I was 28 years old and hadn’t done a damn thing wrong, but there I stood in fear for my life on a hot afternoon on a Providence, Rhode Island, street. A white man in blue jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers was pointing a very large gun at me and threatening to turn my head into a canoe.
“Get your ass on the ground right now,” he said. “Don’t you move a fucking inch.”
He didn’t say “nigger,” but he might as well have. The barrel of his gun looked as wide as New York City’s Lincoln Tunnel. From the nature of his commands, I figured he was probably a cop. If not, I was in real trouble. Bad guys don’t give commands. They just shoot. The probability of him being a police officer, however, just made things worse. On this afternoon, I was a federal law enforcement officer in the middle of a case, and I was about to be shot by another law enforcement officer who thought that since I was the only black man around, I must be the criminal.
It was the summer of 1990. George H. W. Bush was president, Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, and HIV/AIDS was so new that contracting the disease was considered a death sentence. The Honda Accord and the Ford Taurus were the top-selling cars. Hip-hop and rap music had taken hold; so, as part of my job, I was dressed in a Coca-Cola T-shirt, some cool jeans, and my Fila sneakers, doing my best to look like a cross between Ice Cube and LL Cool J.
America was in the midst of the infamous war on drugs, and as a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, I was at its center. Making things right, or so I thought.
Like most African-Americans, I had no idea then that this “war” would devastate black communities as much as, if not more than, the narcotics. By the early 1990s, however, cocaine use had reached epidemic proportions. The industry was driven by sales and consumption in white America. White Americans made up 80 percent of the users and sellers, but cocaine’s most visible and devastating effects were seen in African-American communities, where cheap crack cocaine reigned.
Twenty-four-hour violence washed over black neighborhoods as drug dealers and addicts put down roots. Addicted women—mothers, young teenagers, professionals, and nonprofessionals—were reduced to trading oral sex for meager sums to feed their addictions. Families were ripped apart. Neighborhoods, including the one where I grew up, were ravaged. I was reminded of the impact of the crack epidemic every time I visited my mother and father in our North Philadelphia row house. A community of once neatly trimmed lawns now included boarded-up houses that were used for sex and getting high. There were three drug houses on my parents’ block. Street corners where some of us idled away parts of our adolescence were now controlled by dealers and their runners and lookouts. Crack zombies, adults searching aimlessly for their next high, meandered down vacant twilight streets. My mom sometimes couldn’t sleep because she feared what might happen. Every time I visited my parents and saw what cocaine had done to my neighborhood, I knew I was definitely doing the right thing. Get the drugs. Get the dealers. Get the guns.
Part of my new job with ATF was working undercover, which is always dangerous and always tricky. My assignment on this particular day was to purchase a gun and drugs from a Latino man we had been tracking for a while. He wasn’t Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, but he was a major player on the local drug scene. A conviction on drugs alone could result in significant prison time, but under the new federal sentencing guidelines, possession of a weapon brought enhanced, longer sentences. So, we wanted both.
In our strategy meeting before the bust, we had gone over the plan. After I purchased the drugs and the weapon, I would walk a safe distance away and give the arrest signal through a microphone wired to my body. Everything went as planned. I had the guns and the drugs. I was walking away. “Move in now,” I said into my microphone. Mission completed. It’s time for a beer. But as my team members made the arrest, a plainclothes Providence police officer, not involved in the operation, heard the radio traffic—“Move in, move in. Suspect on the move”—and descended on me.
The suspect’s description and mine couldn’t have been more different. I was the wrong color, the wrong size, and the wrong ethnicity. The cop, however, had apparently heard all he needed. There was a suspect, and, me being a black guy under 30, I was him. Fortunately, another Providence police officer who was part of the undercover operation intervened. The officer apologized, though, I admit, I wasn’t in the mood for offering forgiveness after coming that close to possibly losing my life. My guys had to pull me back to keep me from punching him out.
What I experienced that day in a 10-second, near-death exchange encapsulates what it is like to be “black in blue” in America, the dichotomy, the fragility, and even the peculiar dangers of being an African-American law enforcement officer. You are part of the law enforcement team, but not so much so that there aren’t risks. Like your white colleagues, you are sworn to protect and serve, but soon after taking the oath, you discover that your duties include protecting the minority communities you serve from racist, bigoted, or biased actions of fellow police officers—black and white.
You wear a uniform that represents decades of inequity, insensitivity, and brutality imposed on African-Americans. Consequently, your own communities often eye you with suspicion and distrust, even disregard. Yet, nowhere is your presence more desperately needed than in disenfranchised black communities that are misunderstood and devalued by the rest of society. Where your white or even Latino counterparts often see fear and potential criminals at every turn, you see a historical African-American narrative of people struggling against the odds to create a better life for their families. You differentiate between the teenagers who just want to play basketball and the real predators. You know the financial and environmental pressures of that single mother who is doing her damnedest to raise her children on a meager income in a community with an indifferent education system, dramatically limited services, and few recreational opportunities. She doesn’t always succeed, but she’s trying. You see grandmothers and aunts and uncles and cousins and fathers, where some just see suspects. These circumstances may mirror the reality of officers of all races and ethnicities, but in America, skin tone tends to color our vision, no matter what our background.
As a black cop, it becomes part of your job to navigate this maze, and serve differing cultures for the sake of the greater good. And, while doing so, you know that missteps allowed for your brethren and fellow officers are not allowed for you. Your mistake could end your life.
That may sound like an exaggeration, but Natalia Harding knows this story all too well. Harding lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is a slight woman, regally adorned with carefully coiffed gray hair. We sat in her neat, compact living room and she told me how her son, Omar Edwards, had wanted to be a cop since he was 5 years old. “I don’t know where it came from,” she said as she showed me photos from his youth. “Nobody in our family ever had much to do with police,” Harding recalled. She said that when he was 10, he began hanging around the 73rd Precinct station house on East New York Avenue in Brooklyn. He would help out and ask officers what the codes on the police radio meant. In 2007, he graduated from the New York Police Academy at age 23 and became “one of New York’s finest.” He was so proud of his achievement that he wore his badge around his apartment the whole day. “He loved the job,” she said. “He was so proud of what he was doing. He felt like he was making a difference.”
Two years later, Omar, now a newlywed of only three weeks and the father of two small children, was dead. He was shot and killed by a white police officer who saw Omar chasing a man who had broken into Omar’s car, and assumed he was the bad guy. Omar had wrestled with the thief, but he broke free, and Omar, his gun drawn, gave chase. Not until officers tore open Omar’s shirt as he lay handcuffed and dying on the street, did they see his police academy T-shirt and realize that the black man they had shot three times, once in the back, was one of their own.
What happened to Omar is a painful reminder to every black law enforcement officer that we are different. We live by different rules.
The truth is, it’s amazing that so many African-American men and women are cops, considering our collective and personal history with police. The gulf between our communities is as old as the racist laws and mores that police officers have been called on to enforce against African-Americans, Asians, and Latinos in America for more than 100 years, from Alabama to Arizona, California to Connecticut, Maryland to Montana, Texas to Tennessee, West Virginia to Washington state, and not just in the South.
Police officers were on the front lines, the daily enforcers of racial segregation and discrimination. It was their duty to arrest African-Americans for being in white neighborhoods or being downtown after dark, for attempting to drink from whites-only water fountains, using whites-only restrooms, entering whites-only restaurants and other public establishments, sitting in the whites-only section on public transportation, talking too loud in the presence of white women, and for not getting off the sidewalks when whites walked by. In 35 states, they were required to arrest citizens for marrying someone outside their race.
Police forces across the South would arrest thousands of black men and women, most often for the false crime of vagrancy (not having a job), to support a system of forced labor. Under an arrangement that didn’t end until just before World War II, those black men and women were then leased as cheap labor to states, local governments, white farmers, and corporations, including U.S. Steel, then the largest company in the world.
In some cases, as in the public lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith on August 7, 1930, in Marion, Indiana, police were participants in meting out “justice.”
In 2016, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, America’s largest police management organization, recognized the historical role police have played as enforcers of racist and discriminatory policies by issuing a formal apology to the nation’s minority population “for the actions of the past and the role that our profession has played in society’s historical mistreatment of communities of color.” Terrence Cunningham, then-president of IACP, said on behalf of the organization’s 23,000 members at the association’s annual convention, “There have been times when law enforcement officers, because of the laws enacted by federal, state, and local governments, have been the face of oppression for far too many of our fellow citizens.”
Because of cops’ historical role in perpetrating brutality against black communities, almost none of my family or friends were thrilled about my decision to enter law enforcement. I grew up in Philadelphia during a time when a high school dropout named Frank Rizzo ran the Philadelphia Police Department, which viewed all African-American residents of Philly as criminals. A racist, a bigot, and a bully, Rizzo would later become mayor and appoint his brother to run the fire department. Before his ascent to top cop, Rizzo once told a reporter that he would be so vicious as police commissioner that “I’m going to make Attila the Hun look like a faggot.”
Several times during his career, Rizzo was charged with beating suspects in his custody with a blackjack. But the charges were always dismissed. He personally led Saturday night roundups of gays and staged a series of raids on coffeehouses and cafés. He claimed they were drug dens. Not one person was ever charged with a crime as a result of those raids. In 1972, shortly before Rizzo resigned as police commissioner to run for mayor, he ordered police to raid the Black Panthers headquarters, herd its members into the street, and force them to strip naked. That left a bad taste in the mouth of African-American residents of Philly. Even now, some still spit at the mention of his name.
My personal encounters with police had been mundane until 1983, in large part because of my parents. They barred me from street corners and other innocent locations that might draw police attention. They wouldn’t even let me go to the Parliament/Funkadelic concert that e-v-e-r-y-b-o-d-y was planning to attend for fear that something might happen and police would be called. But in 1983, our beloved Philadelphia 76ers, led by Julius “Dr. J.” Erving and Moses Malone, won the National Basketball Association Championship after six long years of coming so torturously close. That year, I was a sophomore at Delaware State University, home for the summer, and there was no way I was going to miss the celebration in downtown Philly.
When I came out of the subway staircase on the east side of City Hall, however, I was met by a snarling German shepherd followed by four or five cops, coming right at me. I turned to head back into the subway, but I didn’t move fast enough. Next thing I knew, I was holding on to a traffic-light pole and screaming as a police K-9 dog ripped off my right sneaker and began gnawing on my foot. A police officer finally pulled the dog off me and told me to “get the fuck out of here.” The dogs and the officer disappeared into the crowd, but I wasn’t in shape to go anywhere. Some people helped me hobble a few blocks to 13th and Market streets and turned me over to two other police officers.
I told them I had been bitten by a police dog, and they drove me to Hahnemann University Hospital. I was there for a week, long enough to be pissed. My irate father called a black editor he knew at the Philadelphia Inquirer, the city’s daily newspaper. The editor, Acel Moore, assigned the story to a white reporter named Bill Marimow, who later earned two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his work on this story. Marimow wrote 40 stories on how a corps of K-9 officers and their dogs, who were out of control, routinely used their dogs to attack people. His report changed the way the Philadelphia K-9 units worked.
Once out of the hospital, I did my own investigation. I found the report that the officers turned in after dropping me off at the hospital. Under the section that asked for an explanation of my injuries, they had written “unknown,” even though I told them I had been bitten by a police dog. That stunned me.
So, it doesn’t take much more to explain why being a law enforcement officer wasn’t at the top of my list of desired professions. Most of the African-American cops I know have a story like mine or had a similar initial ambivalence about becoming a cop.
Lisa Montague is retired now from the Baltimore City Police Department after 19 years. She had a good career, rose to the rank of sergeant, and has one of the best minds I’ve ever met when it comes to day-to-day law enforcement and how to deal with the myriad of problems police face as they go about their jobs. I loved hearing Montague explain how she and so many women officers worked through various situations by using brainpower instead of brawn. There were some scary stories, but one of my favorites was a simple shoplifting case.
“I get to the store and I see a guy taking off down the street with the can of pork and beans in his hand,” Montague said. “The store manager is chasing behind him. The manager turns to me and says, ‘Aren’t you going to go after him?’
“I said, ‘For a can of pork and beans? No, sir. He’s a local. I will see him later and arrest him then.’ Now, some young male cop might have chased him to settle it ‘mano a mano.’ But that’s just macho stuff. It may look good, but it’s not effective policing. I couldn’t believe it, but when I got back to the squad room, I found out the store manager had reported me to my sergeant.”
“What did your sergeant say?” I asked.
“He asked if that’s what happened. I said, ‘Yes it did. There were no bodies, nobody was injured, no broken windows. So, no, I’m not chasing down a suspect for a can of beans.’ He just laughed.”
For all Montague’s skill, achievements, and love for her job, like me, she never wanted to be a police officer. Never.
“I didn’t look at them as people,” she told me, “because they didn’t treat us like people when I was growing up. As I got older, I’d watch the way they dealt with blacks. It was a power thing. You do what I tell you to do. They come into your home, You shut up and you sit down. They were supposed to be there to protect us, but that’s not what happened. We had a saying in my neighborhood, ‘Be careful when you call 911, because you don’t know who is coming.’”
After graduating from high school, Montague completed two years of college and began looking for employment. “I knew I needed a job, and I didn’t want a regular job. I wanted a city, state, or federal job. That’s what we were always taught by our family. Those were the good jobs. So, I applied everywhere, the post office, social security, and the police department.
“The police department was the first one to call. I didn’t want to be a police officer, but I needed a job. Even when I started at the police academy, I was always hoping that some other [agency] would call, and I could get out, because I did not want to be a police officer.”
In interviewing many African-American officers around the country for this book, I found that a lot of them did not like cops growing up and never intended to become one. Carl Williams didn’t want to be a police officer, either. Williams had a distinguished career as an officer in the nation’s capital until he was shot by a neighborhood hoodlum during a 1974 Christmas party that he and other officers were throwing for the children in southeast Washington. He was shot in the arm and stomach and left the service a year later.
Williams is a Vietnam veteran who was also injured during one of the war’s most brutal battles. He grew up poor in West Baltimore, which was the major reason he enlisted in the military. As a kid, he said, there were so many people in the house, not only did he not have a bedroom, he didn’t even have a permanent bed. “I slept where I could find a place every night,” he told me as we sat in the den of his home in Gwynn Oak, Maryland. From Williams’s home, we could see the site of a former “whites-only” park, Gwynn Oak Amusement Park. During an eight-year campaign to desegregate the facility, Williams’s future wife, Lydia, unofficially integrated the park in 1963 by walking right in. Her skin complexion was so light that park officials thought she was white. Her bold move and continued protests from blacks in the area led to the park’s official desegregation on August 23, 1963, when an 11-year-old black girl rode the park’s “whites-only” carousel on the same day the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in the nation’s capital. That very same carousel now sits in the center of the Smithsonian Museums on the National Mall in Washington, where hundreds of thousands of children and adults from around the world ride it annually.
Williams became a D.C. police officer following his time in the US Air Force, where he was assigned to the military police. He rose to the rank of sergeant in the District of Columbia Police Department at age 24. He couldn’t assume the position, however, until a year later, in part because he had completed all the requirements before the traditional age when officers are made sergeants.
That was ironic, because Williams joined the military to get away from Baltimore and its racist police, he told me. One of the things he wanted as an adolescent was a pair of shoes popular with him and his friends. They were only sold downtown at a shoe store called Manchester’s. Downtown Baltimore in the 1960s was a place where segregation in restaurants, stores, and other facilities was vigorously enforced.
“There was separate everything. My grandmother had told me repeatedly not to go downtown by myself, because everything was segregated, and you were pretty much at the mercy of the police and other white folks when you went there. But I wanted those shoes,” he said with a smile. “You know how it is when you’re young.”
So, one day he slipped downtown and not long afterward, emerged from Manchester’s with his prized possession under his arm. Not long after he came out of the store, he was stopped by two Baltimore cops.
“They were red-faced, and I could smell the alcohol on them,” he recalled. “They stopped me and said, ‘What you got in that bag, nigger?’
“I told them it was shoes. They took the bag and opened the box and started making fun of the shoes because they had these pointed toes, which was the style back then. One of them said, ‘Yeah, nigger, you can use these shoes to kill the roaches in the corner.’
“Then they asked me for a receipt. Being young, I had left it at the store. I definitely didn’t want to lose my shoes, so I said, ‘Sir, the store is still open. We can go back to the store and they can tell you I just bought them.’ They didn’t want to do that. They slapped me and pushed me around some and then gave me back the shoes. They said, ‘Get the hell out of here, nigger,’ and I left. I never told my grandmother, because she would have beat my ass for going down there in the first place. Everybody in our neighborhood already didn’t like police because of the way they treated us. They would just come into your house—no warrant, no nothing—and talk to you like you weren’t even human. But after that incident, being a cop was the last thing I wanted to do.”
Even as African-Americans became cops, we were segregated and discriminated against at every turn. Initially, black police officers only patrolled black neighborhoods. They weren’t allowed to arrest white residents. They also weren’t allowed to ride in police cars and, during roll call, white officers sat while they stood.
One of the permanent, though unintentional, reminders of the racism black officers endured early on is on display at the police academy of the Miami-Dade Police Department. It’s a photo of the 1960 graduating class, the first class in which an African-American officer was allowed to attend. Clarence Dickson was standing at a bus stop in the wee hours of the morning on the way to his job, when a white officer passing by saw him and thought he might have a good work ethic.
There were black police officers in Miami beginning in 1944, but none had been allowed to attend the academy. They were separate and unequal. In the early years in Miami, black cops had no headquarters, no cars, and no radio contact. They policed by walking or riding bicycles. They used the office of a black dentist as their headquarters. Later, they used a one-bedroom apartment in the “Central Negro District.” There are many stories of arrested prisoners being taken to jail on bicycle handlebars, or by walking, and sometimes by hailing a black citizen’s car as it was driving by. A real station was built for them in 1950; it was named the Black Police Precinct. It provided a station house for African-American police officers and a courtroom for African-American judges to hear cases involving black defendants. It existed until 1963.
Dickson said he used to hear whispers about him being the “first one,” but he never understood the significance until one day during roll call one of the black officers walked over to him and said, “Some of us lost our jobs fighting to get blacks into the academy. Don’t let us down.” The other black officer didn’t know it when he made his remark, but Dickson was flunking out of the academy at the time. “When he told me that, I felt a great responsibility to those guys,” Dickson said. “I went back and I rose from being almost kicked out of the academy to graduating number two in my class. Out of about 40 of us, only 13 graduated. On graduation day, our academy class took a picture, all 13 of us standing up in our uniforms, relieved and proud. And there I was, the only black guy in that class.”
Dickson would later become Miami’s first black police chief. But, today, if you go back and look at that picture of his class hanging in the Miami-Dade Police Department Training Academy, you won’t see him in it. What Dickson didn’t know then was that the department had called his classmates back later to take a picture without him.
Twenty years later, Lisa Montague was still feeling the same discrimination as the second black woman in her Baltimore police district when she joined the force in 1979.
“All of the white officers made it clear they didn’t want me there. One particular white male officer who bordered my section—say, I was patrolling section 832, he would be in section 831—he came out and said that he had a problem with me as a black woman and that I had no business on the job. He said this to my face. He said I was going to get one of them hurt, and if I ever needed backup, he said, ‘Don’t look for me.’ We were in roll call when he said it. Other guys heard it. Some of the guys came up and told me not to worry about him, but it was clear that a lot of them felt the same way,” Montague said.
I’ve felt the sting of that racism while being black in blue, as has just about every other black officer I’ve met. David Lomax and I were ATF agents together for nearly 30 years. We primarily worked in different cities, but we met often and swapped stories about what it’s like to be black in blue. Before Lomax joined the department, he had been a police officer in St. Louis, and man, did he have some stories about his earlier days before he joined ATF.
“So, one of my first weekends on the job, I was paired with another African-American officer,” he began. “We get a call to report at a house in South St. Louis in the Carondelet area. We get to the house, knock, and a lady comes to the door. First thing she said was ‘Where are the police officers?’ We’re both dressed in our uniforms, big as day. So, my lead officer says, ‘Miss, we’re right here.’ She said, ‘I asked for police officers, not niggers.’ I’m thinking, Damn, that’s messed up because I’m just out of the academy. So, we contacted the sergeant, and he told us to leave. A little later, we get a call to the same house. The same lady answers the door. She looks at us and says the exact same thing.”
David is incredulous, and so am I, but the story is so ridiculous and I’ve heard so many like it, deep inside I’m chuckling a bit. We order another drink and David starts up again.
“The next weekend, they partner me with this white guy. We’re riding around, and I swear, the only word that came out of his mouth was nigger. We’re riding through a black neighborhood near downtown, and he said, ‘I’m so tired of riding around protecting these niggers.’
“He looked at me and I said, ‘What’s up? What are you saying to me?’
“You know what he said? He said, ‘I’m not talking about you. Your color is blue.’
“So, I went back to the sergeant, who was Latino. He said, ‘Your job is to keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut.’ That’s how he addressed my concerns. So, from that point on, I just kept my mouth closed and did what I had to do to advance.”
After he graduated, the racist behavior continued, he said. “So, now I’m an officer and I’m out with this white officer and he pulls over this black family because their turning signal doesn’t work. The man is in the car with his wife and his kids. I step out of the car, so I can watch my fellow officer’s back. The cop walks up to the car and says, ‘Hey, nigger, did you know your taillight is out?’
“This is 1981. I’m thinking, ‘If this was me, and I was in the car with my wife and my children, I’m going to react a certain way.’ And sure enough, the guy said to the officer, ‘Sir, tell me what I’m doing wrong, but I don’t appreciate you talking to me like this with my wife and family in the car.’
“‘Well,’ the white cop started again, ‘I don’t give a shit what you think.’
“Next thing you know the white guy was on the ground. The black guy had knocked him on his ass, because another N-word had come out of his mouth. So, I go up to the guy and I say, ‘I understand why you did what you did, but I’m going to have to arrest you because you assaulted a police officer.’
“So, the officer goes into the station and tells the captain I wasn’t out there helping him. I tell the captain, ‘If this guy is going to be out there calling somebody a nigger, and then he needs a “nigger” to get somebody off his ass, maybe he shouldn’t be doing what he’s doing.’ The captain, a white guy, started laughing. All he had to do was tell the man why he got stopped and give him a ticket and let him go on his way. I would have reacted the same way, if he had talked to me like that.”
I had my own encounter with a fellow law enforcement officer and the N-word. Ironically, my incident brings us to where we started, in Providence, Rhode Island. I am now an ATF officer, and this is about two years after I was nearly shot by the white cop while undercover. As part of our duties, we frequently worked surveillance in conjunction with other agencies. One night, we were working a joint case with the Providence Police Department’s Special Investigations Bureau. I can’t remember the particular case, but it was dangerous enough for me to wear my ballistic vest and bring a tactical rifle. At the police department, I was teamed up with another ATF agent. We left and decided we’d better grab a bite to eat. Once you get rolling on these operations, you never know what is going to happen. You may not eat until you’re done. You may end up following a suspect to another state. So, we stopped at Burger King. We went through the drive-through window and were heading out onto the street. I was driving. As I was pulling onto Broad Street, a carload of black guys zoomed past, almost hitting us.
My partner yells out at the car, “Fucking niggers.” He quickly remembers who is sitting right next to him and says, “Oops.”
I don’t say a word, but I am steaming. I’m trying to decide how to respond. So, I come up with a plan. I drive us to a really rough area in South Providence, a known hangout for gang members and drug dealers. I place the car in park and turn to him, “John, get out.” He refuses and I tell him again. “Get out.” People are starting to gather now and look at the Crown Victoria parked in the middle of the intersection.
I then exit the vehicle and go around to the driver’s side with my tactical gear—big ATF letters on my ballistic vest, firearm in holster—and yell, “John, get the fuck out of my car before I drag you out!” He’s not moving, so I unhook his seat belt. By now, his face is turning red. I yell once more for him to get out. By now, people are really beginning to take notice. I was about to drag John out of the car, which could have been bad for me, but, fortunately, he got out, and I drove off. What happened next? Let’s just say our surveillance was not compromised, John got back to the office safely, and the issue was resolved to my satisfaction. I just knew one thing when I left that scene. That was the last time I wanted to hear a cop call a black person “nigger.”