Twenty-nine Years in the New York Police Department
It was an ambition of mine going back to high school to join the police department. My family lived on 115th Street and Lenox Avenue, and I was born in Harlem in 1943. My father was a laborer, working at Fordham University. My mom was a housewife. When I was about seven, we moved to the South Bronx, where I went to Prospect Junior High School and then Morris High School. I graduated in 1960, a few years after General Colin Powell.
As a youngster, I was sort of a joiner. I joined the Police Athletic League (PAL), where they had sports I could engage in. An officer from the Forty-first Precinct, a patrolman named Officer Thomas, coordinated PAL. He was African American, one of the few such cops around then. He encouraged me to consider joining the police force.
Basically, I saw cops making things right. No people appreciate the selling of drugs in their neighborhood. Not that that was a big problem in the 1950s in the South Bronx, but I saw police act on things like that. It wasn’t that I had any relatives or friends who were police; I simply felt it was something I could do.
I graduated from high school when I was seventeen, and two weeks after that I was on my way to a four-year enlistment in the Marine Corps. Although I liked the Marine Corps, I didn’t forget my thoughts about becoming a police officer. In 1963, home on leave, I decided to take the examination.
Right away, I ran into problems. I passed the written part of the exam, and I asked for and received a ninety-six-hour pass from my base down South to come up and take the physical exam. I’d been in the Marine Corps, a pretty tough outfit, and was in good shape, so I wasn’t worried about the physical. I thought I’d done pretty well. But the department told me I had failed. The reason? I was missing a tooth. That’s something that occurs in my family; some of us are missing teeth. It hardly seemed like a reason to deny me entrance to the police force, though.
I took this rejection letter back to the base dentist, a U.S. Navy captain, and he read it. He examined my teeth and got very upset at the rejection I had received. He said, “Your teeth are excellent. They are good enough that if you had applied to the Naval Academy, you would be accepted without question.” The captain wrote a letter to the Department of Personnel in the city. It was a pretty strong letter, mentioning my record in the Marine Corps. The next thing I knew, I got another letter, saying I was accepted and on the list.
Months later, at the graduation ceremony from the Police Academy, I turned to smile at another officer, a White man, standing right next to me. He smiled back. His teeth were all rotten—falling-out rotten.
That was my first experience with recruitment discrimination. I got another one right afterward, involving my own family.
My brother-in-law, who had moved to New York City from Tuskegee, Alabama, was very interested in joining the police department as well. At that time, I was already actively recruiting African Americans to join. My brother-in-law took the exam and did very well, too. But the department investigated him thoroughly. He had never known his father. He had been raised by his grandparents back in Alabama. The police personnel officials told him he had to go back to Tuskegee, find three people who knew his father, and have them write letters attesting to his father’s good character. My brother-in-law was humiliated and frustrated. There was no way he could get those letters. So he just went to work for the post office instead.
Those kinds of rejections frustrate people when they occur at ages like nineteen, twenty, or twenty-one. Most of them are not going to fight back. The department seemed to have ways to frustrate people it didn’t really want. In my police class of five hundred, there was a handful of other Blacks. I found that several had similar stories. One had been put through a tough hearing about a distant relative he knew nothing about, who had been arrested many years earlier. This sort of thing didn’t happen with other officers.
It was obvious that minority recruitment was not really a goal in the department. Somebody should have prevented that dental rejection. Someone should have circumvented the demand that my brother-in-law find people in Tuskegee to vouch for his father’s character. For my part, I was humiliated. But where would I go to confront the problem? To whom would I talk about it?
My initial assignment was to the Forty-fourth Precinct in the South Bronx, near where I grew up. The first real lesson I learned was that the police department has both a formal and an informal leadership structure. Most people pay greater attention to the informal structure, where leaders have their own rules. In the police department, the informal leaders may be other cops and not necessarily ranking officers. They are the ones who lay down the rules.
One rule I learned was that any suspect who assaulted a police officer in any way was never supposed to be able to walk into the station house on his own. He was supposed to be beaten so badly that he couldn’t walk. If you did bring a prisoner in who had assaulted you or another officer and he was still standing, you were admonished by your colleagues, sometimes by supervisors.
This happened to me several times. It led to some bad feelings. I refused to accept prisoners who had been beaten while handcuffed. I made it clear I wouldn’t tolerate that in my presence. It was really not a humane or manly thing to do. But it was not uncommon to see officers take advantage of the fact that they were police officers and abuse that power, because that’s what the informal leadership structure demanded.
For a while, I worked with youth gangs in the Bronx. There was one particularly tough kid. He was part African American, part White; they called him Red. This kid had a long criminal history and had assaulted police officers in the past. It was indicated he was involved in a double homicide.
My partner and I accosted Red on the sidewalk. We arrested him, and he came along with us without a problem. We walked him into the precinct. Within minutes I was called aside by another cop. “Hey, why is this kid walking in?” this cop asked.
“Because he is my prisoner and that is not my thing,” I replied. He backed off, but I could see he didn’t like it. At other times, if I saw someone else beating a prisoner, I stopped him. They didn’t like it, but I insisted.
A similar unwritten law covered chases as well. If an officer had to chase someone, by car or on foot, the person would invariably be beaten when captured. After a long chase, the officers would be pumped up, angry. They would want revenge for having put their lives in danger. That was the case in the Rodney King situation. It was taken to the extreme.
At the trial in Los Angeles, we all saw that video for days on end, and the officers were found not guilty. The system came to their defense. They weren’t portrayed as bad cops, within either the law enforcement community or the larger community. Analysts argued that the force used was within departmental guidelines, even though the whole world had seen this man, lying prostrate on the ground, hit over and over and over again. Those cops were out of control. Although a supervisor was present, they were still completely out of control. One needs a supervisor on the scene who keeps his cool, who holds the officers back. Why have a sixty-five-mile-per-hour chase down crowded streets, with the risk of injuring innocent people, over a traffic incident? Better to call off the chase.
But the system came to their defense.
The informal leadership structure that I’ve described almost demanded that kind of response. Officers were more or less encouraged to be abusive, as long as they stayed within certain parameters. If they did, the system would give them the benefit of the doubt. Even if they went outside those parameters, the system would still come to their aid.
In my first few years on the force, we were often called out to handle civil disturbances. The Harlem riots erupted the same day that I was discharged from the Marine Corps in 1964, and there were frequent incidents in the ensuing weeks and months, some in Harlem, some in the Bronx. They almost always followed the same sort of scenario: unnecessary force, indiscriminate use of the nightstick, unnecessary brutality. The goal was supposed to be to stop the riot or the disturbance and to arrest those who were actively participating. Not to wantonly corral people, or corner them. When you cornered people, you invariably had a group of cops on one side and angry people on the other who defended themselves. At those times, it looked as if it was just one mob chasing another mob.
Later on in the 1960s, I was assigned to a lot of anti–Vietnam War demonstrations. I was also assigned to Columbia University in 1968, where a group of students had taken over a building. The police were called in to clear it. I saw these officers wildly clubbing these kids. I was surprised. That these were White kids offers another clue to the nature of brutality: race does not necessarily have to be a part of it. The only crime of the White students was to have taken over and occupied a building at a prestigious school. Even though there was some provocation—some things were thrown out of windows, and I think a student jumped from a window onto a cop—that sort of response was not necessary. The retaliation, the violence, far outweighed the provocation. I believe this happened because most cops thought the system would protect them if they went overboard.
I learned a different sort of lesson on the job as well, one that drove home to me the need for greater minority recruitment in the police force. Many times, my presence alone at the scene of a confrontation was enough to ease tensions. Having a Black officer as a witness on the scene seemed to discourage officers from abusing people. I think they couldn’t be sure whether or not I would report it, and they may have been reluctant to go out of control.
That was particularly true on the few occasions we would encounter interracial couples walking in the city. White officers I worked with became highly perturbed at that sight.
There was a White man whom I generally liked and considered a good cop. Once when we were working as partners, he spotted an interracial couple walking down the street. He was behind the wheel and, without saying a word about what he was doing, he proceeded to drive around the block three times, slowing up each time we came abreast of the couple and glaring at them. At one point, the young Black man hugged the White woman he was with. He bent her back—almost as in a Hollywood swoon. I thought perhaps he had noticed us and was determined to make the point that no one was going to interfere with him. My partner became so outraged that he punched the car dashboard over and over. But he didn’t do anything. I have absolutely no doubt that had I not been there he would have gotten out of the car, approached this man, and goaded him into some sort of confrontation.
Partly because I was from the community and had shown a rapport with kids, I was named to a youth aide position in the Bronx. Everyone called it the youth squad. It was a citywide unit, with each division having its own, separate youth squad. We would patrol juvenile delinquents. Our job was to get to know the kids. If there was a graffiti problem, if cars were being broken into, or if juveniles were committing certain other crimes, we would patrol those areas and investigate.
It was during that period that I endured one of the most humiliating personal experiences. I remember it was a very hot August afternoon—hot in the way only the South Bronx can be. The streets were baking. To top it off, the city was in the midst of a water shortage. It was my responsibility, as a youth patrol officer, to drive around with another officer and someone from the city’s Department of Water Supply and turn hydrants off. We were on Union Avenue, where the kids had turned on a lot of hydrants. The other officer, a White man, turned to the city official, who was also White, and said, “Let’s get them all off. Turn them all off. I want to make life as miserable for these bastards as I possibly can.”
I guess he forgot I was even there in the same car with him. Or he didn’t care. The man from the water supply department looked at me. I could tell he was embarrassed. Here I was, a Black officer who had grown up in the South Bronx, a boy who had relied on these hydrants himself for relief in hot summer weather, and here was this guy making a comment like that right in front of me.
I was steaming, but tried not to show it. I quickly reminded him that the European Americans on the Lower East Side and in other parts of the city also lived in tenements and projects and also turned hydrants on. He didn’t say a word—he just sat there, looking at those kids as though he hated them. I thought, “If this officer can express that kind of hostility with a Black officer in the car, you can imagine what goes on in other places.” He and I both had youth squad assignments, where one of the requirements was supposed to be that you had an interest in young people.
There were other incidents like this, not as dramatic or venomous, but they let me know what some of my colleagues really thought. One day when I was headed out on patrol, I realized I had left my wallet at home. I was in a plainclothes unit then and lived on Olinville Avenue, not that far from the station house. I asked the two officers I was working with to drive with me to my home so that I could get my wallet. They did, and when I came back out, one of the officers looked up at the building and asked me, “How can you live in a building with all these Jews?” That was a shock to me. I thought, “If he can make a comment like that to me, I wonder what he is saying about Blacks and Latinos behind my back?” It was a wonderful building, and we had wonderful neighbors, much like those where we live now.
Other things that happened also disturbed me. There would be disparaging remarks on the police radio. Racist graffiti in the station house. Photographs of wanted posters with the names of Black suspects scratched out and the name of a Black officer written in. There were racial jokes, ethnic jokes.
During a locker room bull session with other cops while I was in the youth squad, I made a comment about being Black on the police force. I said that I had spent four years in the South with the Marine Corps from 1960 to 1964—and it was really the pre–Civil Rights South—and I still felt more comfortable with those White Marines than I did with my White colleagues in the New York City Police Department. I still feel that way today. In the Marine Corps, you might once in a while hear something like, “I’m just not used to taking no orders from no colored folks.” But that was more comical than anything else, and we would all laugh.
The atmosphere in the squad must have been bad, because we had an old-timer, a lieutenant, who called me into his office. He asked me whether I felt uncomfortable in the squad and wanted a transfer. He was aware of the level of racism that was prevalent there. But I said no, I wanted to stick it out.
The majority of cops were good, hardworking, conscientious individuals. They cared, and they wanted to do a good job. But there were enough bad cops—not one rotten apple, but several rotten apples—to give law enforcement the taint it had received.
My experiences with discrimination after my first few years on the job were enough to make me doubt whether I really wanted to stay on the force. I had a friend, a public school principal, who suggested that maybe I should become a teacher. He offered to make me a teacher’s aide while I worked on getting the necessary certification. I did that part-time for three months, but teaching wasn’t for me. I decided I could promote change and be a more positive force by working in the police department, as opposed to running away from it.
A key part of the work we did involved the juvenile reports. These were informal reports prepared by officers who encountered youngsters committing minor offenses and certain misdemeanors. An officer had the discretion to prepare a report rather than arrest a youth. It was our job to investigate those reports.
The entire system allowed enormous discretion in the way cops could handle things. I saw that minority kids, Blacks and Hispanics in particular, were never given the benefit of the doubt. If cops could arrest them, they would do so. Other youngsters got the old story from the police: “I’ll drive you home and knock on your door and tell your father that this is what you’ve done,”—that type of discretion.
If a cop wanted to be particularly venomous, he could escalate the situation, by taking what was essentially a misdemeanor and writing it up as a felony. Nobody questioned it. That kind of discretion I found particularly disturbing when children were involved.
One view of minority communities seemed to be almost passed down from generation to generation in law enforcement: that these people condoned and tolerated criminal activity in their neighborhoods. Of course, that was simply untrue, as any cop doing his job found out. Most of the serious crimes in those neighborhoods got solved because somebody in that neighborhood informed. That was how a detective solved crimes. People informed, because they wanted to rid their community of crime. Resident in all communities wanted the same thing for their children. Still, the attitude was almost, “Why don’t they police their own community” Well, why doesn’t anybody police his or her own community?
In my ten years in the youth squad, I developed such a reputation that nowhere did people confront me with abusive, racist behavior, because I wouldn’t tolerate it. If I saw somebody abusing a prisoner, or getting ready to abuse somebody, I would stop him. I figured it was easier to do my job well than to do it the other way.
During that time, officer sometimes went into gang clubhouses and destroyed them. Part of my job with the youth and intelligence unit was to try to persuade these kids to stay out of trouble, and keep an eye on what they were up to. I said to the other cops, “Listen, at least we know where they are when they’re in the clubhouses. They’re not in trouble if they’re in the clubhouse.”
The kids themselves began to respect us. We would take kids to doctor’s appointments, act as advocates for them in school, and talk to their parents. When there were gang murders, we went to the kids and got the information. Kids would call my office and surrender to me and me only, because they knew that they would be treated fairly, that this was the way I operated. They feared that other cops would beat them up.
The period 1969–1971 saw a rash of shootings of Black plainclothes cops, both on- and off-duty police officers, by White policemen. Several were badly wounded, and a Black detective was shot dead by White officers as he was holding a suspect at bay. The police commissioner at the time convened a focus group at Arden House upstate. It included many Black, Hispanic, and White officers—patrolmen as well as superior officers, a cross section of the department.
Officers were randomly selected to share rooms, and two White officers refused to share rooms with Black officers. They slept in the lobby. I thought, “How can we be here to deal with this problem, and this attitude surfaces?”
Some good did come of the conference, regarding the problem of how we could identify officers who were wearing civilian clothes. After considerable discussion, we hit on the idea that at the beginning of each tour, in each precinct, the “color of the day” would be announced. Plainclothes cops would all don that particular color on a sweatband, and this would supposedly protect them from the peril of mistaken identity.
That conference in 1971 showed that when you forced police officers to sit down and brainstorm about a problem they could come up with some solutions. I don’t recall a similar effort being made to deal with more recent problems of police brutality.
Of course, the conference didn’t end the mistaken-identity problem. It saddens me that this problem occurred in 1971 and that just a few years ago (in 1994) we had another incident in the subway. A Black plainclothes officer who had just turned out from the six-to-two tour was shot during a chase by some of the same officers he’d just finished working with.
Right now there are all these touchy-feely sessions and highly paid consultants, but I question how much impact they have on preventing police brutality. It is my conviction that discipline is the strongest motivator to change. If you know that discipline is going to be sure and certain, you are going to refrain from certain kinds of behavior. Discipline can force you to leave your attitudes in the locker, if it is made clear that you will get into a world of trouble if you take that attitude onto the job. When you get off duty, you can put on your racist hat if you want to, but in the meantime, you had better leave it in that locker.
In the early 1990s, during the development of the “Safe Streets, Safe City” initiative and the disturbances in Washington Heights in upper Manhattan, I was given the go-ahead to put together some sessions on police-community relations. We took ten adults from the community and ten randomly selected officers from the precinct. We had consultants come in to help push the discussions along, but it wasn’t a touchy-feely thing. At those sessions, police brutality was the subject that always generated the most discussion. People expressed their feelings and named names. After two days, the community residents came away with a real understanding of what it was like to be a cop in their neighborhood. The police officers got a better understanding of what it was like to live in that community. That program was expanded to several precincts, and I think it proved very successful.
During my years on the police force, people frequently complained about police brutality. If they told me about instances involving other officers, I would tell them to go to the precinct and fill out a form, and if they couldn’t do it, I would help. People who went to the station house on their own were often treated discourteously. Sometimes they would get frustrated and just walk away. That old informal leadership structure came into play, and if those informal leaders in the precinct had racist attitudes, these attitudes set the dominant tone there.
I was on the police force during the early 1970s, the years of the Knapp Commission hearings and the subsequent Knapp Commission Report on Police Corruption, released in 1972. The investigation was prompted by revelations of brutality and corruption by the police officer Frank Serpico. Just about every major unit in the police department was touched by this scandal, with the exception of the youth squad, where I was working. I don’t know whether police brutality and other forms of police corruption go hand in hand, but I suspect that if you are going to take the opportunity to engage in other illegal activities, you are going to take the chance to be brutal as well.
Just the same, I know from my own experience that not every complaint about police brutality is true. I had my own encounter with a false accusation.
On a sweltering summer afternoon on the Lower East Side, some kids playing at an open hydrant sprayed an African American man coming home from work. He got mad, went to his house, came back out with a .38 revolver, and started firing shots indiscriminately in the air. There were hundreds of kids and people in the streets. I was about a block away when the call came in. A kid on a moped pointed the man out to me. I got out of the police car, drew my weapon, and ordered him to drop the gun. Instead, he put the gun in his jacket pocket and froze. He just stared at me. I got closer and closer and then tackled him. We went rolling around on the sidewalk, I reaching for his gun pocket and he holding on. Cops were coming from everywhere because citizens had called in that a man was shooting at cops. It was a wild scene. The man wouldn’t let go of his gun, and another cop came running up, pulled a knife, cut the pocket, and pried the gun loose. Well, he cut the guy’s hand in doing so, though not seriously.
Three months later, I was called to the Civilian Complaint Review Board because I was the subject of a citizen complaint. This guy had filed a complaint against me. I could have shot him, and I would have been within department guidelines on using deadly force. He had used a gun; I saw the gun. I had witnesses pointing him out as the one with the gun. He refused to relinquish the gun. The investigator at the hearing even told me, “You could have shot him. It would have been a clean shooting.”
I was promoted to detective after I was transferred to the Runaway Squad. My partner and I patrolled the Times Square area. We would look at the area where prostitutes worked and try to pick out the very young faces. We found this one kid who was really young and appeared to have been beaten by one of the pimps. We put her in the police car and drove her back to our office. She took it very hard, not saying a word. We had to take her up to the Spofford Juvenile Center. She suffered like that for two days. Later we learned that her pimp had really beaten her; she had broken blood vessels in her eye. Half her jaw was broken in three places. It took her that long to come around and call her father, who, it turned out, was an influential person upstate. We ended up getting the coveted gold shield for that work.
In 1979, I was promoted to sergeant. I was briefly assigned to the Seventh Precinct, on the Lower East Side, on Pitt Street. I was then one of about seventy-five Black sergeants in the department, out of about twenty-five hundred sergeants in all. It was police department procedure that the sergeant in charge of patrol had an officer assigned to him as he went around supervising officers on patrol. Word got back to me by way of some sympathetic officers that there were a couple of White officers who were saying they wouldn’t “chauffeur this nigger sergeant.” The ones saying that were older officers, but I’m not sure that a lot of other cops didn’t feel that way too. Although I didn’t seek out any confrontation with these people, I certainly didn’t back down. When the situation arose in which they had to drive, they did.
After I became a sergeant, some people were reluctant to speak to me, reluctant to follow orders—nothing flagrant, nothing that I had to take to another level, but I was disappointed. This wasn’t the 1950s in Birmingham, Alabama; this was the 1970s in New York City. It was another example of what we called the “Black tax,” the extra tax we paid on the police force for being Black. We were the last to get good assignments, the last to get steady radio cars. We suffered from overzealous supervision by some supervisors.
The biggest change on the police force that I witnessed was the influx of large numbers of female officers in the late 1970s. These officers had a calming influence. They were particularly effective with community people and children. Many were African Americans and Latinas who came directly from that community. Many had children and knew how to communicate with kids. That was crucial, because the inability to communicate is often what leads to aggravation between cops and kids.
I come from a well-disciplined, strong family background. One word out of line, and my father would correct me. Most cops have such a background. It is a big change to go into the inner city and say, “Hey, you, kid, come here.” The kid’s answer may be different, but there is no crime in being disrespectful. I think the female officers understand young people and have a real impact in dealing with them.
In other respects, the police department hasn’t changed nearly enough. There is the joke about the southern sheriff who pulls the Black body out of the river. The body is wrapped in chains and a 300-pound weight is attached to it. The sheriff gets the body on shore and says, “Well, there is a clear case of suicide.”
That scenario is supposed to be out of the 1920s or 1930s. But look at the venom surrounding the Abner Louima case, where a man was beaten and sodomized with a broom handle in a station house. The cop who changed his plea to guilty in the middle of the trial, Justin A.Volpe, had the same attitude as the old southern sheriff. In his opening statement, Volpe’s lawyer, Marvyn Kornberg, said that the severe internal injuries to Mr. Louima’s rectum and bladder were the result of consensual sexual activity1 prior to his altercation with the police, and that he would introduce evidence to prove that such activity had taken place. Of course, he never did, because his client, Officer Volpe, admitted before the trial ended what he had done. Still, how far removed are that cop and that lawyer from that story about the sheriff? How far have we really progressed?
These kinds of situations are not the rule, but they do happen. Although the vast majority of officers today are well trained, committed to the job, some still tend toward brutality. In a way, this attitude is more frightening today because it is more subdued. Officers know that the likelihood of being disciplined and punished is now far greater. Citizens are more likely to make a complaint, and their complaint is more likely to be acted upon. The momentum is starting to build in the department to address the brutality issue. The Louima case and the Diallo shooting are forcing the department to take a harder look at itself.
I have always been an active recruiter for the police department. It offers a good job, and I can’t understand why it doesn’t attract more minorities. Now, even though retired, I tell youngsters to apply. As part of my volunteer work at a local high school, I try to set up summer youth employment program slots. These funded positions require only that you get an employer to agree to sponsor them. But I still have difficulty getting kids placed in the police department. Why not invite these kids into the precincts and make them a part of the force? They might want to make it a career.
In talking with kids about the police force, I use several raps. I tell them it’s not boring. I never had a boring day in twenty-nine years. The pay, though not the best in the world, is certainly adequate. I put my daughter through Cornell and my son through Wesleyan—and I was a dead-honest cop. We drive a car that is twelve years old, but at least we have a car. I got a great deal of satisfaction and a sense of accomplishment in the police department, especially from my work with kids. And there are the retirement benefits: somebody who joins the force at twenty-one or twenty-two can retire at forty-two or fifty.
The key to meaningful change is minority recruitment. More ethnic diversity on the force would mean less brutality. I have seen it happen. It is a natural thing, because you identify better with the people you are dealing with. But minority recruitment becomes a front-burner issue only after some highly publicized incident of police brutality.
We don’t need to lower standards to improve minority recruitment. Nobody in any community wants to see that happen. On the other hand, we should not set artificially inflated standards in the recruitment of police officers. When the U.S. armed forces moved to become an all-volunteer force, the guys in charge realized up front that they would have to establish a level playing field and make the armed forces attractive to minorities as a matter of national security. They said, “Whatever it takes to do that, we are going to do.” And they did. They continue to do it and to do it well. Why can’t the law enforcement people follow that example? Why can’t they do it? Apparently, they don’t feel the same sense of urgency.
NOTES
1. New York Times, May 5, 1999, sec. A, p. 1.
Thanks to Tom Robbins for his assistance on this essay.