Tony April

Captain, Alaska State Trooper

When I was growing up, I couldn’t stand cops. I would see a cop and they would come into my neighborhood and treat everybody like criminals. Cops would call us niggers or boy. “Get off my street, boy,” “Nigger, get out of here.” They were always insulting us, saying something to demean us. It was like being on a plantation; the neighborhood was all black and almost all the cops were white. They liked to wear these mirror sunglasses, and they wore their shirts tight. Everybody hated them. Their profanity: “Fuck this, fuck that.” Our perception was that if you were a cop, you killed black people to get promoted. That’s the way we looked at it, because that’s what it seemed like was happening.

In 1979, they beat a black man to death. He was on a motorcycle and they chased him. So, when I was a kid, there were two things I said I would never do. I would never join the military and I would never be a cop. I ended up doing both.

I grew up in Miami in a neighborhood called the Goulds, right down the street from a housing project called Cutler Manor. We had a big family. There were 10 of us—6 girls and 4 boys. I was sixth out of the bunch. We had two loving parents. My mother, Jimmie April, stayed home and looked after us. My father, Robert Claude April, was a no-nonsense guy. He’d kill you in a minute if you messed with his family.

I finished basic training in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and where do you think they stationed me, a kid from the Goulds? Anchorage, Alaska! They sent a Florida boy who had never even seen snow to Anchorage, Alaska, the coldest place in America. That was crazy. The only good thing about it was that I met my wife there.

In 1991, I joined the Alaska National Guard and in 1994, I started working for the Alaska Department of Corrections. That was a tough job. I worked in the segregation unit where inmates were locked down 23 of 24 hours a day, where they could not come out of their cells. The prisoners were mostly whites and Alaskan natives. There were lots of skinheads and white supremacists—and me.

I had one inmate, every day he’d say, “Hey, nigger, bring me my food” or “Nigger, bring me my paper.” I’d walk by and he’d spit on my shoes. My biggest thing was to avoid reading their [criminal histories]. It revealed what crimes they were in for. I didn’t want to read their jackets so I wouldn’t develop a bias against them. I wanted to see them as human beings.

I joined the Alaska State Troopers in 1997. As a trooper, you spend 15½ weeks in the academy and then you go through 3½ months of field training. When I was in the academy, everybody told me, whatever you do, you don’t want to go to Palmer, Alaska, for field training. They had a reputation for [terminating recruits]. Of course, I was sent to Palmer.

One day, I came back to the station and saw a trooper who I later learned was completing an application background check on another applicant. I asked, “What are you doing?”

“Trying to keep people like you off the force,” he shot back.

Near the end of my probation period, my evaluation read so bad that it seemed like I didn’t know how to walk and chew gum at the same time. The sergeant in charge threatened me: “I’m going to fire your ass in two weeks.” I thought about quitting right then and went home to tell my wife that I was done! But a fellow trooper who was white said, “Don’t quit. That’s just what they want you to do.” So, I stayed.

They assigned me to Bubba Cox, who was the hardest FTO (training officer) that we had. He was a no-nonsense, no-soft-spots, straight-shooter guy. Bubba and I went on a call one day. He told me to handle it. But this white guy began talking to Bubba and totally ignored me. Bubba interrupted him, “Sir, this is the officer you should be talking with. He is handling this call.” The guy ignored the comment and just kept talking to Bubba. Finally, Bubba said, “Okay, we’re done. If you don’t want to talk to him, we’re out of here.” And we left.

The last day of my training, Bubba and I pulled up at the station. I didn’t know if I had passed or failed. “Before you get out,” Bubba said, “I want to let you know, I didn’t give you a damn thing. Everything you got you earned.” I’ll never forget, Bubba had a little tear that streamed down his face.

Two years later I was chosen as Trooper of the Year.