1.

THE BOOGEYMAN

Implicit bias lives in our police departments, just as it exists among our coworkers, families, friends, and associates. It affects us all and consumes some of us. Thirty years ago, however, the term implicit bias hadn’t entered the lexicon, and it was the last thing on my mind as a young rookie on a domestic abuse call when I entered an apartment building in Arlington, Virginia. I was just praying I wouldn’t have to shoot the person standing in front of me.

The textbook definition of implicit bias says it is the attitudes or stereotypes that we all have. They, in turn, affect our encounters with people, and influence our actions and decisions in an unconscious manner. In other words, we internalize repeated messages from our family, our friends, our neighbors, our community, and the stereotypes and images we see on television, and in movies, magazines, and other media.

Bias is different from racism and sexism. Racism and sexism affect the conscious prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race or sex based on the belief that one’s own race or sex is superior. Implicit biases are attitudes and assumptions ingrained in our subconscious. Our implicit biases explain why tall men are almost invariably asked if they played basketball and why, if I say, “peanut butter,” you are likely to respond, “jelly.” They explain why studies show that European standards of beauty are widely accepted as the norm, even among Asians, African-Americans, and Hispanics. Those same studies show that, across the board, regardless of race, Americans have a pro-white bias. African-Americans and Latinos are less pro-white-biased, but the overall culture apparently pushes us in that direction as well. Implicit bias also explains why wealth and power are most often associated with white men. Unfortunately, it also explains why black men are inherently felt to be dangerous by much of America, even by many African-Americans.

We all have these biases. They don’t necessarily make us bad people. They just make us people. Unfortunately, when they are held by someone with a badge and a gun, and the power to take a life, those biases can play out negatively and people who shouldn’t be, end up dead.

I first learned about my own bias as a rookie cop while on a domestic dispute call that evening in Arlington. I was working a DUI assignment when I got the call to assist another officer. So, I hurried over. I met with the primary officer, a woman who was from a nearby police force who was my partner on this call. She brought me up to speed and we walked over to the residence. Since it was a domestic violence call, I assumed we would be meeting a distraught woman, probably crying, possibly injured.

Wrong.

The complainant was a man, average build, about 5-foot-10, possibly Hispanic. He said he had been assaulted by his lover, Leslie, and he wanted Leslie out of the apartment. We both felt it was weird, a man being beaten up by a woman. Still, I’m thinking, This will be simple. Handling a woman is a lot easier than dealing with an adrenaline-charged, probably irate, possibly drunk man. It was dusk when I got the call. By now, it was getting dark. As we headed upstairs to the apartment, my partner and I agreed that she would take the lead for a woman-to-woman conversation. Good plan, I said to myself.

Wrong again.

When we entered the apartment, Leslie was sitting on the sofa. Leslie was a large black man, as wide as a La-Z-Boy. Trust me, Leslie was big. Now, I’m concerned, but not overly so. Back then, I was 6-foot-2 and weighed a well-muscled 260 pounds. Still, I’m mentally rehearsing my training for situations like this, in case of resistance. Leslie was polite. He said he was sorry that he and his lover had created the disturbance that had brought us to his door. Everybody was amiable, and things were going fine until we told Leslie something we knew he didn’t want to hear.

“Sir, your roommate wants you to leave the apartment,” my partner said. “Please stand up so we can go downstairs.” Our reference to Leslie’s partner as his roommate was further evidence of our bias at the time. If it had been a heterosexual relationship, we most assuredly would have referred to the other individual as boyfriend or girlfriend.

“I don’t want to leave,” Leslie responded. “This is my apartment, too.”

He was passionate, but not threatening.

“Sir, you have to leave,” my partner said. “Please come with us downstairs, and I’m sure we can work this out.”

We needed Leslie out of the apartment because it would have been extremely difficult to handle a big guy like him in that small space. Again he said he didn’t want to leave and refused to stand up. My partner asked again. Same reaction. We went back and forth with Leslie for a minute or so about standing up and he told us repeatedly that he didn’t want to leave and how he loved his partner. This was not good. Noncompliance is cause to notch things up a bit. We were now getting close to possibly having to use force, which is always dangerous. Then without warning, Leslie did exactly what we asked him to do. He stood up, and that was when things really got scary.

To be honest, I never really wanted to be a cop. I joined the Arlington County (Virginia) Police Department in 1986, not long after graduating from Delaware State University, a historically black public university in Dover, Delaware. Representatives from the department visited our campus in my senior year and recruited me to join the department. I liked them, but I didn’t immediately commit. Still, I thought, depending on how my initial plans panned out, it could be a good fit.

My goal after graduating college was to become a starting offensive lineman in the National Football League. I played left and right guards and filled in at tackle from time to time. I was big, and I was fast. People, including me, thought I was pretty good. I made the All-Mid-Eastern Atlantic Conference team one year. So, I figured I’d give the NFL a try. That dream, however, was set back significantly when I was cut during tryouts with the New York Giants the summer after my graduation.

I had thought about following the typical career trajectory of guys trying to break into the NFL. You spend the year eating and lifting and running, trying to get bigger, stronger, and faster while working security at clubs and concerts to make ends meet until the next training camp. Some guys make it and others do it for as long as five years before giving in to the reality that they just weren’t good enough. I considered it, but my father, an electrician, and my mother, a secretary, took me aside and suggested it was time to move on with my life and start a career. The offer from the Arlington County Police Department was available and sounding better by the day. So I took it.

Arlington’s was one of the very few accredited police departments in the nation, which made them special. One of the requirements for all accredited police forces is that their officers must all be college graduates. I liked that. I thought it would make any organization much more professional and would mean fewer guys just looking to play cops and robbers. Arlington was also a very affluent area, a lot more than the neighborhood I grew up in. The median household income in Arlington is almost double the median household income for the rest of the nation. Consequently, it was also the highest-paying police department in the Washington, D.C. area, even higher than the police department in the nation’s capital. That particular fact really attracted me to the job.

Which is a roundabout way of explaining how I had come to this moment in time where I might have to shoot someone.

If I thought Leslie was big sitting down, he was a mountain standing up, at least 6-foot-8 and well over 300 pounds. I thought I was buff, but I was nothing compared to him. At this point, my partner and I were at an extreme disadvantage. Somebody could get hurt or worse. The only thing that I had that could really handle him without me or my partner getting hurt was my weapon. In 1986, tasers weren’t as readily available as they are now. So, to collect ourselves and manage a potentially volatile situation, we reversed our instructions.

“Sir, could you please sit down?” I said.

Leslie looked at me, confused. “I don’t want to sit down,” he responded. “She asked me to stand up, so I’m standing up.”

Now, we have this huge, possibly violent man standing in front of us and not following our command for him to sit down. Things were not good, and then Leslie heightened the tension. He said he needed to see his lover downstairs. Now that was not going to happen. We certainly weren’t going to allow a person who is accused of assaulting someone back into close proximity to the alleged victim. So, again we asked Leslie to sit down. He ignored us. We asked again. He refused. We asked again. He refused again.

My partner and I knew that we would be hard-pressed to arrest Leslie without additional support, based solely on his size. I had resigned myself to the fact that once we put hands on this very large man, if his noncompliance continued, lethal force might be necessary. We had choices to make. If we tried to handle him physically, we could both be hurt badly. If we had pulled our weapons at this point, our actions likely would have been defensible, and if, at some point in a struggle, we had shot Leslie, we probably would have been justified.

“I feared for my life” would have been my defense, and it would have been reasonable, though not completely accurate. That’s what the higher-ups tell officers to say when something goes awry. You learn it in the police academy and it becomes the mantra of every officer when any shootings occur. And who can prove that you weren’t in fear for your life, even if the fear was caused by something improper that you yourself did.

Here’s an example from a true story. On a winter afternoon in New York, an 18-year-old black male was seen leaving a local store. A police officer radioed in that he saw the teenager tugging at something in his waistband, possibly a gun. The teenager, however, was unarmed. Other police began to follow the man. The suspect didn’t know he was being followed. As the teenager neared his apartment building, police say they told him to stop but he ran into the apartment building. Video of the incident, however, shows the man casually walking into his home as though he never heard a command. The officers then tried to kick down the front door of the apartment building so they could get to the kid’s apartment. Remember, this was a teenager who might or might not have a gun, but police were trying to kick down a door to an entire apartment building.

When that didn’t work, two officers went to the back of the building, where they were let in by a first-floor tenant. They located the teenager’s apartment. The teenager was living with his grandmother. Officers went to her apartment, and she let them in. When the teenager saw the police, he ran into the bathroom and tried to flush a small bag of marijuana down the toilet. When he turned around, an officer shot him in the chest. The cop said, “I feared for my life.” We all agreed that at that point he may have actually feared for his life. Who could say otherwise? But here’s the other side. He created the situation that caused him to fear for his life and shoot that youngster. There was no reason to chase that kid into his house. The kid hadn’t committed a crime. There was no need to try to break down the door of the apartment building, home to numerous residents. Also, why did the officer go into the bathroom? The suspect had already been cornered. He was trapped in the bathroom, so why not wait outside? What if the kid did have a gun and was waiting for the officer to come in? Then the officer might have been killed, or there might have been a shootout and the grandmother might have been inadvertently killed. Now an unarmed man was dead, a family was grieving, and the officer was facing a disciplinary hearing, possibly a trial, possibly loss of his job. And for what? A few bags of marijuana?

My partner and I were trying to avoid a similar stupid mistake. So we were at a stalemate. We really didn’t want this encounter to go awry. We didn’t want to shoot an unarmed man over a lovers’ quarrel. The man who called us didn’t want his lover shot. But we were very, very close to some kind of force being used.

So I was standing at the ready. So was my partner. I could see her widening her stance almost imperceptibly in preparation for a struggle. Leslie was just looking at us, confused and frustrated. Then, right before we started taking things up a notch, Leslie began to weep. He put his face in his hands, tears running down his cheeks, and sat down. Inside, I breathed a deep sigh of relief and my sphincter muscle relaxed. We eventually convinced Leslie to walk out on his own, where we arrested him without incident.

The point of the story is this: Leslie was big, and he was black, but did that make him bad? I am big and I am black. Does that make me bad? I ask that question, because bad was the term a Tulsa, Oklahoma, police officer used to describe Terence Crutcher, an unarmed African-American man and father of four on September 17, 2016, just seconds before another Tulsa officer shot and killed him. The video of the incident has been seen by millions around the world.

Crutcher had stopped his vehicle on a Tulsa street when police received a 911 call a little after 7 p.m. about an abandoned vehicle in the middle of 36th Street North just west of Lewis Avenue. One caller said: “Somebody left their vehicle running in the middle of the street with the doors wide open. The vehicle is still running. It’s an SUV. It’s like in the middle of the street. It’s blocking traffic. There was a guy running from it, saying it was going to blow up. But I think he’s smoking something. I got out and was like, ‘Do you need help?’ He was like, ‘Come here, come here, I think it’s going to blow up.’”

The other caller said: “There is a car that looks like somebody just jumped out of it and left it in the center of the road on 36th Street North and North Lewis Avenue. It’s dead in the middle of the street. Nobody in the car.”

Judging by the 911 calls, police clearly knew something was wrong, even if they didn’t know exactly what. They had a car blocking traffic and possibly either a confused or high or disturbed man in the vicinity. None of the callers, however, mentioned a weapon or a threat of violence.

Officer Betty Shelby arrived on the scene first. Crutcher was standing in the road outside his car. Shelby exited her vehicle and almost immediately pulled her weapon. She gave Crutcher a series of verbal commands. At one point, he had his hands in his pockets. She told him to take them out. He did. Crutcher, however, didn’t say a word. Shelby had called for backup. Crutcher put his hands in the air in a surrender pose and began to walk back to his car. By now, at least four officers were at the scene in addition to a police helicopter overhead. Shelby drew her gun and she and another officer followed Crutcher as he walked to his car with his hands in the air. The other officer had his taser out. Shelby was the only officer with a gun drawn.

Officers in the helicopter overhead, which included Shelby’s husband, filmed the incident. With tensions high, an officer in the helicopter looked down at the scene and made this assessment: “That looks like a bad dude.” Two seconds later, Crutcher was shot dead—with one hand in the air and the other by his side. He was unarmed and there was no weapon in his car. When I saw the video footage, the comment from the cop in the helicopter really stuck in my head. It made me question everything that had happened.

What evidence made the officer conclude that Crutcher, 40, was a “bad dude”? He had never seen the man before, so he had no previous encounters on which to base his claim. He had not run the license plates on the car. If he had, he would have found that the car had not been stolen. He would have also found that Terence Crutcher, who was the registered owner of the car, was not wanted for any crime. Additionally, Crutcher had made no verbal or physical threats to anyone, not to the people who made the 911 calls, nor to any of the officers on the ground. Crutcher had no visible prison or gang tattoos, nor other visible markings that might indicate he was dangerous. He wasn’t wearing biker gear or clothing that glorified crime or violence. So, what made him a “bad dude”?

For the officer in that helicopter, Crutcher did have one telltale marking. He was a “male black.” Crutcher, like so many black men, was dead because too many of us view an African-American man as the real-life boogeyman. We are imbued with diabolical attributes and devious motives. Consequently, black men are suspected of wrongdoing, locked away, or gunned down.

In the court proceedings that followed, Shelby testified that she shot Crutcher because she feared for her life. There’s that ubiquitous phrase again. “I thought he was going to kill me,” she told a court. How did she come to that conclusion? For what reason would Crutcher want to harm Shelby? He was not an escaped fugitive. He was not wanted for any crime. He was not trying to escape or elude arrest. There were no signs that he was armed. He had not made any threatening gestures toward Shelby or the other officers. If anyone should have been in fear for his life, it was Crutcher. Shelby had her gun trained on him. He was surrounded by armed police. What reason could Crutcher possibly have had to want to harm Shelby? It strains credulity.

So, where did things go wrong? Let’s review the Crutcher shooting through a law enforcement lens. The goal of every law enforcement confrontation with a citizen should be to gain compliance in a situation that is safe for the person and safe for the officer. As an ATF agent and an agent training instructor at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Brunswick, Georgia, I’ve taught hundreds of officers how to handle themselves in these situations. In every encounter, officers should go through what we call a use-of-force continuum. There are five steps in the continuum. The officer’s first step is to establish presence. This is in some ways the most important step in the interaction between the officer and the people he or she is addressing. It’s sometimes called command presence. If officers present themselves well, no force is required in most cases. Presence encompasses the officer’s appearance and attitude. It should be professional and nonthreatening. It’s the way you look, the way you dress, the way you stand, the way you walk and carry yourself. You should exude confidence, but not arrogance. You need to look like you’re in command of yourself and you can handle whatever situation arises. You can be friendly and engaging, but you cannot appear to be someone who is not in control.

The next step is verbalization, which refers to the officer establishing verbal contact with the individual. The officer should give very clear, concise, nonthreatening instructions. If the officers have not established command presence, however, verbalization may not work. The guys on the corner or the couple in a domestic squabble have already dismissed you as out of touch or ineffective. So, nothing you say matters. That’s why I say command presence is so important. As you talk with people, your tone should be polite but authoritative. People need to know you mean business. “Good morning. I am Officer Matthew Horace. We are responding to a request for help. What seems to be the problem? You, sir. I need you to take 10 steps back and stand there. You, miss. Please go to that corner and my partner will talk to you.” Sometimes you must shorten commands or raise your voice. Unfortunately, some cops arrive on the scene and immediately start shouting commands, addressing people disrespectfully, and treating victims like suspects. African-Americans and Latinos know this response all too well.

The next step up is empty hand control. Now, you are using bodily contact to control the subject in a way that protects the individual and you. You may need to place one hand on the person’s back and grab the person’s arm with the other. You may be using that to move him to a different place temporarily or to put the person in a posture that is more secure for you and the person.

Now, if there is resistance, we start moving to the next level, which is stuff that doesn’t look good on video. We are now using intermediate force. Officers may have to use punches and kicks to restrain an individual. They can use batons or chemical sprays or Tasers to get the person under control. In some of our tactical takedowns, such as SWAT or special response teams, we’ve fired a bean bag round from a shotgun. It’s not lethal, but if you get hit with one, you’re going down. Under intermediate force, you may need to swarm an individual and take the person down to the ground. I’ve used this tactic numerous times. None of this stuff looks pretty, but the person is alive. The infamous beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1992, which ultimately set off the worst riot in the nation’s history, was shocking to watch. It was excessive, horrific, and criminal, but in the end King was still alive.

In Crutcher’s case, Betty Shelby skipped the use of intermediate force and went from verbalization immediately to the last step on the continuum—the lethal force that took Crutcher’s life. They did use a taser, but he was shot almost simultaneously. With so many officers on the scene, they could have rushed him and taken him to the ground. But they didn’t. If they feared he was going into the car to get a weapon, they could have retreated to a safe distance and fired on him the moment his hands disappeared into the car. They didn’t do that, either. Again, there was no evidence that Crutcher had a gun or that he was violent.

None of these situations are as simple as my textbook explanation. These encounters can take place over 30 minutes or longer, during which the officer has time to go through the continuum at a methodical pace, or they can happen in an explosion of less than 60 seconds. I’ve had it happen to me. You are trying to guide someone with an empty hand and the person pulls away. You then decide to make a hard grab and be more forceful, and boom, the individual swings at you. Now, you may have to use your baton across the femoral artery on the person’s thigh or the brachial artery on the person’s arm or kick the person in the back of the knee to bring the individual down.

But these are tactics I’m telling you about, when the real problem is the perception of African-American men, and, to some degree, African-American women, as inherent threats by their mere presence. In police parlance, it initially comes across the police radio with these three words: “suspicious black male.” I have heard this term too many times throughout my years in law enforcement, spoken as if the two last words in the phrase automatically prompted the first word in the description.

When I was on the police department in Virginia, I was often dispatched to calls of a “suspicious black male” and, in response, I would ask via the radio, “What is he doing?” My question was simple. Just what is he doing that makes him suspicious, other than being a black male? Generally, when I did this, my mostly white fellow officers would key the radio microphone to make a clicking sound in a show of sarcastic disapproval at my question, and a supervisor might call me to ensure that I was responding to the call. Most times these calls involved nothing more than a black man waiting for a bus; he was just waiting for the bus in the “wrong” neighborhood. Another time, a black guy was passing out flyers. Another time, a kid and his girlfriend had a tryst planned in a secret meeting place during the day. It was always innocuous stuff. It’s not that we shouldn’t investigate “suspicious” people, but what makes them suspicious?

For example, I was called to investigate a report of a suspicious white male. In this case, the call said, “suspicious white male, no shoes, no shirt, dirty blond hair.” What made him suspicious was not that he was a white male, but that he was shoeless and shirtless in the middle of December, a sign that he might have been high on PCP, because PCP users were always hot.

I approached him and told him I needed to speak with him. He replied, “Fuck you, nigger.” I immediately called for backup because PCP imbues users with extraordinary strength when they are high.

If we have an inherent fear of or bias against blacks, they are always going to be suspicious. Even as a federal agent, I have been on surveillance or supporting an operation and have had an officer approach me and say that neighbors called about a “suspicious” vehicle, which meant it was a black guy driving a car. I’ve been the man in that suspicious vehicle.

When I was assigned to Seattle, Washington, as assistant special agent in charge of other ATF agents and police officers in seven northwestern states and Guam in 2002, I lived in a golf course community in Mill Creek. It was a great little community just north of Seattle. The community had about 1,000 homes developed in manicured clusters that centered around a world-class golf course. My subdivision had 103 homes and there were two African-American men in this neighborhood. There may have been a total of six black men in the entire community.

I had been living in Mill Creek for a little over a year when I was driving my newer-model Mercedes-Benz through the development and noticed flashing lights behind me. The way the community was engineered really didn’t allow you to speed. So, I was confused and concerned. Why was a sheriff’s deputy stopping me? The officer asked me for my driver’s license and registration. I gave it to him and asked what I had done.

I also presented my federal ATF credentials, to which he responded that he didn’t recognize my vehicle as one with which he was familiar. At this point, I’m thinking, Is he familiar with every car and every person in the development? He could have followed me, had my tag run, and realized that I lived in the community and that both my license and registration were current. But let’s assume that I didn’t live in the community. Let’s assume that I was lost or visiting a friend or admiring the homes or checking out the neighborhood because I might want to move there. That’s not probable cause to stop me. None of those activities make me “suspicious.” And, just for argument’s sake, what crime would a guy in a newer-model Mercedes be up to in this neighborhood? A burglary? A robbery? A drive-by shooting? My car was worth more than anything I could steal. What rational reason could he give for stopping me?

None.

I subsequently made an appointment with a commander in the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Department and explained who I was and what had happened. I also told him which vehicles my wife and I drove, including my federal undercover vehicle, and advised him that I never expected to be stopped by anyone in his department ever again unless I had committed a violation. And I wasn’t.

Not once have any of my white friends and colleagues told me they have been stopped under similar situations. Why not? Because African-Americans live with a double standard and our actions are interpreted differently than those of our white counterparts.

Not long ago, I was walking into a hardware store in my suburban Pennsylvania community and stood in line behind a white man with a holstered firearm. He was clean-shaven and well-dressed, in khaki pants and a polo shirt. I assumed that he was a local police officer. Nobody was alarmed or anxious by his presence. I thought to myself, even if he were a cop, how could every person in the hardware store know that he was? Perhaps the employees, but certainly not all the customers.

Here’s the other side. In 28 years of dutifully carrying a firearm as part of my job, I’ve never walked into a commercial establishment with my weapon openly displayed. Scores of black law enforcement officers I have known for years do the same. We would never want that call to go into dispatch that a black man with a gun was in the store. Even if we were wearing khaki pants, penny loafers, and a tennis sweater, I would fear that the law enforcement response would not be a positive one. There is a boogeyman effect when radio traffic says, “black man with a gun” that escalates the response, no matter what the conditions.

John Crawford, for example, was casually shopping in a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio, on August 13, 2014, with his pregnant girlfriend. As Crawford’s girlfriend wandered off to one part of the store, he headed toward the other and the two began a conversation via cell phone. At some point in their conversation, Crawford, 22, casually picked up a toy gun from a store shelf with his left hand while still talking on the phone with his right. A white shopper, Ronald T. Ritchie, saw him with the toy rifle and called the police. He told the dispatcher a black man was armed with a rifle and was menacing customers in Walmart.

“He’s pointing it at people,” Ritchie said.

Ritchie then told the police dispatcher he was watching as it appeared Crawford was trying to load the gun. He also told police Crawford was pointing the rifle at children. With Ritchie on the telephone continually describing a situation to the dispatcher, police rushed to the store. They made their way into Walmart, down the aisle, and within one second of their approaching Crawford, he was shot dead. After the shooting, Ritchie’s wife, who was with him in Walmart, posted on Facebook how she saw Crawford load the weapon and menace people.

Tragically, the entire incident was built on a lie and the fear of a black man with a gun. Walmart surveillance footage showed Crawford never pointed the toy rifle at anyone, never waved it around in a menacing manner, never even pretended he was going to shoot it. Instead, it was by his side as he walked the aisles and talked on the phone with his girlfriend. In fact, footage showed Crawford was pointing the rifle to the floor and was on the phone when Ritchie told the dispatcher, “He just pointed it at, like, two children.” Crawford encountered two sets of parents and their children. Neither showed alarm or even excitement in response to Crawford’s presence. The second parent, Angela Williams, a 37-year-old white woman, however, died of a heart attack as she tried to pull her two children to safety in the chaos of the shooting. The local coroner ruled her death a homicide because the panic of the shooting caused her heart to go into arrhythmia. Her teenage son blamed her death on Ritchie. “I hope that he’s happy with himself,” he said after the incident.

Afterward, a special prosecutor was appointed to review the case, and presented evidence to a grand jury that the officers who shot Crawford had done nothing wrong. The same special prosecutor declined to prosecute Ritchie after a local judge later found there were grounds for Ritchie to be charged with a crime for the erroneous statements that led to Crawford’s death.

Three months later, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was playing cops and robbers 200 miles upstate in Cleveland with a toy gun a relative had given him. He had been inside a local community center for a while until officials there shooed him outside into the November cold and snow of a local park. Rice walked around the park pointing his toy weapon at imaginary villains. Someone saw him and called the police to report a black man in the park pointing a pistol at random people. The caller twice told the police, “It’s probably fake,” referring to the pistol. Toward the end of the two-minute call, the caller said, “He is probably a juvenile.” The dispatcher, however, never relayed that information in the request for officers to respond.

Instead, police were told via radio only “of a male black sitting on a swing and pointing a gun at people.” Two police officers, Timothy Loehmann, 26, and Frank Garmback, 46, heard the information and sped to the park. Garmback drove the car recklessly within six feet of Rice, clearly bad tactical procedure. If Rice had been an actual shooting threat, Garmback would have put the officers at risk of being shot by placing them directly in the line of fire with no protection. As the car came to a halt, Loehmann immediately exited the vehicle, gun drawn, and shot Rice within seconds of leaving the car while shouting directions for him to drop the gun.

Rice died a day later.

As in the case of Crawford and hundreds of others, an unarmed black male was dead, and nobody was at fault. Following a grand jury hearing, police officers were not indicted for any criminal conduct.

Ironically, a year later just 45 miles away in Akron, Ohio, a white male, Daniel Kovacevic, strolled through black neighborhoods with an assault rifle slung across his back. Kovacevic wore a black ski cap pulled far down on his head that covered his hair and sunglasses that hid his eyes. Residents called the police. He was not shot. Instead, officers can be seen on a video explaining to black residents that Kovacevic was just exercising his constitutional right in Ohio to openly carry a weapon without threat of violence from others or the police, just as any person in Ohio does… except for John Crawford and Tamir Rice.

As jury after judge after jury has refused to find officers guilty of anything, including misdemeanor charges, in deaths of unarmed black men and boys, America is saying to us that it is officially reasonable to be afraid of a person just because he is black. And because you fear him, it is okay to kill him.

For me, the most startling example of the boogeyman effect was illustrated in a recent study on justifiable homicide. Only 2 out of every 100 homicides in America are ruled justifiable by law enforcement. For a homicide to be justified, it must be a “homicide that is committed in self-defense, in defense of another and especially a member of one’s family or sometimes in defense of a residence, in preventing a felony especially involving great bodily harm, or in performing a legal duty and that is justified under the law,” according to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary.

That 2 percent figure holds true virtually for every racial scenario except for when a white person shoots a black person. For instance, when Hispanics killed black men, 5.5 percent were ruled justifiable. When whites killed Hispanics, 3.1 percent, or 3 out of 100, were justified. When blacks killed blacks, the number was 2 percent, and when blacks killed whites, less than 1 percent were found to be justifiable.

But when a white male killed a black man, the number skyrocketed; 16 percent were deemed lawful, eight times the rate for African-Americans.

By now, most of us have seen the statistics that show the disproportionate stops of African-Americans on highways, streets, and in neighborhoods. We have seen the statistics that also show that stops of white drivers are 30 percent more likely than stops of African-Americans to reveal drugs and contraband. Yet police still suspect African-Americans at double, triple, even five times the rate of white Americans. And the race of the officer doesn’t seem to matter. In Baltimore, where black cops make up 52 percent of the police department, one man was stopped and questioned more than 20 times without any charges ever being filed. Each specious stop deepens the divisions between the African-American community and the police. And each encounter creates a possibility that somebody—police officers and/or citizens—will be harmed.

I’ve had this discussion with lots of my white friends, and most nod their heads in acknowledgment, but I can tell many of them don’t truly believe it, even coming from me, a cop. One person told me that when hearing of these encounters, he has always assumed the person did something wrong to cause the police officer to respond in a deadly manner. A friend’s wife told me, during a discussion of the shooting of a black man, that she simply rejected all this talk that these incidents were somehow related to race. “How can you say it had anything to do with race unless the policeman said something racist or he was wearing a KKK shirt or something?” she asked.

I understand that, for most of my white friends, it just isn’t part of their reality. However, when one African-American they know—a friend, a colleague, a coworker, a celebrity, even a United States senator—states this is a reality, why is it so hard to believe? I point to US Senator Tim Scott (R-South Carolina), a staunchly conservative black Republican and one of only three African-American members of the Senate. Scott and I have never met. We are as different as cornbread and Kool-Aid.

He is from a small Southern town. I grew up in urban northwest Philadelphia. He was raised by a single mom who struggled mightily and successfully to raise him and his two brothers. I had the good fortune of two parents who both worked good-paying jobs. He graduated from a private, mostly white religious college, steeped in the teachings of the Southern Baptist Convention. My higher education was at a public, historically black university that was formed because for years African-Americans were not permitted to attend most white colleges and universities.

He is a strong and outspoken supporter of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who wanted to bring back the days of harsh sentencing and police tactics initiated during the war on drugs that devastated black communities. As I will discuss in the next chapter, I was in the forefront of that mistaken policy with the Bureau of Alcohol and Firearms and helped lock up hundreds of thousands of black men and women as the nation marched off in the wrong direction. I never want to go there again. Scott is staunchly to the right. I am more middle of the road.

Despite our differences, we are bound together by the threat of law enforcement because of the color of our skin and our gender.

Scott passionately told his own story on the US Senate floor in 2016, following a series of highly publicized police shootings. He talked about the fear, anxiety, and shame he felt the very first time he was stopped by an officer. “The cop came up to my car, hand on his gun, and said, ‘Boy, don’t you know your headlight is not working properly?’” He said that, even as an elected official, he had been stopped seven times in one year, on one of those occasions because the officer said he thought Scott was driving a stolen car. Yes, he said, he was speeding twice, “but the vast majority of the times, I was pulled over for nothing more than driving a new car in the wrong neighborhood or some other reason just as trivial.”

He recounted how his brother, who had achieved the highest rank in the US Army for an enlisted man, was stopped during a trip from Texas to visit family in Charleston. The police officer told his brother he stopped him because he was driving a Volvo, and black people don’t usually drive Volvos. For that reason, the officer told him, he thought the car might be stolen. Scott told of a young black man who worked in his office and drove a “nice car,” a Chrysler 300. He had been pulled over so many times that he sold the car to stop the harassment. Near the end of his speech, Scott, a black man far to the right politically of the vast majority of other black men in America, uttered words that spoke for all of us.

“I do not know many African-American men who do not have a very similar story to tell, no matter their profession, no matter their income, no matter their disposition in life,” he said. “Imagine the frustration, the irritation, the sense of a loss of dignity that accompanies each of those stops. I have felt the anger, the frustration, the sadness, and the humiliation that comes with feeling like you’re being targeted for nothing more than being just yourself.”

As part of my effort to further explore this issue, I traveled to St. Louis and Ferguson, Missouri, where the police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in 2014 sparked rioting and reignited the decades-old conversation about the shootings of African-Americans by police. Brown’s death was followed quickly by the killings of other African-Americans by police. They galvanized this new discussion. I wanted to understand what sparked the incident in Ferguson. What had been happening in a town of only 21,000 people that has pushed us to where we are now? What I soon discovered was that, for black residents in Ferguson and in St. Louis, the relationships between African-Americans and the police were nearly identical.

As I met people, I encountered a wonderful young woman named Amy Hunter. She gave me a deeper understanding of just how personal and deep the fear, the anguish, and the anxiety about police stops goes for African-American parents.

She is the manager of diversity and inclusion at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, one of the city’s major medical institutions. Hunter lives in the upscale University City neighborhood of St. Louis, where median incomes run about $100,000 and where crime is largely an afterthought. There are no drug houses on the corner, no drive-by shootings, no gang bangers at every turn. Still, she and her then-husband made a pact that they would give them “the talk,” the conversation many black parents have with their children about the special procedures they must follow when they are invariably stopped by police.

“We sat them down and told them how to behave if the police should stop them,” Hunter told me over the dining room table of a friend in an even wealthier St. Louis suburb. “We told them, don’t smart off, regardless of what they say. Do exactly what they tell you to do. We just want you to come home safe. We will handle whatever happens. We don’t want to have to identify your body because you’ve been shot by a police officer.”

Hunter was also one of the hundreds of protesters who lined the streets of Ferguson night after night following the shooting of Michael Brown. By her count, she was on the street nearly every day following the shooting, including the freezing-cold nights when they protested against the backdrop of the city’s Christmas decorations that read SEASON’S GREETINGS. She was tear-gassed and held at gunpoint with M-16 rifles pointed at her chest.

I asked her why an upper-middle-class woman who didn’t live in Ferguson and who had not experienced what its residents endured at the hands of police would be so dedicated to the Ferguson protest. I reminded her that she had told me her sons were now grown and doing quite well. It certainly must not have sat well with her employers that she was out there every day, putting herself at risk, I observed. Why would she do something like that? She looked at me with a kind, almost patronizing look, and then she told me a story.

When her sons were 12, she dropped one off to hang out with his friends in an area in University City called the Delmar Loop. The Loop is a popular entertainment district filled with specialty shops, restaurants, and music venues. Unless he was touring, local resident and rock-and-roll pioneer Chuck Berry performed there almost weekly until his death in 2017. When Hunter’s son arrived in the Loop, his friends were drinking. He knew that was a no-no, so he decided to walk home. He lived less than a mile away. When her son was about five houses away from home, he would later tell his mother, he saw police following him. Ultimately, he said, he was stopped, questioned, and searched. The police told him they stopped him because he matched the description of a man carrying a machete. “He was 12,” Hunter said. “He was 5 feet tall.” She recalled how flustered her son was when he arrived home, frustrated and trying to make sense of it all.

“He was asking all these questions because he was trying to understand it,” she said. Her son told her he had done as she instructed, but he still couldn’t understand why the officer stopped him.

“He said, ‘But, Mom, I’m wearing khaki pants and a polo shirt and a belt and it’s tucked in, and I have on Sperry Top-Siders.’ It was as if he thought his clothes could save him from the experience. But there’s nothing he could wear that would save him from that, and I knew it. So, he said, ‘Mom, I want to know, is it because I’m black?’

“I said, ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’” Her son continued to ask questions, she said. She could tell that he was troubled by the experience—the fear of being stopped by men with guns, the uncertainty of the outcome, the vulnerability. And as he talked, she could see that he was trying to hold back the tears that were welling up in his eyes.

“He looked at me and said, ‘Mommy, I just want to know how long this will last.’ And then I looked at my 12-year-old son, now with tears rolling down my face, and I said to him, ‘For the rest of your life.’”

She looked down for a few seconds and then back up at me. Now, she had tears in her eyes.

“That’s why I went to Ferguson,” she said. “I want this to stop.”