The Fence Part 3

But Flynn stood by Roache, the commissioner he'd appointed. Flynn and Roache were boyhood friends who'd grown up together in Southie. "Mickey Roache may not have done very well in the area of management," Flynn told reporters at a press conference. "But I give Mickey Roache an A-plus in the area of integrity and in the area of bringing people together racially." Roache hung on to his job for another year. When Flynn was appointed to be American amba.s.sador to the Vatican in 1993, Roach resigned to run for mayor, and Bill Bratton stepped into the commissioner's seat.

Robert "s.m.u.t" Brown didn't have to read the St. Clair report to know the black community in Boston's inner-city neighborhoods deeply mistrusted the Boston police. s.m.u.t knew firsthand the kinds of abuses covered in the official report in clinical fashion. More than once, he said, cops had "done me wrong." Following one high-profile killing, he was leaving the Rose Club and about to get into his car when two officers snapped him up. "They cuffed me and put me in the car and rode me around, asking questions." He'd heard similar stories up and down the street. The alienation was embedded in the daily life of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan.

Black teens-some g.a.n.g.b.a.n.gers, some not-had been complaining regularly to Boston and state officials about Boston police roughing them up. One girl, a seventeen-year-old tenth grader, said a police officer stopped her while she was walking down the street and asked her name. Why? she asked. The officer patted her down. When her two friends protested, the officer turned on them and patted them down too. In early 1990, a twenty-year-old black man said he was parked outside one of the city high schools waiting to pick up a friend when two officers walked up and began searching his car. He questioned the officers and said the officers told him to "Shut the f.u.c.k up." Young blacks said officers stopped them without reason-ordering them to drop their pants in public or to open their mouths for inspections or to place themselves spread-eagle against a wall.

For their part, Boston police were scrambling to combat the frightening rise in violent crime fueled by rampant drug use, especially crack cocaine. The 95 homicides in 1988 skyrocketed to 152 by 1990, with taped-off crime scenes becoming as frequent as sunup and sunset. Street gangs flourished, and some police commanders admitted openly that officers on the frontlines in Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan were aggressively going after known gang members and anyone else a.s.sociating with them. One captain in Roxbury was quoted in the Boston Herald in 1989 saying, "People are going to say we're violating their const.i.tutional rights, but we're not too concerned about that...If we have to violate their rights-if that's what it takes-then that's what we're going to do."

The captain later called the remark a "psychological ploy" and insisted officers were not randomly hara.s.sing blacks or trampling on their rights. Police Commissioner Roache, soon after the captain's public comments, even issued a May 23, 1989, memorandum describing the department's "profound responsibility" to honor and protect citizens' rights under the U.S. Const.i.tution and Ma.s.sachusetts law.

Certain Superior Court judges were not convinced. One judge threw out two criminal cases after ruling Boston police had violated const.i.tutional protections against unwarranted searches and pat downs. The famous U.S. Supreme Court case controlling these circ.u.mstances was a 1968 case known as Terry v. Ohio. In it, the nation's highest court ruled police cannot stop and frisk someone on a hunch, but must have a "reasonable suspicion" the person was engaged in or about to engage in criminal activity. In Boston, Superior Court Judge Cortland Mathers found that Boston police were violating so-called Terry principles by practicing a policy that "all known gang members and their a.s.sociates (whether known to be gang members or not) would be searched on sight." The policy, the judge ruled, was tantamount to "a proclamation of martial law in Roxbury" against street gangs and other young blacks.

Judge Mathers was also unimpressed by Commissioner Roache's memo seeking to rea.s.sure the public that police were not running roughshod over people's rights. In a scathing rejection, Mathers said, "The Court finds a tacit understanding exists in the Boston Police Department that const.i.tutionally impermissible searches will not only be countenanced but applauded in the Roxbury area." The police bra.s.s continued to disagree and defend the department in a war of words with their critics.

Newspaper headlines were one thing, the street was another. s.m.u.t Brown and others like him lived in a world where they believed Boston police would do anything to get them-lie, cheat, set you up. There was anecdotal evidence to draw on-instances where some officers didn't care about the truth and the law, only the conviction.

In one 1989 court case, an officer testified he watched a drug deal go down. But the officer would have needed X-ray vision for his testimony to have been true-he was standing on the other side of a two-story building when the alleged drug deal occurred. In a gun case, another officer testified he saw a gun stashed on a second-floor landing-and, again, this was superhuman. The officer would have had to be 30 feet tall for the eyewitness testimony to be true.

The police perjury had a name: "testilying." The fabrications might be rooted in good intentions-to convict the guilty. The officers wanted to arm prosecutors with the strongest, cleanest testimony possible, so they'd ma.s.sage evidence against the accused to make the case seem better than, in fact, it was. They might honestly believe they had a criminal in their sights, and they wanted to make sure he didn't get away, even if it meant lying. They perverted the law to enforce the law. The ends justified the means.

It was nonetheless a message of injustice-and word about the bad cases got around. The worst examples were when the police department's freewheeling ways with the truth ended not with getting the right guy-even if by questionable means-but in a wrongful conviction. This happened in one of the biggest murder cases of the time. On an August night in 1988, a twelve-year-old girl named Tiffany Moore was perched on a blue mailbox on Humboldt Avenue, long the focal point in Roxbury's drug world and nicknamed "heroin alley." The broad street was scarred by burned-out homes, empty lots, and broken-down cars. Cash, clothes, and cocaine dominated its culture.

Tiffany was sitting on the mailbox swinging her legs, talking with friends. Then, from behind, two or three young men wearing Halloween masks ran across a small lot and began firing into the group. Minutes later, the 911 call to the Boston police captured the horror: "Oh, G.o.d! Oh, the little girl on the ground, shot." Blood poured from three bullet wounds. One-to Tiffany's head-was the wound a medical examiner termed "incompatible with life."

Tiffany Moore became an instant symbol of the drug-fueled lawlessness rocking the city. The girl was the youngest victim ever in the city's street gang wars, and her killing made the news around the country. She was collateral damage-the unintended victim of one street gang-Castlegate-seeking vengeance against the Humboldt Street gang, whose members were among the group of kids mingling on the street corner. City leaders sought to calm a public crying out for an arrest and panicked by the soaring murder rate. Some in the community even called for the deployment of the National Guard in Roxbury. Promising results, police launched a ma.s.sive search.

Two tense weeks later, justice was apparently in hand. Shawn Drumgold, a twenty-two-year-old only a few months out of prison, and a second man were charged with killing Tiffany Moore. Police and prosecutors told reporters Drumgold was a "drug dealer and member of the Castlegate gang" and that "many, many witnesses" told them Drumgold was the shooter. The big problem with the statements was accuracy: They were false. Drumgold was no innocent-a street-corner drug dealer who had shot and been shot at, he surely fit the profile of a possible suspect. But Drumgold was a freelance drug dealer unaffiliated with any gang. Homicide detectives knew this; police kept books listing street gang members and anyone a.s.sociated with a gang. It was all part of the beefed-up effort to combat the gang violence. Drumgold was not listed in the Castlegate book-or in any gang listing. Even some of the officers a.s.signed to the streets of Roxbury were taken aback when homicide detectives picked up Drumgold as their man. "Shawn was dealing in peace, not bothering either gang," said one officer based in Roxbury.

But the homicide detectives apparently didn't want to hear any of it. From the start they focused on Drumgold and his pal, building a case on the backs of youngsters who were intimidated and pressured into providing incriminating testimony, all of which became pieces of the prosecution's case. Without key physical evidence-the guns and Halloween masks were never recovered-witness testimony was everything.

"I'm just a dumb puppet in there," one witness confessed later about how he folded under police pressure and agreed with his interrogators' suggestions that Drumgold was armed and looking for trouble that night. Fourteen months after Tiffany was killed, in October 1989, Drumgold was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole. His a.s.sociate was acquitted. It didn't matter that many in the neighborhood knew Drumgold couldn't have done it, because he couldn't be two places at once. He was not on Humboldt Avenue when Tiffany was shot; he was blocks away with a group of friends snorting c.o.ke. But, given their illegal drug activity and fear of police, those alibi witnesses went underground rather than risk facing the police.

Even Tiffany Moore's mother was not sure. "It was very hard to tell if he was the right one," Alice Moore told a neighborhood newspaper, the Bay State Banner, following the murder trial in October 1989. "It's a big mess." Fourteen years later, Drumgold's conviction was overturned. Press accounts exposed the pattern of witness intimidation, possible prosecutorial misconduct, and the alibi evidence. In the "interests of justice," the district attorney asked a Superior Court judge to let Drumgold go home.

With the St. Clair Commission's explosive findings, 1992 was off to a terrible start for the Boston Police Department. But there was more trouble to come. That same January a trial began in Boston that served as a kind of appendix to the panel's findings-a case of police brutality dramatically ill.u.s.trating in real life the failings the panel had outlined clinically and statistically.

The case was the May 1988 beating of the c.o.ke-snorting John L. Smith, who, after running a red light, had led police on a fifteen- minute chase through various city neighborhoods until his Cadillac broke down on Borland Street in Brookline. Smith's arrest woke up the residents, mostly professionals living on the usually quiet street not far from nearby Boston University. One woman told authorities she looked out her bedroom window and heard a "wailing sound" from Smith, who was lying facedown with his hands behind his back, apparently handcuffed. "It was a very eerie sound. It sounded like the sound coming from an injured animal. It was quite loud," she said. She watched officers casually walk over to stomp on Smith's back and then walk away. The woman's husband, a lawyer, was standing by her side at the window. He said he could hear Smith "whimpering and saying, 'No, no.' It was very loud, very clear and was obviously the voice of someone being hurt." To make matters worse for the police, another Borland Street resident happened to be a state prosecutor. Not just any state prosecutor either-Stephen L. Oleskey was supervisor of the Public Protection Bureau, which investigated complaints involving consumer protection and civil rights. When Oleskey looked out his window he first thought officers huddled around a man on the ground were trying to help someone injured in a car crash. When he stepped outside and police walked past him with Smith, he realized his initial a.s.sessment was likely wrong. "When I saw the civilian go by, with the battered face and handcuffed, I revised." Oleskey began thinking Smith might have been beaten. "But I wasn't sure."

Oleskey then talked to his neighbors. Before long the state attorney general's office opened an investigation. The next year it filed a civil rights lawsuit in state court against the police department, the city, and the "Brighton 13." Thirteen officers were accused of beating Smith or standing by and doing nothing to stop it. The January 1989 lawsuit was filed as a last resort-after state prosecutors had urged Boston police officials to discipline the officers but nothing was done. "When I became convinced that nothing was going to be done internally by the Boston police, I felt it was necessary to go to court," Ma.s.sachusetts Attorney General James M. Shannon had told reporters.

It was a historic moment-state prosecutors asking the judge to issue a court order against the thirteen Boston officers barring them from using excessive force and demanding they report police brutality. Never before had such an injunction been sought against police-either in Ma.s.sachusetts or, as far as anyone could tell, in the country.

The attorney general continued to try to negotiate with the officers, their union, and police officials, but they would have none of it. The thirteen officers denied wrongdoing, saying any force that was used was necessary to subdue a "c.o.ke-crazed madman." The police union attacked state prosecutors for meddling and second-guessing officers whose split-second decisions may mean the difference between life and death. Union lawyers called the court action outrageous. One argued, "If you start thinking twice about using force or your gun because of an injunction, your life is in danger." The police department's Internal Affairs probe, meanwhile, never got past "go." The case was simply on file, with no action.

"The office felt no choice but to go forward," one state prosecutor explained about taking the case to trial. "Our attempts to resolve the matter had been rejected over a long period of time and the City of Boston had never disciplined the officers." Testimony began the same week the St. Clair report came out-a nonjury, civil rights trial before Superior Court Judge Hiller B. Zobel.

Eight of the thirteen officers were from the police district known as Area D, with five officers working in the Da4 station in the South End. This was Kenny Conley's station, and January 1992 marked the seventh month Kenny had been on the street in uniform as a full-fledged officer.

"I didn't know most of these guys," Kenny said about the five officers going to court each day to attend the trial, as well as the other officers in his station. The politics and scrutiny of the department were swirling at levels far above his status as a twenty-three-year-old rookie. "I didn't talk to many people. I did my job, and I went home."

But the trial of the Brighton 13 was the talk of the police department-and especially in the Da4 station. Kenny overheard plenty. "The guys were just upset that there were injunctions getting put out against them." Newspaper coverage typically triggered the talk. "Lunch, dinner, or breakfast, or whatever, the guys would be sitting around writing reports, and someone would have a paper." That's when the complaints, commentary, and existential questions began: What the h.e.l.l's going on?

It wasn't pretty. "Guys were saying it was f.u.c.king stupid." Most found the attorney general's case traitorous, going after Boston officers for doing their job: "Getting charged with arresting a guy." There was no debate about it-no opposing or cautionary point of view, where some other officer, sergeant, or supervisor was telling everyone to calm down. No one was making the point that brutality charges were serious matters and, if true, unacceptable. "Everybody was hostile towards it," Kenny said. That consensus extended "throughout the department."

The two-week trial featured some remarkable testimony. Ten officers took the witness stand and denied beating Smith or seeing him beaten. Two of them provided a rare and stunning peek inside their world. One officer testified that he would never report another officer's misconduct or wrongdoing. When asked why, the officer talked about the job's dangers and the need for brotherhood. The officer told the court he would not go against another officer because his own life depended on his colleagues.

The second officer, a veteran of more than three decades, unabashedly told the court that in all his years on the force, he had yet to see another officer commit so much as an infraction of the department's regulations. When asked how this could be, the officer did not answer he'd simply never seen it happen. He said: "I never see it."

The remark seemed a pa.s.sage right out of the code of silence, or "blue wall," where cops stuck together at all costs-turning a blind eye to any misconduct or worse-where cops refused to "rat" on another officer. This was true even though it was a police officer's job to rat. Telling on people-ratting people out-went to the job's core, the sworn duty to uphold the law. To catch lawbreakers, an officer must testify-inform on criminals, either as an eyewitness or by relaying evidence others have provided. But when the lawbreaker was a fellow officer, this principle collided head-on into the "blue wall." It was all about bonds and ties-and ties that bind. With criminals, no such bond existed. With a fellow officer, it did-and so the culture's code was one of see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil.

The prosecutor cited the two officers' words as part of the "evidence of the code of silence; that is, not that they sit around a darkened candle in a darkened room and make a pledge, but what we have from that witness stand...a plethora of evidence that these officers lived by a code which they will not testify against another officer."

Judge Zobel wouldn't go there-he neither agreed with nor rejected the attorney general's claims of a police code of silence. Instead of drawing any broad conclusions about the police culture, he focused on the thirteen officers before him. In so doing, he hammered them. In a forty-page ruling issued on May 8, 1992, Zobel concluded that thirteen "frustrated, disgusted and angry Boston police officers allowed emotion to supplant their training." They violated Smith's civil rights, "from a shared belief that in staging his own version of Smokey and the Bandit, Smith had showered a platoon of Boston police officers with disobedience and disrespect, in the process endangering their safety and making fools of them all. Thus they set out to teach this scofflaw a lesson."

The judge did not rule specifically that any one officer had "kicked or kneed" Smith, but found that officers had "hurled themselves on top of Smith" after hauling him from his car and that "no law-enforcement reason justified the piling-on." Moreover, the judge said the officers' demeanor in court and their sworn testimony did not reveal "the slightest remorse or regret about any of that morning's events." "They don't get it," the judge wrote. "They do not understand how improperly they behaved on Borland Street.

"Being forceful does not mean using excessive force. The pressure that society puts on police to apprehend criminals and deter wrongdoing cannot justify a misuse of the physical power which society entrusts to every police officer." The judge then concluded that outside judicial intervention was necessary-and he granted the attorney general's bid to impose a permanent injunction against the Brighton 13.

"I have determined that because police officers are not likely to regulate police conduct, an outside sanction here is necessary for the public good."

The officers were angry. "For the first time, to my knowledge, a judge has issued an injunction against on-duty officers," said one of their lawyers. "It virtually renders it impossible for the officers to function on the streets, with this injunction hanging around their neck." They appealed, but Zobel's ruling was upheld by the state's highest court, the Supreme Judicial Court. The Brighton 13 were then ordered to undergo "extensive retraining" in civil rights, the use of force, and telling the truth.

For all the hullabaloo surrounding the trial, life inside the department for the thirteen officers barely skipped a beat. Throughout, they'd remained on the job. Some won promotions. From the inside, it was as if rather than losing the court case, they'd won. Kenny Conley, not one to pay close attention to the case's legal twists, reached that conclusion. Nothing seemed to have changed. While riding around on patrol during the remainder of 1992 and into the next year, he figured the police had prevailed. "I would a.s.sume they ruled in the police officers' favor because they're all walking the street."

CHAPTER 5.

Mike's Early Police Career The Boston Police Department is the oldest department in the United States. In the early 1800s, the city's growth on every front-land area, population, immigration, and commerce-gave rise to a more socially complex metropolis. The city was fast outgrowing its original town meeting form of government aimed at keeping power in the hands of many rather than concentrated in the hands of a few. The need for a professional, full-time force to replace constables reflected these changes, and in 1838 the state legislature voted that Boston should a.s.semble a formal police department.

For more than a century and until the civil rights era, the force was largely a fraternity of white men. Then, in 1970, six black and two Hispanic men sued Boston and various state agencies in federal court after their applications at the Boston Police Department were rejected. The department's racial makeup ill.u.s.trated what they were up against: Only about 3.6 percent of the force was black-in a city where blacks made up about 16.3 percent of the city's total population of 641,000 residents.

The men claimed that Boston's hiring and recruitment practices-and those at every police department in Ma.s.sachusetts for that matter-were discriminatory. They argued that the civil service examination was biased and violated their const.i.tutional rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. The federal judge agreed, ruling in Castro v. Beecher that the exams "were discriminatory against minorities which did not share the prevailing white culture." The bias may not have been intentional, the judge said, but it had nonetheless resulted in years of an "unconscious lopsidedness of the [police] recruitment." Determined to come up with a strong remedy that would have an immediate impact, the judge in 1973 approved a plan known as the Castro decree.

The plan required the creation of two pools of applicants: One group contained blacks and Hispanics, and the second group contained nonminority applicants. The applicants in each group were then ranked-with rankings affected by several factors. The most obvious was the exam score: the higher the score, the higher the ranking. Being a veteran of the armed services and being a relative of a public safety officer killed or injured in the line of duty were other factors that boosted rankings.

The two applicant pools were then merged into a single master list. The first name on the new list was the highest ranking minority applicant, and the second name was the highest ranking non-minority applicant. To fill openings, the police department went down the list-in effect, alternating between the two groups. The first opening went to a minority applicant, the second to a nonminority. The system was intended to "facilitate the appointment...of one minority policeman for each white policeman." No one disputed that the plan favored minority applicants, who, by virtue of merging the two pools, ended up ranked higher than a white applicant who had a higher score on the exam or was related to an officer killed in the line of duty. That was the whole point of the affirmative action plan-to use race to correct a gross imbalance in the racial makeup of the force. The goal was to achieve "rough parity," where the percentage of minorities on the Boston police force mirrored the percentage of minorities living in the city.

Mike c.o.x was a second grader at St. Mary's in Brookline when the Castro decree's quota system first went into effect in 1973. Fifteen years later he sat down to take the civil service exam under the revised system with the hope of becoming a police officer. As always, his older sisters had been looking out for him. Lillian not only showed Mike the recruitment ad in the newspaper, she got him the forms he needed to apply.

Lillian was responding to an interest Mike had had since he was a boy, even if he was uncertain whether he could ever measure up to the job. "It seemed like a very difficult job," Mike said. Self-doubts aside, the Castro decree had guaranteed a police job was no longer a long shot for a young black man. By 1988, the look of the police force had changed radically. Of the 1,908 officers, 365 were blacks and Hispanics-making up 20.7 percent of the department's total workforce.

Mike became excited about applying. "It was an opportunity to do something which I would probably learn to like, and I always had an admiration for law and the legal field." Mike was also impressed by the pay. "It wasn't bad either." Earning power was no small thing to him in his new role as provider. The year of 1988 was proving to be a big and hurried one-a personal trifecta covering marriage, family, and career.

Mike and Kimberly were married on June 25, 1988. Vince Johnson was his best man. Mike had just turned twenty-three and Kimberly was twenty-two. The wedding came just a few weeks after Kimberly's graduation from Spelman College with a bachelor of science degree in biology. The newlyweds immediately settled in Boston. Five months later, on November 14, Michael c.o.x Jr. was born. Even with all that, Kimberly was intent on juggling motherhood and her medical school ambitions.

In the fast makeover of his life, Mike's one piece of unfinished business was Providence College. Mike had not returned to Providence following his semester at Morehouse. He became preoccupied with Kimberly, their marriage plans, and starting a family, and he decided he could not start a police career and continue school. "I always knew I could go back to school," he said. "I didn't know if I necessarily would have another opportunity to go into the police academy." When Mike told Kimberly he was going to drop out and apply to the police department, she supported him. They agreed that Mike would complete college later and go on to pursue another goal: a law degree.

Mike pa.s.sed the civil service exam, filled out the department's thick application, had a physical, and sailed through a series of interviews. The process included an a.s.sessment by a mental health professional who, studying the paperwork and noticing Kimberly's academic bona fides, joked, "What's it like being married to someone who's much, much smarter than you?" Mike laughed. "It's a matter of opinion," he retorted.

Soon Mike got the good word: He was in-an affirmative action hire in the new cla.s.s of recruits that would begin six months of training at the Boston police academy on February 27, 1989. Vince Johnson was one old friend taken aback by Mike's career move. "I couldn't believe he was a cop," he said. "He never seemed the type." But one of Mike's former neighbors on Winthrop Street in Roxbury was not surprised. "The profession he chose was a good one for him," the elderly woman named Seleata said. "He cares about people and always has."

Following graduation from the police academy, Mike was ready for prime time-and he was a.s.signed to a new station opened by the city to beef up police coverage in the high-crime neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan. The older station, known as Area Ba2, was located in the heart of Roxbury in Dudley Square, just a few blocks from where Mike grew up. The new facility, known as Area Ba3, was built a couple miles south on Blue Hill Avenue in the Mattapan neighborhood.

Mike began his probation working as a patrol officer during the day shift. A few months later, Mike jumped at the chance to work a more pro-active a.s.signment. Cornell James asked the rookie to work with him. James, a black officer in his early thirties, was a veteran working nights in plainclothes. His family lived on Whiting Street, a cross street off the c.o.xes' Winthrop Street, and the two families knew each other well.

Mike was eager to join James. For a rookie still on probation, working in plainclothes was the fast track. But Mike quickly learned of the a.s.signment's unique dangers. One night he and Cornell James went after a car thief. Listening to the radio, they heard the suspect had abandoned the car and was fleeing on foot. Mike ran from the cruiser and began heading down a street hoping to cut the suspect off. He was playing a hunch. "I was going to the point where the suspect was going to be at." He was dressed in street clothes. His badge was on a necklace around his neck, his police ID was in his wallet, and he wore his service belt. But the police identification was mostly concealed. To any bystander, Mike looked like a black man on the run.

Suddenly, a police cruiser raced by and cut directly in front of him. To avoid being hit, Mike leaped and landed on the hood of the car. He tumbled to the ground, and before he could stand up one officer had grabbed him by his shoulders while a second officer had him by the throat. "I couldn't talk. He was choking me." Mike was unable to explain who he was even if he'd wanted to. The first officer suddenly let go; he'd seen the police ID. The second officer, meanwhile, "stood there trying to choke me and threw me on top of the car." The first officer began yelling that Mike was a cop and then the second officer finally backed off. They left to chase the suspect.

Mike was left dazed by the hit-and-run. "I wasn't scared," he said. "I was baffled." It was the choking by the second officer-a textbook example of the use of unnecessary force. "I didn't understand why he was choking me because I was offering no resistance, so I was more or less angry. I didn't know what was going on."

But Mike quickly let go of his concerns. After the suspect was apprehended, the two officers swung by the Area Ba3 station to look him up. They were not from Mike's station and didn't know the rookie. "They all came by to apologize," Mike said. The first came up and said, "I didn't recognize you." The second also said he regretted the mistake. It ended there. But not before word got around and a captain in Mike's station called him into his office. "I gave an oral report," Mike said. The captain explained his concern: He'd heard talk the officers involved had a "reputation for doing things like that to black people who live in that area." He wondered if Mike wanted to file a formal complaint. No way, said Mike. He was a twenty-four-year-old rookie cop. "I said, 'Captain, I'm on probation. I just started this job. They all apologized. I'm satisfied with that.'"

When his probation ended early in 1990, Mike was a.s.signed to stay in Ba3 in Mattapan, although his shift changed to the "last half" from 11:45 P.M. to 7:30 in the morning. He started out patrolling alone in a service car, responding to routine calls from the dispatcher. Then one night, Craig Jones, another black officer at the station, asked Mike to team up with him. Craig was working in plainclothes in an anti-crime car-in fact, by this time, Craig and his partner were the only ones in that capacity in Ba3. But Craig's partner was getting transferred downtown, and Craig needed a new partner.

The two didn't really know each other, although they'd seen each other at the station house. Craig had been on the force only a little more than two years. He grew up in Boston and, as part of busing, attended South Boston High School. Then he enlisted in the U.S. Army and served three years-at bases in Fort Lee, Virginia; Fort Knox, Kentucky; and Karlsruhe, Germany. When he was discharged, he worked as a security guard in a mall. He entered the police academy in late 1986 and hit the streets in 1987.

Mike took to Craig's offer instantly. He had liked working with Cornell James. He saw working in street clothes as carrying a bit of prestige along with the freedom to be really active on the street, the kind of police work he wanted: "Drug arrests, gangs, things like that." The two teamed up and, in short order, established themselves in Mattapan as a pair of enterprising crime-fighting cops drawn to the action. "We would go to places where they were known to sell drugs," Mike said. "Or there were a lot of shootings that we would respond to. Priority 1 calls only-the highest priority-it would be shootings or stabbings and gang calls."

One early morning in June, the new team of c.o.x and Jones played a key role in apprehending a man who'd shot another officer in the thigh. It was 2:30 A.M. on June 28-three days after Mike's second wedding anniversary-and the two raced to a housing project called Bataan Court after hearing about a shooting on their radio. They arrived in time to see a black man, brandishing a rifle, jump into a Pontiac. The ambulance was arriving to attend to the fallen officer, and Mike and Craig took off after the fleeing Pontiac. They were able to radio in the car's location to the dispatcher, and, several blocks away, another unit cut it off. Two men with rifles were arrested.

Six months later, at 4:15 A.M. in the morning of December 6, a convict who'd just gotten out of prison went on a shooting rampage in Dorchester-firing an AKa47 semiautomatic machine gun. Two residents were wounded, and a man was killed. Mike and Craig were one block away. They arrived to find two men standing in the middle of the street. The men began to run. Despite a mismatch in firepower, Mike and Craig jumped out and gave chase. One suspect stumbled, and the AKa47 hit the ground with a thud. The suspect kept going. Craig grabbed the weapon while Mike followed the man into a backyard farther down the street. Another officer, coming from the opposite direction, cut off the suspect and captured him. Mike's eyewitness account later convicted the man.

The next month, Mike and Craig were in their cruiser at 3:40 A.M., staking out a party when they saw two men leave the apartment building in a hurry. The men climbed into a car. Mike and Craig then heard on the radio that a shooting had occurred in the apartment. The dispatcher was calling for police units as well as an ambulance to respond. Mike and Craig were all over it. They turned on their lights, raced after the car, and cut it off. They arrested the two men inside and recovered a.38-caliber handgun from the car. The weapon was loaded with four live rounds and one spent sh.e.l.l.

Time and again, Mike and Craig thrust themselves into the thick of it. In the process they'd learned about each other. Both were tall and strong and took pride in their physical fitness. They discovered they complemented each other personality-wise-a bit of yin and yang. Craig ran hot-he was typically a step ahead at an incident, jumping in to size up the crime. "He liked doing that, you know," said Mike. "Going inside, see what's going on." Mike ran cooler and quieter. He tended to work the perimeter.

It worked. They were a good fit. They made arrests-or a.s.sisted in arrests-that were clean, intense, and exciting. High-five police moments. Barely two years on the force, and Mike and Craig shared awards for exemplary police work. Their role in arresting the man who shot another officer, for example, resulted in a "medal of honor" in 1991. Then, in early 1993, they won a promotion to the elite gang unit. By January 25, 1995, Mike, having done well on the exam, was awaiting a promotion to sergeant.

Along the way, however, were nights when the crime fighting was not so clean, when in the heat of the moment the lines between the good guys and the bad guys became confused and complicated, when Mike c.o.x experienced deja vu to the first time he was mistaken as a suspect. One episode was later during Mike's rookie year, after he had completed his probation. He and several other officers were chasing a suspect on foot down a street in Mattapan. The suspect jumped over a fence. Mike ran along the fence to keep up with the suspect, and then he began climbing over it too. But as he climbed he felt someone grabbing at his legs, trying to pull him down. Mike turned and saw two officers. "There was apparently some mistaken ident.i.ty," Mike said, but the confusion was short-lived. "I was able to verbally say who I was, and that more or less ended the physical grabbing of me." Mike wasn't troubled by it. "I wasn't punched or anything."

Nor was he troubled by several other incidents. Hearing a report one night that an armed man was walking in back of a building, Mike and Craig headed over to investigate. They carefully made their way down an alley when they noticed an officer they knew standing in the dark. They a.s.sumed the officer recognized them. But he had not. Mike and Craig, dressed in hooded sweatshirts like a pair of g.a.n.g.b.a.n.gers, continued walking toward the officer. The officer shouted, "Show me your hands, show me your hands!" He drew his gun. Finally Craig said something. "Mark, Mark-it's me, Craig."

The officer relaxed, and the suspicious persons incident was recorded officially as an "8-boy," police code for no person to be found. Unreported was a mix-up that, in a blink, could have gone bad but luckily had not. For their part, Mike and Craig had not helped matters. They had not radioed ahead to say they were responding so that the officer in the alley would be on notice that two officers in plainclothes were on their way. But despite its dark potential, the moment pa.s.sed-no harm, no foul.

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 f.u.c.k 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 cla.s.sic Mike c.o.x: 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-cla.s.s 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 ident.i.ty 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 ident.i.ty 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 att.i.tude 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 f.u.c.k are you guys doing?" he screamed. Craig ran up shouting at the officers, "Are you guys stupid! He's a cop! What the f.u.c.k!"

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 c.o.x, along with other officers, was chasing a suspect armed with a handgun. During the foot pursuit Officer c.o.x 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 ch.o.r.es 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 Ca11. 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 Ba3. 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 c.o.x 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 cla.s.s 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.