Alienation Is a Partner for Black Officers
By C. J. CHIVERS
One night last December, Officer Eric Josey was driving his Acura Legend on East 138th Street in the South Bronx. He had just completed a tour patrolling Harlem, and had changed into a sweatshirt and jeans. A jacket concealed his 9-millimeter pistol.
Stopping in traffic, he glanced in his rear-view mirror and saw two men rushing for his car. They were carrying guns.
In the instant Officer Josey had to react, he reacted like a cop. He reached for his pistol, pushed open his door and turned his 6-foot-2-inch, 225-pound frame to face what he thought was a carjacking. But his gun snagged on his jacket liner, he said, and the men were upon him.
One pointed a pistol at his head. Someone swore and ordered him to the ground. Vehicles and men swarmed all around. Officer Josey realized what was happening. He was being stopped by the police.
"I'm on the job!" he shouted, using police jargon for announcing he was an officer. The plainclothes detectives, a Bronx narcotics team, looked flummoxed - until one found Officer Josey's silver badge under his clothes.
It was in the long moment that followed, as the narcotics team's red taillights faded down the street, that Officer Josey, standing beside his idling car, heart pounding, anger rising, saw more clearly than ever the New York Police Department's capacity to alienate black men, including its own.
"I can't be any more clear about this," he said. "I almost lost my life. If I had gotten my gun out, I would have been dead, and for no other reason except I am black."
For more than 25 years, the department has been unable to integrate a significantly larger proportion of black men into its ranks. In 1974 male black officers formed 7.7 percent of the ranks. The proportion is now 9.2 percent, an increase dwarfed by the advances of Hispanics and women....
...Two Departments: A Double Standard of Policing
For Officer Josey, life as a police officer has undeniable benefits, offering a measure of respect and financial security and access to the close-knit culture of America's most storied police department. And there have been rich intangibles: the excitement of arrests he made in Harlem's 28th Precinct, the pride he felt as a Police Academy instructor, the challenge he feels now as he trains for the department's Emergency Service Unit.
But he also has real misgivings about his department, from his sense that black men have little chance at promotion to his belief that minority neighborhoods are policed one way and white neighborhoods another, even accounting for relative crime rates.
This tacit double standard, he said, is what led to his being stopped at gunpoint last December, and caused him to file a complaint with the Civilian Complaint Review Board. "I've been around long enough to know that there are two police departments here, the one above 110th Street and the one below it," he said. "Some of the routines you see above Central Park - the stop-and-frisks, the boxed-in cars, the buy-and-busts at the doorways - would not be tolerated in the white neighborhoods."
Senior police officials declined to comment in detail on Officer Josey's complaint, saying only that it was under investigation. But the officials have broadly defended their tactics, noting that the numbers of police shootings have declined sharply for several years, as have the number of lawsuits alleging brutality. They also rebut the contention that the department engages in racial profiling,
And while they acknowledge that police aggressiveness has fueled some animus in minority neighborhoods, they also note that those neighborhoods are much safer than they were a decade ago.
"What the department has done is put out more resources where crime is occurring," Chief Lawrence said. "The upside of that is the reduction in crime in many neighborhoods where minorities live."
But Officer Josey's feelings were echoed repeatedly in recent months in extended interviews with dozens of male black officers and detectives. Some, like Officer Josey, are active members of the Guardians or 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, two fraternal groups. Many are not.
These officers almost invariably said that the satisfactions of the job were undercut by the department itself. All but three of the several dozen officers interviewed, for instance, said that at some point in their careers they been unnecessarily stopped or hassled, when in civilian clothes, by their white peers. Many spoke of being repeatedly asked to produce identification at night on subway platforms. One officer says he is pulled over in his car at least twice a month. Officer Skeeter said a police cruiser once ran him off the road in Central Park.
"For every African-American who has had this type of thing happen to them, getting stopped, getting frisked, there are probably 200 who have been verbally harassed," said one senior black officer. "The verbal attitudes have more of an effect than dragging people out of their cars, because there is so much of it."
These repeated observations - by undercover narcotics officers, by senior supervisors, by veteran patrolmen and near-rookies in some of the department's roughest precincts - echo those noticed by William J. Bratton, Mr. Giuliani's first police commissioner, who said he held several focus groups with black officers in the mid-1990's, and never found a male black officer who had not had a bad encounter with the Police Department when in civilian clothes. Their experiences, recounted repeatedly, together create a portrait of a troubled segment of the police ranks.
Differing emotions pulse through these men. Some talk of anger, others of shame and bewilderment. One said the department was chiefly interested "in the maintenance of white supremacy." Most were circumspect.
One theme, though, was constant: regret.
It was regret chiefly that an institution in which they saw such promise had failed to integrate and elevate significantly more black men, even after a generation of saying it was trying.
And there is a sense that the future looks much like the past. There are important trends: declining percentages of black male supervisors; the makeup of recent academy classes lagging far behind the black representation in the city.
Lt. Eric Adams, president of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, summed up a common sentiment: "I see that in 26 years we've picked up 1.5 percent more black men," he said. "You know what this tells me? It tells me that in another 26 years we'll pick up another 1.5 percent. That's the pace, and the people who run the department seem comfortable with it."
They also said that greatest cost of such powerful disappointment is that the department may have lost the enthusiasm of the very officers most qualified to integrate the job.
Captain Hogan, the recruiting section's commander and a retired police officer's son, says his recruiters sense the loss. He said that with so few black men being promoted in the department, it is often hard to recruit even the sons and nephews of black police officers. For white officers, intergenerational succession is a robust tradition.
"We just don't see the same number of the children of black cops wanting this job," he said.
Officer Skeeter said the phenomenon was one of the strongest indicators of the department's failure; even its own black officers steer their children away, an outcome that he said puts an asterisk beside the city's steep decline in crime in recent years.
"Most minority officers I speak to say they would never let their kids come on this job," he said. "They don't think they've been treated fairly by the department, and wouldn't ever want their children facing the same thing."