The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston's Racial Divide (13 page)

Another night, Mike and Craig were walking through a housing project when they saw some officers searching a couple of suspects. One officer looked over and shouted, “Who the fuck are you?” He had not seen that Mike and Craig were police officers. But the confusion was cleared up before anything bad happened. Again, no harm, no foul.

Even so, the mistakes left their mark, a challenge to the idealism—or naivete—Mike brought to being a police officer. “When I first came on the job, I never really considered myself just a black police officer. I just considered myself a police officer.” The words were classic Mike Cox: the Roxbury boy who’d gone to schools that were mostly white, from St. Mary’s in Brookline to the private preparatory school Milton Academy, and then to boarding at the Wooster School in Connecticut. He was the young man from a middle-class black family who believed character and hard work meant more than race. In many ways, he was color-blind. “It was the way I was brought up,” he said.

But race did matter. The instances of mistaken identity revealed the complexity of a more racially diverse police department. Mistakes like this didn’t happen when the force was nearly all-white. The scare of mistaken identity was turning out to be a dangerous side effect of the department’s successful affirmative action program as well as its initiative to fight the escalating street gang violence by sending black officers into the fray dressed in street clothes.

In time, Mike began to catch on to the risks that were race-based. “I realized that the job itself, it’s a lot more dangerous, just because of the fact I’m black.” But while more aware, Mike still wasn’t too worried—a go-along attitude that wasn’t shaken even after the worst mix-up right before he joined the gang unit.

Mike was running after a suspect down a residential street in Mattapan one rainy night. He was way ahead of a number of other officers, including Craig. The suspect was believed to be carrying a weapon. Mike held his handgun in his right hand as he pumped his arms trying to catch up. Suddenly an unmarked police cruiser pulled up alongside him. “I was running straight,” Mike said, “and it drove alongside of me, and then it turned into me.” Hit hard from the side, Mike was airborne. He slammed into a fence along the side of the road. The cruiser jumped the curb and kept after him. “It pinned me actually against the fence, so my feet were not on the ground.” He didn’t know what was going to happen next. “I was scared because I didn’t know if the car was going to continue to run over me.” He didn’t feel any pain—yet—only fear. “I was very worried about being killed.” Then the cruiser backed off, and Mike heard Craig’s voice in the distance. “What the fuck are you guys doing?” he screamed. Craig ran up shouting at the officers, “Are you guys stupid! He’s a cop! What the fuck!”

Mike was slumped on the ground, his left knee throbbing. More officers arrived and attended to him. Within minutes, he was taken by an ambulance to Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where his badly swollen and cut knees were treated.

The injuries did not prove to be serious. Soon Mike was back at work. But nothing came of it officially. The police report required whenever an officer is hurt in the line of duty referred to Mike’s injuries as unintentional: “Officer Michael Cox, along with other officers, was chasing a suspect armed with a handgun. During the foot pursuit Officer Cox was accidentally struck by an unmarked police cruiser.” The report flatly contradicted Mike’s view that the cruiser struck him intentionally.

“I voiced my displeasure after the fact,” he said. But he did not file a formal complaint. Even though it was no longer no harm, no foul, Mike let it go. It was not his personality to be outspoken—and it never had been, going back to grade school when teachers worried about his reticence. Then at Wooster, a student body that featured the likes of Tracy Chapman was fairly active in social and political causes, but Mike was not. He just wanted the ball to drive to the hoop.

Mike preferred to brush aside the close call. He’d taken to police work and liked the feeling that he and Craig were having an impact on the streets. “I loved the job, and it was more than what I expected,” he said. Mike could almost sound golly-gee about it. The job, he said, “meant integrity. It meant—gosh, respect. Loyalty to your community, and just to the people around you. It meant a lot of things to me.”

Sure, the work could be a grind. He wasn’t wild about the paperwork. And while others enjoyed the pageantry that might accompany working a parade or major city function, Mike did not. “You are just standing there in uniform, either in the heat or the cold, not really doing anything for long periods of time. It was just tedious.” And he did not enjoy appearing in court to testify in a case. “Just answering ridiculous questions,” he said. Mike viewed those as chores getting in the way of what mattered most. “The actual police work. Going out and thinking that I was making a difference somehow, you know, by arresting people who were truly bad and helping people who really, really needed help. Those two aspects were the two things I liked the most.”

His was a truly satisfying start to a career—especially for someone who’d dreamed of becoming a police officer but was insecure whether he was good enough to serve. “I really had these high standards for what police officers were,” he said. “I didn’t know if I really necessarily measured up to those standards.” Very quickly Mike had learned he did measure up. “I took a lot of pride in it. I don’t want to say I got self-esteem from it, but what I did was certainly something I was proud of.”

His wife saw it too. “I was a little nervous in the beginning,” Kimberly said. But she realized her husband had indeed made the right choice. “When he was going through basic training, you know, he loved the friendships that he made, the people he met.”

Kimberly had hit on something. The brotherhood aspect of policing was a big part of Mike’s satisfaction with the job. Mike and Craig Jones were more than friends, for example. They experienced a deep trust from working side-by-side. “When you’re in dangerous situations and you work in dangerous places, you have to have a certain bond,” Mike said. “Just to go in and out of those places and feel comfortable, knowing you’re going to come out okay, in the sense of watching your back.” Their closeness was rooted in the very ethos of big-city policing—the us-versus-them mentality, where it was the law against the lawless. Mike embraced the loyalty flowing both ways.

And he enjoyed the ebb and flow of their nights, from the intensity of a crime scene to the relaxed banter back in the office. During a shift, Mike and Craig often grabbed a bite in the cafeteria of Carney Hospital in Dorchester just outside their Mattapan district. They’d meet up with other officers working through the night. One was David C. Williams, a black officer working in Dorchester in Area C–11. Williams, born in Trinidad, had moved to Boston when he was nine and grew up in Dorchester in Uphams Corner. He’d been a police officer for almost four years, joining in 1991, or two years after Mike. There was Richie Walker, a black officer who wore his hair in braids and worked in Mattapan in the area known as B–3. Of the group, Walker had been on the force the longest—since 1985—although his ten-year run was interrupted when, while off duty, he’d pulled a gun on a civilian after a traffic accident. Walker was actually fired, but he appealed the dismissal through labor arbitration and won his job back. All in all, the eating club was a chance to connect in a setting more relaxed than a crime scene.

For Mike and Kimberly, home life was nothing if not hectic. Mike was still a rookie cop when Kimberly began commuting to Philadelphia in the fall of 1989 to attend medical school. Mike Jr. was ten months old and she was expecting their second, but she was determined to get her medical studies under way. Nicholas Cox was born on January 14, 1990, in Boston, and Kimberly went on a leave for the remainder of the academic year. She resumed her studies the following September 1990, spending weekdays in Philadelphia and commuting home to Boston on the weekend. Mike cared for the boys during the day, and when he left for work at night, his mother, Bertha, usually stayed with the two babies, who were fourteen months apart.

The couple made it work, no matter how stressful their lifestyle. “Being away,” said Kimberly, “commuting back and forth, having two small kids, trying to get through medical school, and Mike trying to support all of us.” The challenge brought them closer. “We didn’t have really any major disagreements,” Kimberly said. “Basically, I was in school and he was taking care of the kids, and I trusted him and he did an excellent job and he managed and handled everything.” She valued Mike’s soft-spoken way, his steadiness and levelheadedness. She loved that Mike was a “nice, easygoing person who enjoyed doing things with his family,” and she loved how Mike made her laugh. “He would joke a lot. He had fun. We did things together.” They imagined a future when she was a doctor and he was a police officer armed with a law degree. “We were looking forward to this new and wonderful life together,” Kimberly said.

Mike was especially proud of providing for his family. In five years he’d doubled his earnings. He started out making $30,115.53, including overtime. His earnings jumped to $61,394.82 in 1994. The couple watched their spending and saved money by moving into the two-family house on Supple Road owned by Mike’s oldest sister. Cora L. Davis, eighteen years older than Mike, lived upstairs with her husband and kids. The couple’s future was bright. Mike even talked about taking a class here and there to finish college.

Simmering beneath the surface of Mike’s police work, however, was the problem of black police officers being mistaken as suspects. The department had not caught up to the vexing aspects of a police force with increasing numbers of black officers. There was no proven method for an officer in street clothes to signal other officers that he was one of them. Most of the time Mike and other black officers simply relied on being recognized.

Mike did once speak up about the problem. He and Craig, brand-new to the anti-gang unit, happened to cross paths with the newly installed police commissioner one night in July 1993. William Bratton, flamboyant and ambitious, had joined the Boston force in 1970 and then left to hold leadership positions with several different police agencies. Most recently he’d been chief of the New York City Transit Police. The new chief, two weeks on the job as Boston’s top cop and saying he wanted to check out the front lines himself, went out riding with a patrol officer in Mattapan. At 10:30

P.M
., a dispatcher put out a call about shots fired nearby. Mike and Craig were the first to get there. They pulled up to a group of young black men. One kid turned and bolted. Mike called for backup while Craig ran and captured the fourteen-year-old suspect.

Bratton then arrived. He got out, looking around, and under a fence found something the fleeing teen had dropped—a silver.32-caliber revolver. The boy was arrested on gun charges. Despite the late hour, a
Boston Globe
reporter learned about Bratton’s hands-on police work and wrote the kind of flattering item the press-savvy Bratton cherished. “Police Commissioner Spends Night on Duty” was the story’s headline, and it quoted Craig. “He knows what he’s doing,” he said about Bratton.

Bratton switched cars to ride with Mike and Craig. Neither knew Bratton. The commissioner, who had a reputation as a progressive, hard-driving administrator, was the one who raised the subject of race and working in street clothes.

“He mentioned it,” Mike said. “He asked, had we ever been mistaken for suspects before by other officers and felt as though our life was in danger by the other officers.”

Mike and Craig both answered they had.

“We started to tell him some of the examples,” Mike said.

Bratton said he’d seen the same problem in New York City. He then asked Mike and Craig whether they thought the Boston Police Department should develop “some type of system” to identify officers working in street clothes, particularly black officers.

Mike and Craig both answered yes.

The ride-along ended. Bratton thanked them. The two gang unit officers felt the unexpected exchange with the new commissioner had gone well. It was good talk.

But no action followed. Within a year, Bratton was on the road again, this time to become chief of the New York City Police Department. “He didn’t implement anything,” Mike said.

CHAPTER 6

Closing Time at the Cortee’s

A
t the club Cortee’s, the fact that Smut and Mike and Craig did not bump into one another was simply one of life’s happen-stances. By the time Smut had arrived around midnight, Mike and Craig had completed their quick turn inside to gauge Hip-Hop Night and were already riding off in their Tango K–8 car.

It wasn’t as if they didn’t know one another; Mike and Craig had played cat and mouse with Smut ever since Smut got home from jail in 1992. By then, the two cops in plainclothes were known on the street for pulling up fast in their unmarked cruiser and jumping out to confront gatherings of “hoodies.” The in-your-face arrival was not solely cop macho; it had a purpose. “On the street the way these guys work is by intimidation,” Mike said, “so jumping out showed them we’re not intimidated.”

The up-tempo entry was also a barometer, a way to gauge a street gang’s level of current criminal activity. If the kids reacted with swagger and trash talk, then they were likely just hanging out, not up to any trouble. But if the kids went silent, looked away, or tried to melt into the night, “then we’d sense something was up. Something was just finished or something was in the works.”

Mattie Brown, however, was not impressed with their head-strong style. She nicknamed them the “Jump-out Boys.” Her son and his friends often hung out in front of her house, and then along came Cox and Jones. “I’d yell at them from my porch,” she said. “Cuss ’em out to get off my property. Sometimes they’d yell back, ‘The street isn’t private property! We can do what we want.’”