background with the Staples in a wavering falsetto.
“… I’ll take you there …”
But Fran’s there already. She’s been there and gone.
“… I’ll take you there …”
She’s got Scoogie’s car radio cranked to WPGC out of Washington, which is about how far you have to go to find old-school R&B on the dial these days. If DeAndre were here, he’d try just about anything to change the station. Find some gangsta rap, or some Boyz II Men at the very least. For him, the Staple Singers are some kind of Grand Ole Opry act, but for Fran, this stuff has all gone ripe in the hothouse of her own nostalgia.
Scoogie comes out of 1625 Fayette.
“Damn, Fran,” he says, watching her bop horizontally. “It must be a bomb today.”
“Is it,” she affirms, with her eyes closed.
The Staples fade, the D. J. sputters for a moment, and the Commodores arrive suddenly to fill the void. “She’s a brick … hoowwwse.”
Fran grooves in her seat.
“There it is,” she laughs.
Scoogie shakes his head, managing a distant smile. He’s the straight one—the only remaining member of the Boyd clan who can claim to be drug-free and steady with a paycheck. He’s working at Martin Marietta out in Middle River and driving this battered aquamarine hulk from one neighborhood mechanic to the next, trying to shove a few more miles onto the odometer before the engine goes.
That’s the workaday world according to Scoogie; Fran carries her own suspicions about her older brother, wondering why he’s always broke if he ain’t on the pipe. And Scoogie is always down on Fayette Street before work, always running in and out of the Dew Drop, always trying to borrow ten dollars for this and that. Fran can’t help showing her cynicism when her brother starts talking that seven-years-clean business, mumbling on about having left the corner life behind after all those years of every kind of drug. She wants to believe that it isn’t true, that it’s all some ridiculous charade of normalcy. Fran hates the implied accusation in her brother’s talk, the suggestion that he’s better than her, or Stevie, or Bunchie, or Sherry. He pisses her off, provoking her to sidelong looks and muttered sarcasm—just enough resistance to let Scoogie know she doesn’t believe.
On the radio, the Commodores are giving it up to Rick James.
Scoogie leans against the front fender and begins rapping lightly on the metal with the fingers of one hand.
“You leavin’ out?” Fran asks.
“Not right yet.”
“Good,” she says.
“You havin’ a little dance party in there, huh?”
“Yes Lawd.”
Fran is up on the mountaintop today, alone in the universe, looking down on Fayette Street from a great height and finding it tolerable.
She gets high every day, but she likes it especially on days like this—the first warm days that hint of spring, with no place to go and the radio blaring the right station. People that don’t get high—not that she knows many—what in hell do they do on days like this? They have to be dead bored. How can you walk outside, greet a day like today, and not want to go all out, to ratchet that feeling inside your heart up to the highest level? She hates Fayette Street. There are times when she feels like she hates herself. But damned if she can’t put all that shit aside by getting a blast.
“Scoo-gie,” she says, accenting the last syllable. “You remember the Happy House.” Even with her eyes closed, she can see him smile.
“Yeah,” he says.
“That place was jumpin’.”
Yes indeed. The Happy House on Bruce Street was where she learned to be a party girl. Weed and pills and acid. All of the Boyd children bouncing off walls in one communal chemical adventure, all of them bringing their paychecks home and throwing most of it into the party fund. On Bruce Street, Scoogie was dealing weed like mad until some gangsters kicked in the door and robbed the place, scaring the shit out of everyone. From middle school on, Fran had been chasing chemicals and the Happy House, ancestor to the Dew Drop Inn, took her from cough syrup to weed, wine to acid. Then came the dope, with that moment of instantaneous perfection at her sister’s wake. And after the dope—Lord, please—when she got to smoking that rock a few years back, she went into a free fall, losing everything she ever had and waking up at the Dew Drop with the rest of the Boyds.
Still, for a while there, the Happy House was happy
indeed. She conjures up another memory: all of them going downtown to see P-Funk, or was it War? One of them funk bands. And Scoogie fucked up on acid, wavering in the aisle, staggering down to the balcony railing and toppling over, pulled back by strangers at the last second.
“You remember that concert when you almost fell out the balcony? Down the Civic Center?”
“War,” says Scoogie, remembering.
Fran is smiling now. “You was fucked-up.”
“All a blur to me now. There’s years back then that I can’t get to,” he says, and the past-tense tone of the remark ruins it for her. Scoogie, talking like it’s all water under the bridge.
She turns the radio louder, trying to recoup her high, frustrated at the thought that no matter how good the dope is, it’s always this way for her now. Time after time, she has to fight to stay on the mountaintop, to find these perfect idylls and keep hold of them. Because for Fran Boyd, the best part of the blast had always been the way it could take her outside of her life, to keep her from thinking about all the things that she really didn’t want to think about.
Like family. Scoogie, for starters, with his job and his house and all, but always down on Fayette Street. Or Bunchie, running games with the rent money. Or Stevie, chasing that needle so bad that his hands are abscessed and open, waiting on that gangrene while Little Stevie, his nine-year-old son, sits at his feet, taking it all in, learning the corner to the point where he could tell his father when the tester lines are forming. Or Sherry, who can barely care for herself, much less an infant daughter—to the point that for a long while Ray Ray was using a cardboard box for a crib. And Fran, too, living the same nightmare right alongside them.
The Corner Page 25
