“THE WORST THING TO HIT US SINCE SLAVERY”
Crack and the Advent of Warrior Policing, 1988–92
When I said goodbye to Tasha Willis in the hallway of the courthouse, I knew she would return to the Shaw neighborhood near Seventh and T Streets, NW. I didn’t expect to end up there myself. But a few years later, that’s exactly what happened; in the spring of 2000, I was working on the second floor of the Maya Angelou Public Charter School at the corner of Ninth and T, just two blocks from the corner where Ms. Willis had been arrested.
The Maya Angelou School was the brainchild of David Domenici, a Stanford Law School graduate with an understated manner and a relentless work ethic. Mutual friends introduced us in 1995, when I was in my second year at the Public Defender Service (PDS) and David was an attorney at Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering (now WilmerHale), a prominent D.C. corporate law firm. David didn’t really belong in a big firm; his true passion was education. In the fall of 1995, we met at a coffee shop near the courthouse, and he told me about his dream: launching a program that would offer a high-quality education, on-site counseling, and paid employment to court-involved teens. David knew that many of my clients were juveniles, and he wanted to know whether such a program would appeal to them.
I was sold on his idea immediately. What David was describing was just what my clients had been telling me they wanted: a good school and a chance to make money. I began to imagine the impact his idea could have on young people caught up—or at risk of being caught up—in the criminal justice system. Most of my clients had struggled in school or dropped out altogether before they were arrested. If a program like the one David was describing had existed, I thought, they might never have become my clients in the first place. At PDS, my colleagues and I sometimes joked about how great it would be if crime dropped so low that we had to find other jobs. We knew this would never happen. But a program that reached troubled kids early, providing them with effective teachers and tutors, professional counseling, and paying jobs, seemed like a step in the right direction.
In the spring of 1997, David quit his job to start the program, and I was granted a year’s leave of absence from PDS to help. By that fall, we had hired a few teachers and cobbled together enough money from foundations and well-heeled lawyers to make our payroll for a month or two. We had also persuaded twenty students, all from the court system, to take a chance on our unproven program, which we named after the poet Maya Angelou.
We faced all the challenges you would expect. Our students were overwhelmingly from low-income families, and most were sixteen or seventeen years old but performing at a fifth- or sixth-grade level. Our first application included a math problem: “You have $10.00. You order three slices of pizza. Each slice costs $1.75. How much change do you have after you pay for the three slices?” Of the first twenty students to enroll, about ten missed this question. Many of their transcripts looked like a bomb had been dropped on them. But David was undeterred; when reviewing applications, he used to say, “All F’s and one D—our perfect student.” Even though he smiled when he said it, he wasn’t joking—he was reminding the rest of us that these were precisely the students we were here to serve.
Academic struggles were just the beginning. Many of our students had experienced trauma—they had lost parents, friends, and siblings to violence, addiction, and prison. Some had endured physical or emotional abuse. Many suffered from depression but had never received treatment. We had a full-time counselor on staff from the day we opened, and even in a school with only twenty students, her office was never empty.
As hard as it was to deal with those issues, at least we had anticipated them. But we were blindsided by an entirely different obstacle: the police. Our students complained constantly about how the police treated them. They told us they were routinely subjected to verbal abuse, stopped and searched for drugs or weapons, or even punched, choked, or shoved. Most of them felt at risk whenever an officer approached.
In the spring of 2000, the staff of the Maya Angelou Public Charter School witnessed the abuse firsthand. Not long after we moved into our building on Ninth and T, the police began raiding our corner. About once a week that entire spring, a team of officers would descend on our block, throw students against the wall, and search them for weapons or drugs. I had learned the concepts of “stop-and-frisk” and “search and seizure” in law school, and as a lawyer, I had filed hundreds of motions alleging that the police lacked “reasonable articulable suspicion” or “probable cause,” the legal standards for conducting searches of this kind. But the searches on our corner defied those standards: if the police had a rationale for choosing their targets among the assembled teenagers, I couldn’t see it. Nor was I prepared for the force and violence that can accompany these police actions—especially when they take place in poor black communities where police are accustomed to having their way. When the police rushed onto our corner, our students were forced to “assume the position,” with their legs spread, faces against the wall or squad car, and hands behind their heads. Then they were searched, with the officers feeling every inch of their bodies, turning backpacks and pockets inside out, leaving the sidewalks strewn with notebooks, broken pencils, lipstick, and combs. Not once, over the course of about ten searches, did the police recover anything illegal.
Usually the searches ended there, with shaken nerves and a messy street. But every so often the situation would escalate, especially if a student resisted or, even worse, ran. In the scariest incident during my time there, a police officer chased a seventeen-year-old student into the school, wrestled him to the ground, and, in front of dozens of terrified students and teachers, drew his gun. On another occasion, a tenth grader was taking a break between classes and standing, legally, on the corner in front of our building. When he refused a police officer’s request to move from the corner, the officer grabbed and handcuffed him. By the time a school official intervened, our student was already being placed in the police van. Luckily, our staff member was able to persuade the officer not to go through with the arrest.
All our students were black, as were most of the police officers; one staff member suggested, only half-jokingly, that this illegal and unprovoked harassment was a form of black-on-black crime. For our students, shared racial identity did little to make the encounters less humiliating. Those of us on staff did our best to assist our students once the police had sped off. We would offer kind words, tell our students they hadn’t done anything wrong, and help pick up their possessions off the street. Their privacy and dignity, however, could not be so easily restored.
Unfortunately, the abuses that our students endured were part of a larger pattern. For decades, D.C. and the nation had been consumed by a drug war whose major fronts were the sidewalks and street corners of America’s poorest neighborhoods. And the police, accordingly, had been trained to act like warriors. As Seth Stoughton, a police officer turned law professor, explains, “Under this warrior worldview, officers are locked in intermittent and unpredictable combat with unknown but highly lethal enemies.”1
It didn’t matter that our students weren’t selling drugs, that they were simply taking a break between Algebra and American History, standing around in the aimless way of teenagers everywhere. As young people in a high-crime community, they were automatically viewed as potential enemies. This fact points to one of the most destructive aspects of modern policing. Although officers recognize some segments of the community—the shopkeepers, the pastors, the elderly grandmothers—as law-abiding citizens, they regard most neighborhood residents, and young people in particular, with generalized suspicion. Unable to distinguish between a student on break and a drug dealer working the corner, the police treat them both as menaces to public safety.2
In this way, the warrior model inverts the presumption of innocence. In the ghetto, you are not presumed innocent until proven otherwise. Rather, you are presumed guilty, or at least suspicious, and you must spend an extraordinary amount of energy—through careful attention to dress, behavior, and speech—to mark yourself as innocent. All with no guarantee that these efforts will work. The War on Drugs exacts a similar toll on the presumption of innocence. Once that spring, following yet another unprovoked search, one of our more assertive students shouted that the police had yet again failed to find anything. In response, a departing officer yelled back, “Not this time.” The officer’s response reveals how devastating it is to lose the presumption of innocence: no amount of good behavior is enough to reclaim it. Even proof of innocence is dismissed by a system incapable of questioning the assumptions that led it to mark you as guilty.
The overt hostility that such officers displayed toward our students—the constant targeting, the rough treatment, the refusal to grant them autonomy of their bodies—has deep historical roots. In The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, Khalil Gibran Muhammad shows how the stereotype of black criminality has been invoked for centuries to justify all manner of discriminatory treatment.3 Indeed, warrior policing would have looked familiar to James Baldwin, whose 1960 essay “Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem” stands as a classic indictment of ghetto policing. The function of an urban police force, Baldwin wrote, was “to keep the black man corralled up here, in his place,” and, to that end, “the only way to police a ghetto is to be oppressive.”4
But the harsh treatment our students experienced also had more proximate causes. Warrior policing as we now know it emerged in the late 1980s, when a terrifying new drug—crack cocaine—invaded America’s ghettos.
In the magnitude of the threat it posed to black America, the crack epidemic exceeded even the heroin crisis of the 1960s. This drug was seen as so damaging because it created so many addicts so quickly, and because its damage couldn’t be contained: not just the addict, but his or her children, family, friends, and neighbors went down as well. Crack also spawned violent drug markets the likes of which American cities had never seen. In their fight for territory, heavily armed gangs turned urban neighborhoods into killing fields. Concerns about drug-related violence weren’t new—Hassan Jeru-Ahmed had articulated them during the heroin epidemic in D.C., and John Ray and Burtell Jefferson had done the same while promoting Initiative 9—but the unprecedented carnage of the crack years seemed to put the point beyond doubt: the drug war was not just about drugs. It could be—indeed, must be—understood as a fight against violent crime.
The menace crack presented in turn provoked a set of responses that have helped produce the harsh and bloated criminal justice system we have today. Most of all, the fight against crack helped to enshrine the notion that police must be warriors, aggressive and armored, working ghetto corners as an army might patrol enemy territory. At the same time, aggressive policing was part of a larger set of legal and policy changes that included mandatory minimums, longer prison sentences, and the seizing of assets of drug dealers and users. In addition, elected officials, police chiefs, journalists, and everyday citizens increasingly heaped shame and scorn upon lawbreakers. This hostile, unforgiving mind-set wasn’t born in the crack era, but it was then that it became entrenched, influencing even to this day how we think about drugs, violence, and punishment.
I won’t take it from the Klan with a rope; I won’t take it from a neighbor with dope.
—Rev. Jesse Jackson5
Broad swaths of black America were struggling in the mid-1980s, hit hard by massive job losses as American corporations moved factories overseas, as middle-class families fled to the suburbs, and as rapacious lenders offered predatory mortgages to black buyers, stripping many families of what little wealth they had managed to accumulate.
Government policy wasn’t helping. During the 1970s, many black leaders had adopted an all-of-the-above approach to fighting crime. While supporting tough-on-crime measures, they also called for federal investment in longer-term, root-cause solutions such as welfare, education, and job training programs. Some, most notably Representative John Conyers, proposed a Marshall Plan for the inner cities, asking the federal government to rebuild America’s ghettos just as George Marshall had helped rebuild Europe in the wake of World War II. By the end of the decade, however, these efforts had come to naught. Instead of an all-of-the-above response to drugs, violence, and disorder, black America had gotten only one of the above: punitive crime measures.
Prospects for disadvantaged communities became even bleaker in 1980, when Ronald Reagan won the presidency. One of Reagan’s signature achievements as California’s governor had been kicking “cheaters” off the welfare rolls; now, as president, he was determined to reduce federal spending on social programs.6 During his first year in office, Congress did just that, passing legislation that changed the formulas governing eligibility and payouts for certain means-tested entitlements.7 These changes led to a roughly 2 percent increase in the poverty rate, the brunt of which was borne by African Americans.8 The federal cuts, in tandem with the Reagan administration’s hostility toward affirmative action and other civil rights measures, led black leaders to strike increasingly pessimistic tones by the mid-1980s. “In the best of worlds we would be reporting that the Black condition has shown marked improvement over the past decade,” said John Jacob, president of the Urban League, in 1985. “But the facts argue otherwise. In virtually every area of life that counts, Black people made strong progress in the 1960s, peaked in the ’70s and have been sliding back ever since.”9
And then came crack. Its introduction into America’s poorest communities was, as journalists Harry Jaffe and Tom Sherwood recall, like “throwing a match into a bucket of gasoline.”10 An adulterated version of powder cocaine, crack is created by mixing cocaine with water and baking soda over heat. But unlike powder cocaine, which is typically sniffed, a rock of crack is easily smoked, which allows the fumes to enter the bloodstream more quickly and deliver a more intense high.11 This distinguishing feature made crack more appealing—and more addictive.12 In 1984, 15 percent of D.C.’s arrestees tested positive for cocaine; by 1987, that figure had quadrupled, to 60 percent, with virtually every user having ingested the drug as crack.13
One way to understand the fear crack induced in black America is to consider the analogies it provoked. At the height of the epidemic, black political and civic leaders often compared crack to the greatest evils that African Americans had ever suffered. In March 1988, the president of the NAACP chapter in Prince George’s County, Maryland, called the drug “the worst thing to hit us since slavery.”14 Two months later, Rev. Jesse Jackson equated drug dealers with Klansmen. “No one has the right to kill our children,” he declared. “I won’t take it from the Klan with a rope; I won’t take it from a neighbor with dope.”15 “This is perhaps the most serious threat we have faced since the end of slavery,” announced the Los Angeles Sentinel, that city’s leading black newspaper, in an alarm bell of an editorial. “And unless we face up to it and do something about it, we are doomed as a community.”16
What is wrong with us as a people?
—Assistant Police Chief Isaac “Ike” Fulwood
When Michael Saunders was found, still breathing, with a gunshot wound to his head, he was sprawled on the corner of First and N Streets with sixty packets of crack in his coat and a pistol in his jeans. He had been shot in the jaw, and the bullet had pierced his skull. He was rushed to the hospital, but it was too late: the nineteen-year-old died two hours later, at four in the morning on January 1, 1988.17 At year’s end, Isaac Fulwood, then the Metropolitan Police Department’s assistant chief, would look back on 1988 and call it “Washington’s Year of Shame.” Saunders was the year’s first victim—but many more soon followed.18
Two days after Saunders’s death, Osahon Sandy Emovon, twenty-seven, was found in a parked car in Southeast Washington with multiple gunshot wounds to the head.19 That same afternoon, half a mile away, several men forced themselves into thirty-year-old Gwendolyn Scott’s apartment, where they began shooting, killing Scott and seriously wounding a companion.20 On January 6, just before midnight, a man was killed by gunfire and another two were wounded while standing in a grassy area in Southwest D.C.21 The next day, a man leaped from his car in Southwest and, armed with a machine gun, started firing at a group of friends, killing Thomas Arnold, forty.22 On January 10, hours after Curtis Briscoe got into a heated argument with three men, he was found shot to death in a courtyard in Northwest. That same day, nineteen-year-old Ricardo Washington was shot fatally in the back outside a Southeast apartment complex.23
The next day, January 11, John Clem was stabbed to death during a fight in Northwest. On January 15, Clifford Jackson was found on the front steps of an apartment complex, shot to death. One day later, Bernard Smith, thirty-nine, and Joseph Williams, twenty-one, were both found dead; Smith had been left to die on the sidewalk after sustaining a gunshot wound to the chest. On January 19, Beverly Anita Thompson, twenty-five, was found in an abandoned, burning apartment in Northeast; she had been raped, beaten, and strangled to death. Thompson was survived by her eighteen-month-old son, Steven.24 On January 20, at two in the morning, a gunman fired into the East Side Night Club, seriously injuring James Ward, twenty-four, and killing George Pringle, twenty, a father of three.25 Later that day, Richard Cole, thirty-five, was found stabbed to death in a basement in Northwest, and on the other side of the city, Horace Pinnock, thirty-four, was shot dead in his third-floor apartment.26 On January 26, a pedestrian alerted the police to an abandoned car in a creek in Northeast; when the police opened the trunk, they found the body of Ralph Bailey, Jr., twenty-three, stabbed, shot, and badly burned.27 On January 27, a masked gunman walked into Gregg’s Barbershop in Northwest and, with customers looking on in horror, unloaded several bullets into William Lee Goins before calmly exiting the building.28 On January 31, Fred Parris, forty-three, an elementary school science teacher, was walking up the stairs to his apartment when two men approached him from behind and demanded money; one of the thieves shot Parris in the back, killing him, and the men fled empty-handed.29 That same day, Reginald Small, fifteen, an eighth grader at Frederick Douglass Junior High School, was shot and killed near his home in Southeast.30 His was the thirty-seventh and final murder of what had become the deadliest month in D.C. history.31
D.C. was midway through a seven-year stretch in which its homicide rate tripled, eventually earning the city the ignominious title America’s Murder Capital. Ike Fulwood, the assistant police chief, took the violence personally. “I’ve been to the scene of these crimes,” he wrote, “and seen a 17-year-old kid lying there with his head blown open and his brains lying out on the sidewalk and said to myself: ‘What is wrong with us as a people?’”32 It was a question that many of the city’s black residents were asking.
D.C.’s spiking murder rate served notice that addiction, as terrible as it was, was far from the worst consequence of crack. Not all these deaths were related to the crack trade, but many were—either directly, as a result of turf wars or deals gone south, or indirectly, catalyzed by violent highs, destructive lows, or the sheer desperation of securing the next fix. “I’d rather be in a crack market than be, say, held at gunpoint, or have boiling oil poured on me,” writes the criminologist David Kennedy, who worked in some of America’s hardest-hit neighborhoods. “Short of that, things don’t get much worse.”33
The crack markets also brought a rush of guns into the city. Despite D.C.’s 1975 law outlawing gun possession and Initiative 9’s mandatory minimums for crimes committed while armed, D.C. could do little to stop the weapons from pouring in from Virginia or Maryland. “Guns are a constant,” noted Mike Tidwell, who worked as a counselor at a D.C. halfway house during the crack years. “They are in the pants, on the sofa, under the car seat. They are part of the scenery, an accepted accoutrement of life.”34 People had begun using guns to resolve more than drug disputes: even the pettiest of arguments—over a girl, clothes, or just a hard look at the wrong person—could lead to guns being drawn.
And the guns were far more powerful. Even now, thirty years later, many D.C. residents can recall the arrival of this new weaponry in their neighborhoods. For example, Albert Herring, who would later serve as Assistant United States Attorney for D.C., lived in Southwest in the mid-1980s. He had long been familiar with the sound of traditional gunfire, but one day he heard something different outside his apartment window. “I didn’t really know what to make of it at the time,” he told me. “It didn’t sound like firecrackers, but it was the same sort of rapid pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa sound.”35 The guns Herring knew—revolvers—did not sound like that. When he learned that the police had recovered Uzi shell casings from a nearby park, he understood what he’d heard.
As the death toll mounted, the victims remained concentrated in D.C.’s poor black neighborhoods. In 1989, D.C. was 30 percent white, but nine out of every ten homicide victims were black. The Department of Justice would later estimate that in the mid-1990s, a black American male faced a 1-in-35 chance of being murdered over his lifetime—a risk that was eight times higher than a white man’s, whose chances were 1 in 251.36
The city’s extreme residential segregation meant that while some parts of the city resembled war zones, large areas remained unaffected. In 1991, for example, Ward 3, the leafy, manicured D.C. neighborhood that houses the city’s upper middle class (and attracts many of its tourists), saw only three homicides.37 The economically barren and almost entirely black Ward 8, by contrast, had a homicide rate that was thirty times higher.38 And while being black and poor were risk factors, so was age: of the 483 murders D.C. witnessed in 1990, half of the victims were African Americans under the age of twenty-five.39
While murders quite rightly received the most coverage, the ranks of the maimed and wounded were growing, too. For every person killed by a bullet, there were at least three others—by some estimates, more than four—who survived.40 By the late 1980s, big-city hospitals had begun to resemble military trauma units; one Vietnam veteran with experience in both places compared the emergency room of D.C. General to a Navy battle aid station. In 1990, when the United States launched the first Gulf War, the military sent surgeons to train in big-city hospitals, where they could prepare, mentally and physically, for the horrors of the front lines.41
Not all the damage was so visible. As a generation of black children grew up seeing friends shot over matters as serious as a drug debt—or as trivial as staring too long at the wrong person—the resulting trauma was as real as the physical harm. Children exposed to violence are less likely to attend school (and more likely to be disruptive when they do go to class). They are also more likely to carry weapons and to require less provocation before using them. Underlying these behaviors is usually a profound sense of hopelessness: Why sacrifice for a tomorrow that may never come?42
In neighborhoods wracked by violence, young people must devote immense psychological resources to their day-to-day survival. I would learn this lesson from the students at Maya Angelou. Once, a student named Bobby asked for more time to finish a writing assignment for a criminal justice class I was teaching. Our school days were long, he pointed out, and he hadn’t had enough time in the evening to get it done. I started picking apart his day, trying to point out times when he could have at least been thinking about the project. I told him that I composed arguments and essays in my head as I was walking or driving to work. Bobby should use his travel time in the same way, I suggested. Bobby, with a half smile (I think he might have been trying to stop himself from laughing at me), said, “Look, James, I’m just trying to get here, and I’m sorry, but I’m not trying to get jumped looking like a fool walking down the street daydreaming about your work.” The teacher in me never stopped pressing Bobby and the other students about turning in their assignments on time. But I did gain a deeper appreciation for how living amidst violence constrained not just their bodies, but their minds.43
The toll of violence may manifest most acutely in children, but it is paid by the entire community. Exposure to violence breeds chronic anxiety, tension, and hypervigilance.44 Since violent neighborhoods are also more likely to be poor ones, these ills have myriad causes—but fear of violence is surely one. Then there are the more subtle effects, both psychological and economic: the office assistant who declines to work extra hours (and make much-needed money) because she doesn’t want to walk home alone at night; the would-be student who forgoes evening classes and never gets her GED; the higher prices charged at local convenience stores by shopkeepers passing along the cost of alarm systems, window bars, and floodlights.
A proper accounting of crack’s impact on black America allows us to see why many, seeking to convey the damage wrought, compared it to slavery and other dismal chapters of American history. David Kennedy is right to look back at those years and say that when “crack blew through America’s poor black neighborhoods,” it was as if “the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had traded their steeds for super-charged bulldozers.”45 But alongside the damage from crack itself lies another set of harms—the damage caused by the criminal justice system’s increasingly harsh response to the epidemic.
We’re going to fight drugs and crime until the drug dealer’s teeth rattle.
—Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson46
The federal role in the War on Drugs escalated in the age of crack.47 In 1984, 1986, and 1988, Congress lengthened sentences and established ever-stiffer mandatory minimums.48 The process was often as hurried as the outcomes were draconian. Instead of holding public hearings and soliciting expert testimony on proposed legislation, members of Congress engaged in a bipartisan bidding war to raise the penalties ever higher.49 “The way these sentences were arrived at—it was like an auction house,” explains Eric Sterling, who was then assistant counsel to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime. “It was this frenzied, panicked atmosphere—I’ll see your five years and I’ll raise you five years. It was the craziest political poker game.”50
The most notorious outcome of this poker game was the hundred-to-one cocaine-to-crack ratio. Under this policy, someone selling a small amount of crack would incur the same severe mandatory minimum sentence as someone selling one hundred times as much cocaine. This distinction was based on racialized fear, not science. As the legal scholar David Sklansky documented more than twenty years ago, the most prominent motivation in the congressional debate over crack was the fear that “a black drug, sold by black men” was making its way out of the ghetto and into white communities.51 Because the hundred-to-one ratio had so little to justify it, and because African Americans were more likely to be involved in the crack trade, the law’s harsher treatment of crack defendants became one of the most grotesque examples of racial discrimination in the criminal justice system.52
Although the federal government played a critical role in the drug war, its actions are only part of the story. The nation’s urban centers exercised their own power—especially when it came to policing. And African Americans, often underrepresented in federal and state government, featured prominently in many municipal governments. By 1990, for example, there were 130 black police chiefs nationwide, including the top cops in D.C., New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, and Houston.53 There were also more than three hundred African American mayors, including those in D.C., New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, Atlanta, and Oakland.54 The words and deeds of these black law enforcement officials and politicians, so often overlooked in histories of the War on Drugs, are crucial to explaining why and how the war developed as it did in American cities.
As we have seen, the crack trade and the violence it generated stirred fear and outrage among residents of inner-city neighborhoods. Public officials echoed these sentiments and reinforced them. D.C.’s Mayor Marion Barry, nine years before his own arrest for crack possession, called drug dealers “the scourge of the earth.”55 Barry was also fond of the phrase “gun thugs and drug thugs,” invoking it to explain why the police needed more powerful weapons (“so they can protect themselves against these gun thugs and drug thugs”) and to dismiss concerns about jail overcrowding (“let me just say that we will find space to put those drug thugs and gun thugs who get convicted of carrying guns and selling drugs”).56 After one shooting, Barry told a reporter that he wanted the police to go after murderers and “hunt them down like mad dogs.”57
In Atlanta, Mayor Maynard Jackson matched Barry’s anger, pledging to make “the drug dealer’s teeth rattle.”58 If a drug or gun sale resulted in a death, Jackson said, the seller deserved to “roast” or “fry.” In 1989 he proposed a program to seize the assets of drug dealers—the program was known by the name “Kick Their Assets.”59 Jackson’s point of view was widely shared among Atlanta’s black leadership. In 1990, when the majority-black city council began searching for a new police chief, council president Marvin Arrington said they were looking for “an ass kicker.” Arrington and his colleagues soon settled on Eldrin Bell, who, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, was known to fill cells “faster than corrections officials can draw up new prison plans.” Upon his appointment, Bell declared war on drug dealers: “Unless we arrest them, incarcerate them and spit them back out with only their underwear,” he declared, “they’ve beat the system.”60
Some African American politicians embraced the war metaphor in describing the fight against drugs and crime. During the 1988 presidential campaign, Rev. Jesse Jackson dismissed his rivals by saying, “I welcome Mr. Bush and Mr. Dukakis as lieutenants, but I am the general in this war to fight drugs.”61 And Jackson wasn’t the only African American politician making this claim; Charles Rangel, Harlem’s long-serving congressional representative, touted his drug warrior credentials in a 1989 Ebony story titled “Charles Rangel: The Front-Line General in the War on Drugs.”62
If wars require generals, then those generals need armies. During the crack years, some African Americans went beyond metaphor and requested that actual troops be sent to ghetto streets. In 1988, in response to D.C.’s exploding homicide rate, council member Nadine Winter asked President Reagan to declare a state of emergency and to deploy the National Guard.63 Others seconded Winter’s request, including council member H. R. Crawford. “We owe those people who live scared some immediate relief,” he said. “We don’t need more summits, more meetings, more discussion. If this is really war, let’s declare war.”64
* * *
Maybe it was just talk. After all, the list of topics for which rhetoric is unmatched by action is long and varied, and includes global warming, income inequality, and poverty. But in the case of crack, the bellicose talk was matched by deeds.
As inner-city drug sellers increased their firepower, the police responded in kind. Through the late 1980s—and even, in some cities, into the early 1990s—America’s police officers carried revolvers. Earlier in the century, some observers had hoped that one day even those would become unnecessary. Walter Fauntroy, who as D.C.’s delegate to Congress had helped lead the 1975 push for stricter gun control, once predicted, “As handguns disappear from the national scene, this nation and this city may approach an era of domestic tranquillity which will allow us to implement a system similar to that now existing in many European countries, where even the police do not carry guns except in emergency situations.”65 But instead of moving in the direction of tranquillity, police officers began seeing themselves outgunned by teenagers. In response, the police armored up, starting with 9mm semiautomatic weapons. In February 1988, Mayor Barry and Police Chief Maurice T. Turner, Jr., displayed these new weapons at a press event, with Barry himself shooting at a target and marveling at the speed with which the guns could fire.66 No longer would an officer find himself pinned down, struggling to reload his revolver, while a drug dealer, equipped with a large-capacity magazine, poured semiautomatic gunfire into the door of the cruiser.67
The new weaponry did not go unused. In many American cities, the police adopted military-inspired “operations” to battle drugs and violence, with such names as Operation Hammer (Los Angeles), Operation TNT (New York), Operation Invincible (Memphis), and Operation Clean Sweep (Chicago).68 D.C.’s main antidrug initiative—also called Operation Clean Sweep—granted hundreds of officers vast powers, including the prerogative to clear corners, establish roadblocks, make undercover purchases, seize cars, and condemn apartments.
Operation Clean Sweep was conceived of and spearheaded by Assistant Chief Fulwood, who had joined the MPD in 1964. A burly man with an imposing demeanor and a can-do attitude, Fulwood had acquired an aggressive, gung-ho reputation on the streets as a young officer. At the same time, he prided himself on developing relationships with neighborhood residents, and his success in a community relations post caught the attention of Burtell Jefferson, who was on his way to becoming D.C.’s first black police chief. Fulwood and Jefferson were both firmly rooted in the African American tradition of overcoming racism through individual effort, and Fulwood remembered Jefferson’s advice about how to rise in the face of the police department’s internal racism. “Things are not always going to be like this,” Jefferson told him. “You guys have to study. If you don’t study, you can’t use race as a crutch.” Fulwood followed Jefferson’s example, passing the department’s various promotional exams, and once Jefferson was named police chief, he helped Fulwood ascend rapidly through the ranks.69
Fulwood carried out Operation Clean Sweep with the full support of the city’s top leadership. In 1986, a few months before the operation was launched, Fulwood’s boss, Chief Maurice Turner, said about drug dealers, “We’re going to arrest every one of those [s.o.b.s] that we can get.”70 Fifteen months later, standing in the sweltering swamp that is Washington, D.C., in August, Mayor Barry heralded the new strategy by saying, “If you think it’s hot today, we’re going to make it hotter on drug dealers and pushers who are destroying the minds of our young people.”71
Just as important, Fulwood had buy-in from the police force itself—a force that, by the time of Clean Sweep, was more than 50 percent black. Propelled by Jefferson’s efforts, the percentage of black officers had been increasing steadily since the 1970s, making D.C. the first large American city with a majority-black police department. And that department delivered on Barry’s promise. Clean Sweep lasted only a couple of years, but it produced an unprecedented number of drug arrests and, perhaps more significantly, ushered in a new era of policing, one that would endure long after the decline of the open-air drug markets to which the operation had initially responded.
Fulwood, however, never matched Barry’s rhetorical posturing (few could), and the vigor with which he attacked drug trafficking and gun violence in the city was shadowed by ambivalence. When asked what he thought about the fact that D.C. had come to lead the nation in drug arrests, Fulwood sounded almost apologetic. “It shows that we are very proficient at arresting drug dealers and users,” he said. “But those arrest figures are a sad commentary on the situation in the District. I would take more pride in less arrests if that meant the problem had been abated.” He also admitted that the police themselves were relatively powerless to solve the city’s drug problem: “We have to do a heck of a lot more in terms of education and treatment.”72 But Fulwood didn’t run a school system or drug treatment center; he commanded a police force.73
Fulwood’s conflicting emotions may have had a personal source. In the late 1960s, just as he was beginning his career in law enforcement, his brother Teddy was entering a lifetime of addiction. Teddy fell victim to heroin and spent much of the 1970s and 1980s moving between jail, prison, and various attempts at rehab. His addiction had a destructive impact on Ike Fulwood and the entire family—sometimes directly, as when Teddy stole hundreds of dollars’ worth of tools from their father to buy drugs. For Ike, the implications were clear: libertarians were wrong to claim that a drug user should be left alone because he “ain’t causing no harm but to himself.” As he saw it, “If you live in one of these neighborhoods, it is more than that. The community is facing peril because of their conduct.”74
But just as Fulwood knew that addiction could fuel crime and ravage a family, he also knew the pain that incarceration could exact. When he became the city’s third consecutive African American police chief in 1989, his entire family was present at the swearing-in ceremony—all except Teddy, who, courtesy of his brother’s police force, was in D.C. Jail awaiting trial on crack charges.
Whatever Fulwood’s personal views, there was nothing halfhearted about Operation Clean Sweep. Its specialized units included “jump-out” squads: teams of officers, typically in unmarked vehicles, who would roll onto corners known for drug dealing and jump out of their cars. Anyone standing on the corner was fair game; not surprisingly, most tried to flee when the jump-outs descended. Lenese Herbert, a former D.C. prosecutor, described the process: As the police swarm in, “the swiftest go free. The slowest are subject to, at a minimum, verbal questioning and physical searches.”75
Clean Sweep also helped entrench the specialized units—antidrug, antigun, and antigang—that would proliferate in the 1990s and that still operate today. Under Fulwood, the Rapid Deployment Unit (RDU), which focused on drugs and guns, was the most prominent. The RDU consisted mostly of young officers lauded by their commander for being “super-aggressive.” As one RDU recruit explained, he had joined the force because he craved excitement. “I came here to be a police officer, not to get fat,” he said. “I’m not a public relations kind of guy.”76
This officer wasn’t alone in his preference for action—and in not caring about the public image it conveyed. After observing RDU officers for The Washington Post, the journalists Michael York and Pierre Thomas noted, “They seem to thrive on humbling some suspects, sometimes even humiliating the rowdy ones.”77 In the early 1990s, the sociologist William Chambliss spent time riding with the RDU and reached a similar conclusion:
The RDU patrols the ghetto continuously looking for cars with young black men in them. They are especially attentive to newer-model cars … based on the belief that they are the favorite cars of drug dealers. During our observations, however, the RDU officers came to the conclusion that drug dealers were leaving their fancy cars at home to avoid vehicular stops. It thus became commonplace for RDU officers to stop any car with young black men in it.78
One RDU officer was candid about the unit’s tactics. “This is the jungle,” he said. “We rewrite the Constitution every day down here.”79 This same officer believed that constant stops would teach dealers to leave their contraband at home.80 “If we pull everyone over they will eventually learn that we aren’t playing games anymore,” he said. “We are real serious about getting the crap off the street.”81
The RDU and its warrior policing had support from both public officials and many residents. Ward 7 council member H. R. Crawford complimented the RDU for forcing criminals “to run for cover.” Responding to concerns over rough treatment, Crawford said, “In a war … we must give up some rights in order to recapture the streets.”82 When members of the Frederick Douglass Community Improvement Council wrote David Clarke to request more police, they specifically asked for more jump-out squads.83
But the aggressiveness came at an appalling human—and, eventually, financial—cost. A seventy-three-year-old retired postal worker was beaten after officers mistook him for a suspect; the man ended up with a broken arm. A fifty-six-year-old woman was beaten with a nightstick after challenging officers involved in an altercation with two of her children; another woman was cursed at, hit, and maced outside the restaurant where she worked. Much like Staten Island’s Eric Garner, a thirty-one-year-old deaf man named Frankie Murphy stopped breathing while an MPD officer held him in a choke hold; he died in police custody. After a dangerous ride in a police wagon—not unlike the one suffered by Freddie Gray in Baltimore—a twenty-eight-year-old former U.S. Marine named James Cox won two separate lawsuits against the police. As a result of such incidents, D.C. paid out about $1 million a year to victims of police misconduct during the early 1990s.84 Yet the abuses continued.
At the same time, a culture of impunity flourished with regard to less violent, but more common, police intrusions into the daily lives of black citizens. Swearing and yelling, making belittling remarks, issuing illegitimate orders, conducting random and unwarranted searches, demanding that suspects “get against the wall”—these behaviors rarely led to lawsuits or newspaper coverage. But for residents of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, especially young people, this treatment became part of the social contract, a tax paid in exchange for the right to move in public spaces. Police mistreatment, that is, became part of growing up.
Short of filing suit, it was virtually impossible for citizens to obtain redress for police abuse. D.C.’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, the mechanism by which the MPD could supposedly be held accountable for its actions, was hopelessly inadequate—under-resourced, overburdened, and generally impotent. In 1993, U.S. District Court Judge Joyce H. Green concluded, “The District of Columbia made a conscious choice to close its eyes and cover its ears to the clamor of the complaints of police brutality languishing before its Board.”85
I’m for confiscating cars. Houses. Jewelry. Television sets.
—Mayor Marion Barry
These heavy-handed police tactics were accompanied by asset forfeiture, a law enforcement tool that allowed the police to seize property—including cars and homes—used in drug transactions or purchased with drug money. Asset forfeiture dates back hundreds of years in American law, but in the late 1970s and 1980s, Congress and many states expanded its scope. D.C. leaders embraced this change, adopting, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, perhaps the most robust asset forfeiture protocol in the country.86
Fulwood had long defended asset forfeiture, declaring in 1986, “We’re going to make it expensive to come into this man’s town and buy drugs.” To Fulwood, the type of drug involved in a sale did not matter. Neither did the volume of the transaction or the distinction between user and seller. “If you come into the District and buy a nickel bag of marijuana, and we see you and stop you and you are the owner of the car,” he warned, “we are going to seize that vehicle.”87 Mayor Barry, who as a city council member had voted in favor of marijuana decriminalization in 1975, now adopted a much more punitive position. “If you are caught with half a gram of cocaine, we will take away your car,” he said. “If you are caught with one marijuana joint, we want your car.”88 But Barry’s list of targets for seizure did not stop at cars. “We’ve got to take the profit motivation out of drugs,” he said at a National Press Club event in March 1989. At another event he announced, “I’m for confiscating cars. Houses. Jewelry. Television sets. That may sound rather harsh and cruel, but if a drug dealer buys his mother a bedroom suite, or some luggage, I’m for taking the luggage and the bedroom suite at the same time.”89
These were not idle threats. One evening, shortly after Clean Sweep’s launch, a man bought $20 worth of PCP at the well-known drug market on Chapin Street, NW. After driving off in his red Cutlass Supreme, the man was ambushed by multiple squad cars. Police officers forced him onto the hood of his car, searched the vehicle, and found the two tins of drugs. The PCP dealers, it turned out, had been undercover operatives; the police promptly arrested the man and, under the new seizure law, confiscated his Cutlass. This strategy—posing as street-level drug sellers, then arresting buyers and seizing their cars—had become standard practice in late-1980s D.C. After the driver of the red Cutlass was placed in the police wagon, one of the arresting officers slammed the door, saying, “You guys just don’t learn.”90
Arrest, conviction, a possible jail or prison sentence, forfeiture of property, and a lifetime of collateral consequences—today many would conclude that this cumulative set of punishments was disproportionate to the offense of PCP possession. It appears all the more unjust—even cruel—given how few drug treatment slots were available for addicts seeking help. But that’s not how it looked to many black citizens facing the horrors of the crack epidemic. “Thanks to Operation Clean Sweep we are now getting control of our streets and community,” said Calvin Rolark, chairman of the MPD’s Citizens Advisory Committee.91 The Afro supported Clean Sweep, saying that the drug industry was “a threat to our race.”92 While lawyers fretted about certain police tactics, the paper reported that Clean Sweep brought “relief to many District residents living in neighborhoods with a high rate of drug trafficking.”93 Even the Girl Scouts were on board: Troop #1589 wrote “to honor the Ladies and Gentlemen of the ‘Clean Sweep Task Force’ … for their tireless efforts in trying to keep our community free of drugs.”94 The community in question, Ward 8, had the city’s highest homicide rate.
There was not a single rock of crack anywhere in the District of Columbia that wasn’t stained with the blood of some mother’s child.
—Albert Herring, former Assistant United States Attorney, Washington, D.C.95
When I talk to my students about the drug war, what they find most incomprehensible (other than marijuana prohibition) is our exceedingly tough treatment of users and street-level dealers. After all, in theory, drug enforcement takes account of the defendant’s place in the hierarchy. The proverbial kingpin is supposed to be treated as the most culpable; the kid making minor sales on the street corner is less culpable; and the individual user is the least culpable of all. But the theory doesn’t always play out in practice. Small-time users and sellers are routinely sentenced to prison. Many are sent to jail while awaiting trial and may spend days, weeks, or months in a cell, away from their families, before they are able to post bond. Even those who never end up behind bars can suffer severe consequences: a months-long legal process, dragged out over multiple court dates, might require a defendant to miss work—which, in the low-wage sector, can mean losing her job. And a criminal conviction, even for something as minor as small-scale marijuana distribution, can make it more difficult (or outright impossible) to vote, land a job, find housing, or be admitted to college.
The crack years help explain why we became so punitive toward users and low-level dealers. Rampant violence associated with crack markets became a way of justifying harsh treatment all the way down the line. As Albert Herring explains,
When I think back to my days as a prosecutor in the District of Columbia, when I think back to those days where the murder rate was above 400 [a year], when I think back to the days when … mothers were burying their children faster than funeral homes could schedule appointments, I am quite convinced—as convinced as I am grown, black, and free—that there was not a single rock of crack anywhere in the District of Columbia that wasn’t stained with the blood of some mother’s child.96
Today, drug users and sellers have become the paradigmatic “nonviolent offenders” in the national criminal justice reform conversation, but Herring’s comments are a reminder of how foreign such a characterization would have seemed to many during the crack era. Sounding like most of the prosecutors I encountered in the 1990s, he argues that anybody who participated in the distribution chain “bore a moral responsibility for all the blood that had flowed in order for that network … to have been built, and to be as vibrant as it was.”97
Herring’s wrath was limited to sellers, but others set their sights on users as well. Reagan administration officials, recognizing that there would be no crack markets if not for consumer demand, were especially inclined to blame drug users for the markets’ violence. In 1985, Ed Meese, in his first speech as U.S. Attorney General, declared at the National Press Club that even the casual user effectively subsidized “terror, torture and death.”98 The next month, testifying before Congress, the U.S. Attorney for D.C., Joseph diGenova, repeated Meese’s accusation: “Drug users, whether occasional or regular, are stockholders in organized crime.”99 But drug users’ most ardent enemy was Reagan’s drug czar, William Bennett, who believed that users should lose their driver’s licenses and face jail time. “Casual use,” Bennett argued, “is no casual matter.”100
D.C.’s Black Police Caucus, an organization of black officers, agreed with Bennett that drug users should lose their driver’s licenses; in a letter to Mayor Barry, they argued that “registration/tags should be confiscated for all automobiles that are found to contain narcotics and individuals that are arrested for narcotics violations should be stripped of their driving privileges.”101 Fulwood agreed that users should face tough consequences, reasoning that “the buyers are the financiers of the whole narcotics enterprise.” Without them, he said, “drug trafficking would not exist.”102 In an editorial, the Afro cheered Fulwood’s remarks, saying, “Truer words were never spoken.”103
Attacking users, some argued, would bring a measure of racial and class fairness to the drug war. In a column titled “Go After the Drug Buyers Too,” William Raspberry characterized the average user as “a college student, a young professional, a wage earner or a suburban sophisticate.”104 In his eyes, then, going after drug users would shift the focus of enforcement and prosecution from blacks to whites, and from the poor to the middle-class and wealthy. But the notion that suburban sophisticates would end up in the back of a squad car underestimated the ability of the privileged and powerful to navigate their way around the drug war’s harshest consequences. In D.C. and elsewhere, those with the financial means and networks quickly found alternative, and less risky, ways to buy drugs. Those left to purchase (and be arrested) on street corners were demographically indistinguishable from the sellers with whom they shared their cells: poor, black, and, in more ways than one, trapped.
… purposeless infliction of pain with no conceivable penological justification …
—U.S. District Court Judge June L. Green
In the first eighteen months of Clean Sweep, the MPD made forty-six thousand arrests—one for every fourteen D.C. residents. This was more drug arrests per capita than in any other comparable American city.105 Some suspects were released immediately with notices to return to court, but many ended up spending days or weeks in D.C. Jail, and some eventually served sentences at Lorton prison in Virginia. These facilities had never been known for their decency or humanity; the prisoners who endorsed Doug Moore in his initial campaign for city council in 1974 had hoped that he would do something about the terrible conditions of their confinement. But by the crack era, Lorton had become even more overcrowded, dangerous, and miserable.106 Male prisoners had it bad—squalid cells, violent assaults, negligent or outright abusive corrections officers, a broken health-care system that, according to a ruling by U.S. District Court Judge June L. Green, resulted in “purposeless infliction of pain with no conceivable penological justification.”107 But the situation faced by female prisoners was arguably even worse. For them, the litany of abuses included sexual predation. Corrections officers raped and assaulted female inmates with impunity; those who complained were placed in “protective custody,” which most prisoners experienced as further punishment (the practice often included twenty-three hours a day of isolation). The physical assaults were compounded by verbal ones—upon learning that a prisoner was going to shower, one officer told her, “Well, you go ahead and do that and I’ll be in there to stick my rod up in you”—and an extreme lack of privacy, as corrections officers would appear unannounced in women’s dressing areas.
Judge Green, who presided over many of the inmates’ lawsuits, repeatedly found that D.C. officials were “deliberately indifferent” to conditions in the city’s jails, conditions that effectively amounted to a humanitarian crisis. But instead of addressing the problems, the city government remained determined to prosecute and incarcerate more people, despite the fact that overcrowding was a leading cause of the hellish conditions. Before Clean Sweep was launched, Mayor Barry had rejected the idea that overcrowding should constrain law enforcement, saying, “We are not going to let any absence of jail space be any deterrent to us locking people up.” And the mayor remained defiant in the face of multiple lawsuits: “Even if I have to be held in contempt of court for violating a court [order] of overcrowding, I’m prepared to do that if it means getting drug dealers and drug pushers off the streets.”108
The city council shared Barry’s antipathy toward those behind bars, even if it expressed its attitude less flamboyantly. In 1990, for example, in the middle of the overcrowding crisis, the council quietly eviscerated the D.C. Jail’s budget for medical services. A year earlier, a court-appointed monitor had concluded that the city’s prison was woefully understaffed—resulting, he said, in “inadequate care and unnecessary suffering.” Charles Phillips, who spent twelve years in the city’s prison system, reported seeing more than one fellow inmate die from treatable causes. “It’s sad,” he said, “but society seems to look at a guy in prison as not a guy who should receive the basic things a human being needs for survival. They seem to think of it as being part of the punishment.”109
* * *
When Ike Fulwood designed Clean Sweep as an assistant chief in 1986, his goal had been to suppress the drug trade and reduce the violence associated with it. Once he was promoted to chief in 1989, he asserted those same priorities, asking to be judged by his ability to bring down the escalating murder rate. But on that measure he had already failed, spectacularly. Despite Clean Sweep’s aggressive policing and escalating arrest numbers, the bodies continued to fall. In 1988, the year before Fulwood became chief, 372 people were murdered. Instead of declining, the toll continued to rise: 434 in 1989, 483 in 1990, and 489 in 1991.
The number of killings, and the nature of them, weighed heavily on Fulwood. He recalled tracking down one killer who had shot two people in their faces, blowing the tops of their heads off. When police found the teenage shooter a few hours later, he was at home, asleep in bed. Fulwood was appalled, asking, “What kind of kid can blow two people away and then go to sleep?”110 Fulwood went to as many of the murder scenes as he could—a small gesture toward ensuring that these black lives weren’t forgotten. At one scene he looked down at the teenage victim, shot to death in an alley, and all he could see were the boy’s sneakers poking out from under the sheet police had laid over his body. They were the same style of Nikes that his own son, about the same age as the victim, wore. Another time he went to the scene of a quadruple homicide and interviewed a nine-year-old boy who casually discussed death with him. Later, Fulwood remembered thinking that he would likely arrest this boy one day. As Fulwood saw it, in D.C. during the crack years, murder had become no big deal; instead of the ultimate step, to be taken only in the most extreme circumstances, it had become a routine option “for valueless people without a soul.”111
A city can’t be well served by a despairing police chief, and Fulwood, to his credit, knew it. He resigned in 1992, admitting that he was stepping down in part because he hadn’t done the one thing he had set out to do: cut the city’s murder rate. At his retirement ceremony, reflecting on his twenty-eight-year career in law enforcement, he conceded the pain the city’s murders had caused him. “The number one low,” he recalled, “has been the record number of homicides, the record number of young black men killed needlessly.”112 And not long after retiring, he acknowledged that racial disparities contributed to his frustration. “I’m tired of seeing black children locked up every five minutes,” he said. “And it’s not having a significant impact.”113
Fulwood had hoped that retiring would provide him with a respite from the violence engulfing the city. It did not. Two months after he resigned, he received the call his family had long feared. His brother Teddy, who had been released from prison the previous year, had returned to the neighborhood where the two boys had grown up—an area that, like much of the city, had become rougher. In all likelihood, Fulwood knew, he had also gone back to using, and maybe dealing, heroin.
On November 19, 1992, Teddy became the city’s 401st murder victim of the year. He was shot just a few blocks from the home where he and Ike had been raised. Like so many of the murders from that era, the crime would never be solved. “Maybe it was a gambling debt,” Fulwood said. “Maybe it was a drug debt. We just don’t know.”
How can you tell us we can be anything if they treat us like we’re nothing?
—High school junior, Maya Angelou Public Charter School, Washington, D.C.
By 2000, the crack epidemic had subsided in D.C. and nationally. Although experts do not agree on the precise reasons for the decline in crack use, most cite crack’s reputation as a dangerous drug, especially among people who saw what it did to an addict’s family members and neighbors. Crack-associated violence also subsided, partly because stabilized open-air markets reduced violent turf battles, lower prices reduced the incentive for sellers to steal drugs and caused others to exit the market, and the drop in the number of users meant fewer people resorting to crime to obtain money to buy crack.
But despite the drug’s declining popularity, its legacy remained, in the form of combative policing practices that continued long after the termination of Operation Clean Sweep and similar campaigns. These were the practices to which students at our school were subjected on the corner of Ninth and T.
In the spring of 2000, after our students had faced a series of particularly nightmarish encounters with police, the staff met to organize a response. As terrifying and humiliating as the police raids were, we hoped to turn them into “teachable moments”—to help our students process their experiences and maybe even pressure the police to change their behavior. After holding a series of small-group discussions and schoolwide town halls, we reached out to the local precinct. Despite the department’s professed commitment to community policing, getting a response was a challenge. But eventually a commander agreed to send some officers to the school for a town hall conversation with our students and teachers.
The meeting started well. The teachers explained that we recruited kids who had struggled, been arrested, or kicked out of school, but who were determined to turn their lives around. The police searches, they explained, risked undermining our delicate work. Then our students spoke up, explaining what it felt like to be stopped and searched without reason, to be made to feel powerless, deprived of dignity and privacy, degraded in public view. One student asked the officers, who were seated in folding chairs at the front of the room, how they would feel watching their own children receive this kind of treatment. When their testimony was over, the room fell silent—a rarity in our boisterous building—as we waited for the officers to respond. The air was charged with our students’ anger, but also with the vulnerability that comes with dropping a tough exterior and exposing a raw wound. Watching from the side of the room, I assumed that the quiet officers, most of whom were African Americans, felt some compassion for our students. I secretly hoped they felt some shame, too.
But if they did, their response did not convey it. Only one officer ended up having the chance to speak. He was African American and looked to be in his forties, and he stood and explained, in a matter-of-fact but not unfriendly tone, that our school was located in a high-crime neighborhood. Our corner was known for drug sales, he said. Neighbors had called to complain, and the police had no choice but to actively suppress the dealing. In response to our students’ vocal objections (“But we aren’t selling drugs! So don’t hassle us!”), the officer turned toward our staff and said, “Maybe you could have your students wear large student IDs. Something we can see. Then we will know who your kids are and we can leave them alone.”
This suggestion, to put it mildly, did not go over well. Some of our students had studied slavery and knew about the antebellum laws requiring free blacks to carry papers proving their status. Others had completed a World History unit on South Africa and knew about the laws requiring nonwhite citizens to carry passbooks when they traveled. Even those students who had studied none of this history could intuit the problem with IDs: as free citizens, they deserved the presumption of innocence. The meeting degenerated into a shouting match, and the officers left quickly.
In the town hall’s aftermath, several students told us that we, the school’s adults, had been lying to them. We had said that if they obeyed the law and worked hard, society would give them a chance. But the police officers’ behavior on the corner, topped off by their performance at the meeting, made our promises seem hollow. “We can be perfect, perfect, doing everything right, and they still treat us like dogs,” one sixteen-year-old student told me. Another asked, “How can you tell us we can be anything if they treat us like we’re nothing?”
I did not have good answers to these questions, and I was furious at the police for forcing our students to ask them. Many of the students had felt hopeless before enrolling in our program, and some continued to struggle. They knew people who were telling them to give up on school, to quit working so hard, even to live like an outlaw. We urged our students not to give in to those voices, but we knew full well that our proposed path was steep.
About half of our teachers and staff were African American, some from poor and working-class backgrounds. Many had their own stories of police harassment. Our curriculum was full of material on America’s history of racial discrimination. We were, in effect, walking the same tightrope black parents know so well: we taught the history and persistence of American racism while simultaneously preaching the gospel of hard work and education.
Under these circumstances, it seemed to me that the police officers’ conduct was more than just wrong; it was self-defeating. If their mission was to reduce crime, shouldn’t they have seen us as allies and gone out of their way to encourage our students’ success? I thought so. But their raids were having precisely the opposite effect: to persuade poor kids of color that society would never let them escape, that their race and class and neighborhood would forever preemptively mark them as guilty.
The officer’s suggestion that our students wear IDs to avoid being harassed only made matters worse. To my mind, the very idea betrayed the hopes of an earlier generation of racial justice advocates. Back in the 1960s, when civil rights activists and black newspapers demanded the hiring of black officers to patrol black neighborhoods, they did so believing that these officers would be able to distinguish between law-abiding citizens and the criminal element. But the officers at the town hall were admitting that they couldn’t make that distinction. They didn’t know the community, and they certainly didn’t know the Maya Angelou kids.
But that was just the beginning of what was wrong with the proposal. Suppose our students had agreed to wear IDs so the police could tell they weren’t drug dealers. That wouldn’t have solved the problem—because even a suspected drug dealer shouldn’t be slammed against the wall or verbally abused. The officers shouldn’t have treated anyone the way they were treating our students.
The police were also failing to adopt a model of law enforcement that could have reduced crime without abusive tactics. Under the approach known as community policing, the officers could have enlisted our students as allies in the project of making the neighborhood safer. Such an alliance might seem unlikely, given the prevailing distrust between black youth and the police. But because young people are at the greatest risk of neighborhood violence, they have tremendous incentives to help prevent crime and achieve justice for its victims. Treating our students as assets, not enemies, would have enhanced the officers’ mission in two ways. First, it would have encouraged the students to cooperate with law enforcement by reporting crimes and assisting with investigations. Second, and even more important, it would have encouraged our students and other young people to obey the law and prepare themselves for a future in a society that had a place for them.114
But none of this was on offer for black kids on the corner of Ninth and T or elsewhere in the city. And as angry as I was, I knew that this wasn’t entirely, or even mostly, the fault of the officers themselves. The real problem was both more profound and more tragic. The officers who rousted the Maya Angelou students sincerely wanted to protect the community from drug dealing and violence, and they were right to feel that the community desperately needed protecting. But they knew only one way to do that job—through the militaristic policing strategies forged in the violence and chaos of the crack epidemic. Whatever their individual intentions or motivations, these officers were bound by a system, and that system was the source of their orders, training, and beliefs. Their job was to make “teeth rattle,” “to arrest those s.o.b.s,” and to prove, in the words of Ike Fulwood, that they were the “biggest gang in town.” And so they did.
In cities across America, they still do.