PARTEE WAS EXHAUSTED. HE STOOD at Penn North as a coalition of officers from around the state tried to bring some semblance of order and calm to a situation that was in complete disarray. He was now in his fifteenth hour on the job, and the protesters seemed to be more emboldened while the officers just seemed more frustrated.
He was hungry, too. The only meal he’d had that day had come when some of his officers went to the Royal Farms convenience store to grab some chicken and pizza. A few hours ago a police van had come to bring the officers on the scene water and snacks—but when the van stopped, its doors opened, the officers inside dumped two cases of water and the food on the median strip, slammed the doors, and zoomed off. He knew that the officers in the van were what he and his fellow street cops called “house cats”—administrators who sit behind desks, file the paperwork, ask questions, and have few answers—and he could understand that they didn’t want to be there; he didn’t want to be there, either. Still, what they did pissed him off. You just gonna throw the food on the ground like that like we’re a bunch of dogs? he thought.
Partee looked at the chaos on the street. The officers had been told repeatedly that they were not to do anything about the looting and lawlessness going on around them. “Don’t engage,” headquarters told them.
All around him were abandoned houses. Less than fifty years ago the city’s population had been nearly a million. Now it had dropped by a third, and what had once been warm, lively residences were decrepit shells. The tired police officers sitting on their steps looked on as fires burned and stores were looted, their eyes asking, What are we supposed to do? He had no answer for them.
For Partee the final straw came later that night, when he was in a line with his other officers trying to keep protesters from interfering with the firefighters who were putting out the blazes engulfing cars and buildings. Looking over his right shoulder, he saw a well-built young man standing in front of the skirmish line with a gas mask on. The young man pulled out a knife.
Partee reached to his hip and pulled out his taser, intending to stop the young man with the knife from doing whatever he was thinking of doing with it.
But a deputy commissioner, Dean Palmere, grabbed his arm. “If you tase him, I am going to take that from you,” he said, staring Partee dead in the eye.
Partee’s hand froze. He was shocked, but at the same time he understood why Mere was saying that.
Partee wished that everyone who screamed about how excessive the police were, how they overreacted, could stand in his shoes at that very moment. When people are getting shot in their community, they want the police there. But now the police were watching people break the law right in front of them, and they couldn’t engage. People seemed to want it both ways, he thought—lawbreakers could engage the police and that was okay, but if the police tried to engage, they were abusive.
Feeling defeated, Partee looked back at the young man with the knife as he punctured the fire hose. The crowd cheered. Partee just turned his head in the other direction.