Tangled Up in Blue

by Rosa Brooks

  This was too much for Thomas, who started to cry again. “A funeral home that I like?”

  “I just mean, one your family uses.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. Let me call my sister. Had an uncle died last year. She’ll remember.”

  Thomas got back on the phone, and the medics finally emerged from the bedroom, carrying their gear. They made apologetic gestures at Thomas and Robert, and left.

  “We can go,” Adam told me quietly.

  “We don’t have to wait for the funeral home people to come?”

  “Nah, could be a couple hours. I guess they changed the procedure. Used to be you always needed a detective, but looks like they’re saving money or something.”

  “So we just . . . go?”

  “Pretty much. Nothing for us to do here now.”

  “Let’s just wait till he’s off the phone, then.”

  Thomas finished his calls and looked over at us. “My sister called the funeral home. They’re sending people over.”

  “Thomas, we need to get back out on patrol,” I said. “We’re going to get out of your hair and leave you and your family to it. We’re so sorry about your mom. She sounds like she was a wonderful woman. I wish I had been able to meet her.”

  “Yeah,” said Thomas. “She really was.”

  “You guys gonna be okay?”

  Thomas looked at Robert. “We gonna be okay, bud?”

  Robert moved his head from side to side and made a noise like a dolphin.

  “Yeah, we’re gonna be okay.”

  Globally, someone dies roughly every half second. In Washington, DC, almost 5,000 people die each year, translating into an average of 13.6 deaths each day, or one death roughly every hour and forty-five minutes. In 2018, there were 160 homicides in DC. Ninety-two DC pedestrians died after being hit by cars, 36 vehicle occupants died in crashes, and about 400 other people died in accidents of one sort or another (they drowned in rivers and swimming pools; got crushed in construction site accidents; fell off balconies, trees, roofs, and ladders; toppled down Metro escalators; froze to death on cold nights; suffocated from smoke inhalation in house and apartment fires; or overdosed on drugs). The remaining deaths—the vast majority—are from natural causes.

  Regardless, this translates into lots and lots of dead bodies for police officers. Within a year of graduating from the academy, even as a purely part-time, twenty-four-hours-a-month officer, I had seen at least six or seven dead bodies, including one homicide victim and two overdose victims. Full-time officers see ten times as many dead people. Like everything else, repetition makes it routine. People die all the time. There’s nothing special about it.

  Even so, for weeks after that, my mind kept veering back to the feel of those birdlike bones shifting and cracking under my hands.

  The Secret City

  Officer . . . reports the arrests of an ATV operator driving recklessly with a juvenile passenger and the seizure of his ATV.

  —MPD Joint Strategic and Tactical Analysis Command Center, Daily Report

  There’s a thrill to it. I can’t deny that.

  It’s not the thrill of power, exactly, although I am certain that for some cops power is the lure. For me, it was more the thrill of getting to do things others couldn’t do, go places they couldn’t go, see things they couldn’t see. As a police officer, you get a view of what things look like backstage—the realities behind the illusions, the machines that keep it all going. The secret city.

  The secret city mostly comes out at night. For the commuters who arrive in DC each morning from Maryland and Virginia, Washington’s a nine-to-five sort of place (or, depending on the commute and the nature of the job, a six a.m. to nine p.m. sort of place). For residents, DC starts a little earlier and ends a little later each day, but unless they’re hard-core partiers (and DC is not a hard-core-partying sort of city), most people are tucked safely into bed by midnight or one a.m. But even at three in the morning, while the rest of the world is sleeping, the secret city’s still bustling. There are cleaning crews going floor by floor in fancy K Street lobbying firms, doctors and nurses and orderlies staffing hospital wards, medics playing cards in ambulances and firehouses, tired security guards manning desks at museums, emergency repair crews fixing Metro track problems.

  And there are cops, lots of cops, driving the quiet, empty streets. You still get occasional calls at three or four a.m.: burglaries, domestic violence. But most nights, things quiet down after one or two and stay quiet.

  There’s a fair amount of camaraderie among residents of the secret city. It’s like going out right when a big snowstorm ends: in the sudden silent whiteness, neighbors who normally only exchange polite waves become chatty and amiable, helping each other with shovels and snow blowers and trading stories about other big storms they’ve known. Night-shift people are the same—even complete strangers act like they’ve survived something together.

  Here is one of the hidden joys of being a cop: You can go virtually anywhere you want. No one will stop you; you’re the police. You want to know what it’s like to walk around in the Smithsonian Museum at two thirty in the morning? Just wave to the security guard and he’ll let you in. No one minds if a uniformed police officer wanders around the galleries with a flashlight for a few minutes. Or—need a bathroom break? Stop by the brand-new luxury apartment complex with the fountain in the lobby. The guard there will be happy to let you use the elegant restrooms with the cloth towels. Museums and luxury apartment complexes often have kitchens and break rooms for staff, and if you need a quiet place to eat your dinner, the guards are usually happy to let you sit around for a bit.

  And the hotels! Many of the fancier DC hotels will give police officers free meals, waving them back to the employee-only dining area. I never experienced this—7D does not run to fancy hotels—but on more than one occasion, academy classmates assigned to the Second District sent me selfies as they dined for free at the Ritz or the Four Seasons.

  In the middle of the night, even the mundane gets a frosting of magic. One night, I got stuck guarding the perimeter of a homicide scene. This may sound exciting, but it’s not; you string crime scene tape all over the place until you run out of tape, then you just stand around for the next few hours, making sure no one wanders in and stomps all over the evidence. Every so often someone shows up and asks what happened, and you tell them there’s an investigation underway, and that you don’t have any information. (You say this no matter what, since it would be bad form to start telling passersby that there’s a dead body just up the street, but most of the time you’re telling the truth when you say you don’t have any information; the detectives don’t go out of their way to walk the perimeter and offer updates to patrol officers.) But this night, I didn’t mind the tedium. My little corner of the crime scene was at the top of a hilly street in Southeast DC. When I turned around, my back to the dead body and the bustle of detectives and crime scene technicians, I could see all the way across the Anacostia River, across rooftops and parks and city streets, all the way to the glowing dome of the Capitol and the spotlighted Washington Monument.

  Strange magic! Blood and squalor and misery behind me; the monuments of the nation’s capital in front of me, bright and glittering in the still night air.

  Southeast DC boasts some of the best views in Washington. There’s a parking lot behind a church on Morris Road that offers a panoramic view of the city and its rivers and monuments. The residents of the beleaguered Seventh District know about it, and it’s a popular spot for weddings and picnics, but I’d bet the majority of Washingtonians never dream such spots even exist.

  Mostly, I’m just nosy. Sometimes I think that’s the whole truth of it. I liked having license to poke around in other people’s lives. When you’re a police officer, people invite you into their homes and kitchens and bedrooms. You see beautifully decorated apartments in dysfunctiona
l neighborhoods, and trashed apartments in wealthy areas. You see unvarnished lives: angry people, weeping people, frightened and hurt people. They answer the door wearing the oddest garments: pajamas, their underwear, elaborate kimonos. Once, we got a guy wearing a gorilla costume. (My partner and I both yelped and did a double take, which made the gorilla yelp and do a double take too, before taking off his gorilla head. “Sorry, officers, forgot I was wearing this,” he explained.) People tell you strange, often incomprehensible stories. (“Well, you see, Jeff decided to dress as Dian Fossey, so I thought it was a good time to get the gorilla suit out from the attic. . . .”) You hear about their no-account boyfriends and their ailing mothers and their son who is going to grow up to be a famous artist.

  My nosiness about people and their stories was rarely shared by my partners. Maybe it was the age difference—many of my partners were young enough to be my children, and they had little patience for people’s long, rambling stories about how a once-happy relationship fell apart or a good job failed to work out, or why cousin Fred was really much nicer to be around when he was on crack. Mostly, my partners wanted to be somewhere else, doing something more interesting. The young men in particular often craved action. They didn’t want to talk to senior citizens with long sob stories about how their diabetic husband only stole those cookies from the 7-Eleven because his blood sugar was all messed up and he wasn’t thinking right. They wanted shootings, stabbings, and high-speed car chases.

  Much to the chagrin of many of the young officers I knew, high-speed chases were officially prohibited in DC, except in rare circumstances and with the authorization of senior officials. The reasoning behind the prohibition was straightforward: the risks outweigh the benefits. Nationwide, most of those pursued in high-speed police chases are suspected of only minor crimes; often, police are simply chasing people who failed to pull over for traffic stops. But high-speed police chases are dangerous, killing several hundred people a year. Most of the time, it’s the suspect who ends up crashing and dying—a high price paid for what are usually minor offenses. But about a third of those killed in high-speed police chases are innocent bystanders, and each year, several police officers are also killed in vehicle chases.

  Still, many officers chafed at the no-chasing prohibition. In 7D, what particularly rankled were the kids on dirt bikes and ATVs. It’s illegal to ride them on city streets, but every so often, small packs of kids on dirt bikes and ATVs (which had often been stolen from local dealers) would take over roads and even highways, popping wheelies, spinning doughnuts, laughing and hooting as other drivers slammed on the brakes and cursed. The ATV gangs caused traffic snarls and accidents, but there was little the police could do. By the time someone called 911 and patrol cars arrived, most of the ATVs would be gone, and the kids who remained would veer off in different directions, cutting across yards and empty lots where patrol cars couldn’t follow. Even the kids who stayed on the roads usually got away—the ATV drivers all knew the cops weren’t allowed to chase them, so they just ignored the lights and sirens and sped off.

  The antics of the ATV gangs were often covered on local news, with unflattering commentary from citizens and city officials about the apparent inability of the police to do anything about them. Sometimes, the police helicopter would track the ATVs from above and direct officers on the ground, but it was still nearly impossible to catch them. It drove cops crazy, and many officers did everything they could to circumvent the no-chasing rule.

  One hot June evening in 2017, about eight months after my academy graduation, I was partnered with a young guy called Jeremiah. He was small and slight, with very dark skin and round, boyish features; he couldn’t have been more than twenty-two or -three, hardly older than the ATV riders themselves. He was a good-humored, friendly soul; whenever he saw me, he greeted me with an enthusiastic hug. He hugged everyone—crime victims, witnesses, even suspects—and everyone, even the people he put in cuffs, seemed to respond to his infectious joy. But the ATVs drove him nuts—“It’s dangerous; these kids could cause an accident and kill someone, you know?”—and he was obsessively dedicated to catching them. As we drove around, waiting for a call, we heard loud chatter on the radio. An ATV gang had been spotted on Interstate 295, which cut through the western side of 7D.

  The police chopper was in the air, narrating their movements for earthbound colleagues.

  “Okay, a bunch of them just hung a U-ey and are heading south, and a couple others broke off onto Malcolm X. Ah, okay, looks like two of them are turning onto MLK northbound—”

  Jeremiah gave a whoop. We were just a block south of the intersection of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Avenue. He stepped on the gas, and sure enough, we could soon see two ATVs ahead of us. Jeremiah drove faster. The ATV drivers glanced over their shoulders and sped up. Jeremiah sped up too. “I wanna catch those little bastards so bad,” he said happily. “Sooooo bad.”

  The ATVs sped up some more. So did Jeremiah. By now, we were going about sixty miles per hour on a residential street.

  “Hey, Jeremiah,” I said, “aren’t we not supposed to chase them?”

  He shot through an intersection. “We’re not chasing them,” he said. “We’re following them.”

  “Ah, what’s the difference, exactly?”

  He grinned maniacally at me. “Well, see, I don’t have my lights and siren on. If I had them on, it would be a chase, and we’re not allowed to chase them. So I don’t turn on my lights and siren! Because we’re not chasing them. We’re just following them.”

  The speedometer now read seventy.

  “So, high-speed chases with lights and siren are prohibited because they’re too dangerous, but you’re thinking that driving just as fast after the ATVs without your lights and siren on is totally fine?”

  “Um . . .” For a minute Jeremiah looked uncertain. “Um, yeah? Because if there’s no siren, there’s no chase?”

  I almost never talked to my young patrol partners about my day job, but this seemed like a good moment to mention it. “Jeremiah, you know I have a law degree, right? That I teach at a law school?”

  He gave me an anxious glance. “Oh yeah, that’s cool.”

  “Yeah, so listen, I don’t think the distinction between ‘chasing’ and ‘following’ would go over real well with the department’s lawyers if you had to explain why one of those kids crashed into a telephone pole.”

  Jeremiah took his foot off the accelerator, crestfallen. “But then how are we going to catch them?”

  The ATVs vanished over a hill.

  “We’re not,” I said. “Not right now, anyway.”

  In some parts of DC—especially in the prosperous, low-crime neighborhoods of the city’s northwest quadrant—bored cops turn to traffic stops when there’s nothing else going on. I know officers who take great delight in traffic stops and enjoy issuing multiple tickets. With nearly two hundred moving violations to choose from, it’s easy enough to do: “Well, ma’am, I stopped you because you failed to signal prior to changing lanes, but now I see that your window tint is excessive, the light over your license plate is broken, and those dice hanging from your rearview mirror are obscuring your line of sight.” If an officer wants to ruin someone’s day, it’s easy to find lawful ways to do so.

  Traffic stops were too easy, like shooting fish in a barrel. You’d tuck your car into a nice sheltered spot, turn off your lights, and wait. It never took long—soon someone would shoot a red light, or go the wrong way on a one-way street, or merge into the next lane without signaling, or drive by while yakking into a handheld cell phone. Bingo! You’d turn on your lights, give the siren a little whoop, and pull them over. You’d run their plates and their license; if everything checked out, you’d give a warning or write a ticket and send them off, relieved or disgruntled.

  I didn’t like traffic stops. Most of the time, I felt like they were just harassing people who were only trying to g
et to work or get home. When I had to stop someone, I almost always issued warnings instead of tickets with fines.

  Fortunately, patrol officers in 7D were under no pressure to make traffic stops, and most 7D officers shared my aversion to them.

  “Do you guys do a lot of traffic stops?” I asked Murphy the second time I patrolled with him.

  “Nah,” he said. “Not unless, you know, someone’s shooting out their car window or something. Not worth it. We’re too busy.”

  Part of the problem was that in 7D, traffic stops tended to lead to arrests, and traffic arrests were boring. It was standard procedure to run plates, check licenses, and check for warrants during traffic stops, and the Seventh District’s extreme poverty more or less guaranteed that every second or third driver would be driving on a suspended license, have no license at all, or be driving an unregistered or stolen car, in which case they would have to be arrested.

  Driving without a valid permit, or even in a stolen car, didn’t make someone a criminal mastermind—people forgot to renew their licenses, or they didn’t possess the right documents to get one, or they had their licenses suspended for unpaid fines. And the very poor, whose lack of bank accounts and even home addresses often forces them to operate in the cash economy, sometimes unknowingly bought stolen cars, or borrowed them from friends or relatives. All the same, driving without a permit and operating a stolen vehicle were arrestable offenses, and in a district that saw several violent crimes each day, few 7D officers wanted to waste their time arresting people over such trivia. Each arrest meant a minimum of two or three hours transporting the arrestee, writing a report, and filling out forms. It was just too much paperwork. Anyway, Murphy said, “If we stopped everyone we could stop, and arrested everyone we could arrest, there’d be practically no one left around here.”

  No one in 7D liked traffic accidents, either. In part, this was because they sometimes involved gory injuries, but mostly it was because they involved so much time and paperwork. You had to stand around waiting for ambulances and slow-to-arrive tow trucks, and then there were extra reports to fill out. Traffic accident reports had to include a pictorial diagram of the accident, showing all involved vehicles, street signs, the direction and speed of travel, the location of any damage to vehicles or other objects, and so on.