by Curtis Bunn
Horne heard Mack yelling, “‘I can’t breathe,’ so I said, ‘Greg you’re choking him.’ He didn’t stop choking him, so I grabbed his arm from around [Mack’s] neck.”
Her partner then punched Horne in the face, knocking loose two of her teeth. But when other officers who were on the scene talked to investigators, “They said I was jumping on officers, kicking ass and taking names. But why would I do that?”
Her department investigated and said Horne’s actions showed a lack of professionalism and could have had fatal consequences for other officers, as well as for Mack. The internal investigation report said that Horne’s decision to intercede had made it “almost impossible for officers to have any confidence in her.”
“The hearing officer said that what I did was so awful that I should be fired,” she said.
Horne was found guilty in an administrative department hearing for violating several regulations and was fired from the force. She was less than two years away from being eligible to receive a pension. She continued to work as she waited for her departmental hearing. But she said other officers failed to respond to her calls for backup when she requested it. The woman who had become a law enforcement officer “to help people” had joined the Buffalo department when she was young with two sons, thinking it would be a secure, decent-paying job.
She now has five sons, fourteen grandchildren. When she was found guilty by the department, she not only was fired, she lost her pension. She’s had two cars repossessed. She’s been homeless, as recently as in 2019. She depended on a GoFundMe account to help make her monthly rent payments.
Years later, Officer Kwiatkowski was indicted on federal civil rights violation charges of excessive force in an unrelated case. Federal prosecutors said Kwiatkowski admitted to “forcibly pushing the heads and upper torsos of four people suspected of shooting a BB gun into the vehicle.” He admitted as part of his plea agreement that his use of force against the four suspects was unreasonable and excessive and that his use of such force deprived the suspects of their constitutional rights to be free from unreasonable seizure and to due process of law, by a person acting in an official capacity.
Prosecutors in the Western District of New York further said that after his use of excessive force against the suspects, Kwiatkowski recovered a BB gun from the vehicle in which the suspects had been riding and handed the BB gun to one of the other two Buffalo Police Department officers on the scene. Those two officers were accused of shooting one of the suspects with the BB gun while he was handcuffed in the backseat of the police car. Those two officers were acquitted at trial.
Kwiatkowski pled guilty to deprivation of rights under the color of law, was sentenced to four months in prison and one year supervised release that included four months’ home detention. Prior to that, he had sued Horne for defamation and was awarded $65,000, of which he has collected about $20,000.
Her former colleagues on the Buffalo Police Department still remember Horne and her intervention. In the late spring of 2020, days after video captured Buffalo officers pushing down Martin Gugino, an elderly white man who had joined a demonstration against racism and police brutality, local law enforcement and others in Buffalo held a rally in support of two officers who were suspended for pushing Gugino to the ground and fracturing his skull. It was what Horne called “a rally for bad cops.”
She showed up and used her mobile phone to take video of the officers at the rally. She said the crowd started chanting “no pension, no peace” and “fired” when they saw her. “If they did that to me in broad daylight, think of what they are doing to our kids in the dark of night,” she said.
Police brutality isn’t the only issue between police and Black men, she said. It’s also the way in which Black communities are policed. Her description again mirrors the coercion and control of slave patrols. Constant ticketing, arrests, jailing, planting evidence.
“It’s a revolving door,” Horne said. “I wasn’t doing it. It’s a problem in the whole country. It starts at the top. As a cop, you have a go-along-to-get-along mentality instead of doing what is right.”
Buffalo’s Common Council, the city’s local legislative body, passed a bill in September 2020 that came to be known as Cariol’s Law. Signed into law by the city’s mayor in late October 2020, the law requires officers “to intervene in a situation where they believe another officer is acting inappropriately or jeopardizing another person’s safety or well-being.”
Horne would like to see a version of Cariol’s Law passed in every state and the District of Columbia. When she saw the George Floyd video, she said, “I cried for days.
“That would never happen here now. As an officer, you would not be able to stand by and watch what happened to George Floyd because officers would have a duty to intervene. It would be illegal for you to stand by and watch,” she said.
She was among those who lobbied for passage of Cariol’s Law, although friends and legal advisors suggested that she hold back speaking out on her case and policing issues because she’s still—after almost a dozen years—fighting for her right to collect her police pension. “I want my pension, but I can’t be quiet. I have to speak out. I’m trying to empower people. We need to keep speaking up about it.”
A Chicago law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, whose team includes a former chief counsel to President Barack Obama, filed papers in New York state court in fall 2020 seeking to get her firing reversed “in the interest of justice,” according to the court filing.
“For doing precisely what we expect and hope from our law enforcement officers…Ms. Horne was assaulted by her colleague, and her employment was terminated,” according to the court filing. “In Buffalo, in America, and in the world, the public is now recognizing the cost of not having officers like Ms. Horne who are willing to intervene.”
She won the lawsuit with back pay and a full pension.
Though Horne and several police officers, current and retired, view the issues of police use of excessive and fatal force through the prism of racism, it’s not simply an issue of white officers versus Black men and women. Studies on police use of deadly force reach similar conclusions that Blacks and other minorities make up a disproportionate number of those shot by police, but many of those studies had opposing conclusions on whether racial bias by officers played a role. Generally, researchers say the issue is more complicated than white versus Black, and factors such as how often police come in contact with white and Black people and other criteria are not always available across departments.
One study, “Blue on Black,” by Georgia State University College of Law professor Nirej Sekhon, analyzed 270 police shootings in Chicago from 2006 and 2014. The data came from the Chicago Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA). The study of what was then the third-largest police force in the United States showed:
95 percent of the 270 shooting victims were minority
80 percent of the victims were Black
70 percent of the off-duty shootings were done by Black officers (but more than half of the off-duty shootings in the IPRA reports involve an attempted robbery of an officer or a burglary of his property)
59 percent of on-duty shootings by uniformed officers were by white officers
48 percent of on-duty shootings by plainclothes officers were by white officers
Among its conclusions were that there was not sufficient data to conclude whether most or all police shootings could be explained in terms of individual officer’s racist malice. A key reason, researchers generally agree, is that it is hard to compare police use of force incidents, including fatal shootings, across jurisdictions, because there is no single standard for departments to compile the information. Details collected in each incident vary from department to department, sometimes within the same state.
Writing in Scientific American in 2019, Lynne Peeples said the social science research community is debating which police incidents to track and include in studies and which details should be given the most we
ight, “such as whether the victim was armed or had previous contact with the police.”
A key point of the Chicago study revealed that a difference can be made by elected officials, mayors, county executives, and the like.
“The enforcement choices police make in these [Black and minority neighborhoods] may create unnecessary risk of officer-involved shootings.” In other words, the manner in which law enforcement police Black and lower-income neighborhoods at least partially accounts for the disproportionate representation of Black victims of deadly police shootings.
Donald Temple, a Washington, D.C.–based attorney who led the now-defunct D.C. Civilian Complaint Review Board, noted that his experience with the review board, and as a criminal defense and civil case attorney, suggest that “not all police officers are bad, but the bad police officers are very bad.”
While overseeing the Civilian Complaint Review Board, he received death threats from officers the board was investigating. “The biggest thing I witnessed over those years was the language difference. The way police [who were] patrolling in lower-income neighborhoods talked to people was very different than the way they talked to people and treated people in upper-income, white neighborhoods,” Temple said. “A big language difference, and they set the tone for differences in the way officers policed in those neighborhoods. It’s more than a training issue. It’s more than a Black and white issue, because I’ve seen Black officers do horrible things to Black people.”
Alexander Williams is a retired federal judge and former state prosecutor who led the Maryland Commission to Restore Trust in Policing for more than two years. The commission was formed to make recommendations on police reform after more than a dozen members of the Baltimore Police Gun Trace Task Force were charged or convicted of corruption-related offenses in federal court.
“No one who is sincere can dispute the numbers,” Williams said. “The numbers have been consistent for ages. Always been a disproportionate number of Black people victimized by police excessive force, fatal or otherwise. Police have been running rampant in African American communities. Years ago, in Prince George’s County, they had the Death Squad. That was the culture then and now in police departments across the country. So, this has been happening for a long time. In African American communities, police concentrate on street crimes, drug enforcement. They don’t do that in white communities.”
Historically, police actions—including shootings—have sparked protests and rioting in Black communities. In Los Angeles in 1965 (thirty-four dead). In Detroit in 1967 (forty-three dead). In Newark, New Jersey, in 1967 (twenty-six dead). In Miami in 1980 (eighteen dead). In Los Angeles in 1992 (fifty-nine dead). In Cincinnati in 2001 (seventy injured). And in 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri; 2015 in Baltimore; 2016 in Charlotte. In each of these instances, Black communities again were the concentration of anger and unrest with law enforcement. But those protests, for the most part, remained in the locale in which the police use of excessive force that sparked the demonstrations happened—not at all like the killing of Floyd, which launched protests and riots across the United States and around the world.
“People are more attuned to what police are doing now because of technology and social media. And the pandemic helped to focus attention. Police have to be held accountable. And, yes, I believe they are going to be,” Williams said.
The Power of Police Unions
On the first day of his first year on campus at the University of Maryland, College Park, Julian Ivey picked up the key to his dorm room from Annapolis Hall, the South Campus greeting center. It was the fall of 2013. His mother dropped him off. She had a severe headache that forced her to wait inside her car in a parking lot at the side of the building. Julian Ivey was inside for only several minutes.
He picked up the key to his room, grabbed a “welcome package,” a Maryland backpack and a campus map. And he headed outside, figuring he’d hitch a ride with his mother to the dormitory, the place he’d live for the next nine months. No more than twenty-five steps from the front entrance to Annapolis Hall, he got an unofficial greeting to the campus in Central Maryland: Six Maryland State Police troopers surrounded him, hands on their weapons.
“They said I fit the description,” recalled Ivey, who is Black. “That was enough for them to think their lives were in danger. Why else would they put their hands on their guns? I was standing there holding all that University of Maryland gear I had just gotten. But to them, it was clear that I was an ‘other’ on campus. I was viewed as a threat.”
Still surrounded by the state troopers, Ivey used his mobile phone to call his mother.
“He said the police have me,” Jolene Ivey remembered. “I bolted out of the car.” She said she must have reached her son and the troopers in a few seconds. She couldn’t believe the state troopers had her son surrounded with their hands on their guns. She asked what was going on, trying to keep her composure. “They kept saying he fit the description. I asked what description. I didn’t get an answer. They finally said, ‘You can go.’
“He was traumatized,” she said.
The troopers didn’t know that Ivey’s father, Glenn, was a recent state’s attorney—the highest-ranking elected law enforcement officer in Prince George’s County, where the Maryland campus resides, and his mother, Jolene, was the chair of the county delegation to the state legislature.
The troopers never shared with Julian Ivey or his mother what the description was. By his own “description,” Ivey is short, light-skinned, and stocky. That day he was wearing athletic shorts. “They finally just said ‘you can go,’” Julian Ivey said. “No apology or anything.”
Less than thirty minutes later, the Iveys were in his dormitory room on the sprawling campus about nine miles northeast of the White House. They looked out the window and saw the same group of state troopers. “They had another Black guy surrounded. He was dark-skinned and tall. Over six feet. He was wearing khaki shorts. We didn’t look anything alike,” Julian said.
A few minutes later, from the same dormitory, his mother saw the troopers stop yet another young Black man. “Neither of them looked anything like Julian,” she said. “I went outside and confronted them, told them it looked like they were just stopping any young Black man. They said they were looking for two different suspects. That was bullshit.”
Later, settling in to his first night on the Maryland campus, he finally understood just how unsettling his encounter had been. His mother was a force in the state legislature and the state Democratic Party, and his father was a former federal prosecutor and twice-elected top prosecutor in their home county—but that didn’t matter. “My mother was parked not even twenty yards away, but there was nothing she could do about it. I started thinking about how close that situation could have changed. Fast. If I ever thought that I was somehow privileged, that I was somehow protected…it stopped that day. I could have been shot. And my mother was right there.”
That “situation,” as Ivey called it, pushed him toward a calling to protest, to demonstrate, to demand change. His friends on campus encouraged him to speak out. He did. After the encounter with troopers, Ivey led demonstrations on campus protesting police profiling of Black and Latino students, as well as other “racial incidents on campus.” It was a relatively easy move for Ivey, who had worked for years as a child actor, starting with Comcast commercials at age four, a role in a Shakespeare Theatre production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in D.C. at age six, and a role on Broadway as the young Simba in The Lion King at age eleven. “When we started the demonstrations at Maryland, I remember thinking, ‘They have to deal with me now.’”
The demonstrations led to sporadic coverage from local TV stations, but there were few tangible changes implemented on campus by the administration—until after commencement weekend his senior year. The pockets of racism that Ivey and other students had protested about for four years became too real for the university administration when a white Maryland student with ties to white supremacist grou
ps stabbed and killed a Black male ROTC student visiting campus from nearby Bowie State University. Richard Collins III had just been commissioned by the U.S. Army as a second lieutenant and was preparing to be deployed to the demilitarized zone between South Korea and North Korea. Collins and Ivey “weren’t friends, but we knew each other, you know we had at times been interested in some of the same young women.” The fatal stabbing reminded Ivey, again, how quickly “situations” can turn into tragedies. Sean Urbanski was convicted of first-degree murder, but the hate-crime charges were dropped.
Ivey entered politics after graduation, first as a member of the Cheverly Town Council, in the town where he was raised. Before leaving that elected position, he helped to uncover that the town’s police department had an unwritten policy to stop Black and Latino drivers within the town’s borders in a misguided effort to combat auto thefts. Now twenty-six, Ivey is a state delegate taking his fight for police reform to the legislature. During the months of Black Lives Matter protests, he repeatedly called on Larry Hogan, Maryland’s Republican governor, to call a special legislative session. Ivey’s main target: the Maryland Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights.
In 1974, Maryland was among the first states in the country to pass a bill of rights for law enforcement officers. The legislation, pushed by unions representing police officers, in many cases set up protections for law enforcement officers that “essentially puts them in a special class of individuals,” Ivey said, even when they are ensnarled in the criminal justice system. In Maryland, for example, law enforcement officers under investigation can avoid being interviewed for up to five days—delays not afforded civilians. In the same state, an officer charged with a felony or misdemeanor cannot automatically be fired from the force—because of bill of rights protections that allow officers to stay in jobs unless they are convicted, no matter the circumstances of the crime. It limits, and in some cases prohibits, access to disciplinary files of officers. It sets time and other limits on the filing of complaints against officers and requires all complaints filed to include personal information on the person making the complaint. It bans any drug tests, polygraph tests, or alcohol tests ordered as part of an investigation of an officer from being admissible in a criminal court proceeding.
