June
6, 2002 9:10 a.m. TNY
on Cincinnati
In
the line of duty-and fire.
hen
one has worked into the small hours picking up shell casings, following
blood trails, and otherwise mopping up in the path of the criminal rabble,
sleep can sometimes come hard. After one particularly grueling night spent
on some of the meaner streets of Los Angeles recently, I was relieved
to come home to find the May 20 issue of The New Yorker in the
day's post. As a mere provincial, one of the unwashed who occupy the vast
hinterland beyond the Hudson River, I recognize that I am not expected
fully to appreciate the wisdom contained within the pages of The New
Yorker. But any given issue is nonetheless valuable to me, especially
in the circumstances just described. When one is lying in bed and has
finished perusing the cartoons, a random turn of the page to almost any
article can serve as the ideal soporific. Haunted as I may be by just-absorbed
images of bullet-riddled bodies, a few paragraphs into "The Talk
of the Town" and I'm fast, fast asleep.
It
was with this sense of hope that I went to bed with the May 20 issue just
before dawn the other day. Yes, the cartoons were wry, as usual, and the
photo essay on Ground Zero was magnificent. But in my search for an article
that might usher in peaceful slumber I would find only disappointment,
for I read Mark Singer's "A Year of Trouble," an examination
of the fallout in the year since a police shooting sparked days of violence
in Cincinnati. Sleep would be elusive that morning.
A bit of background:
In the early-morning hours of April 7, 2001, Timothy Thomas, a 19-year-old
black man, was walking through the Over-the-Rhine section of Cincinnati.
An off-duty Cincinnati police officer, working as a nightclub security
guard, recognized the passing Thomas as being wanted on 14 arrest warrants.
A foot chase ensued, and soon several on-duty officers converged on the
area. One of them, Stephen Roach, a white four-year veteran, confronted
Thomas in an alley off Republic Street. "Show me your hands!"
Roach ordered, and when Thomas failed to do so, Roach fired a single round
from his 9-mm pistol. Thomas was struck in the chest; he died in an ambulance
en route to a hospital. Thomas was unarmed, as it turned out, and his
death triggered three days of rampaging in Cincinnati's black neighborhoods.
In September of that year, Officer Roach was tried and acquitted on misdemeanor
charges related to the shooting.
Less than 500 words
into the nearly 4,000-word article I knew I would be tossing and turning
the rest of the morning, for there came this rehash of the mantra spouted
by those who characterized Cincinnati's riot as a "rebellion"
or an "uprising." Timothy Thomas was, according to Singer, "an
unarmed African-American, shot by a white police officer, the fifteenth
black person killed by Cincinnati policemen during a six-year period in
which no white suspects died . . ." All of which is true, granted,
but implicit in the statement is the notion that Cincinnati police officers
should somehow keep a box score of the race of various offenders and,
when the figures begin to look a little lopsided, keep their weapons holstered
regardless of the circumstances. "Well, partner," a cop might
say, "that guy wanted for murder is pointing a shotgun at us, but
he's black, after all, and offering any kind of violent response might
result in his demise and further skew the statistics in such a way that
would inspire an uprising and invite criticism from such a distinguished
publication as The New Yorker, so let's drive on and see if we
might find a white man we can shoot instead."
Further along in
the article is another gem. In the months leading up to the Thomas shooting,
"the [Cincinnati] City Council passed an ordinance requiring officers
to file reports after every traffic stop, a tacit acknowledgment that
racial profiling existed." Was it really? I propose an alternative
explanation: Perhaps this ordinance is instead evidence that the City
Council was amenable to being mau-maued by the local grievance industry,
whose members refuse to acknowledge the unpleasant truth that violent
crime is more prevalent in some racial groups than others, and that police
contacts — including violent ones — will increase accordingly
in areas where violent crime is highest.
Elsewhere in the
article Singer describes Thomas as a "disheartening archetype —
one among the millions of non-upwardly-mobile young men whom we, as a
nation, have shown far more readiness to arrest and lock up (or, insidiously,
to ignore completely) than to welcome into the mainstream of American
social and civic experience." This passage surely had them putting
down their glasses of Merlot and nodding in wistful assent all over those
tony Manhattan zip codes and leafy suburban burgs where Hillary Clinton
found so many votes: It takes a village to raise a child, and, presumably,
to kill one. I'm surprised Singer didn't come right out and blame Thomas's
death on Ronald Reagan.
Finally, there was
this bit of pithiness that would have me thrashing about and flinging
the covers to the floor. Singer recounts an interview with Timothy Thomas's
mother, Angela Leisure, who spoke of her son's previous unpleasant encounters
with police officers.
Thomas would be
alive today, presumably, if he hadn't run from the off-duty cop who
recognized him. So why did he? "My son had a fear of police officers,"
Leisure told me. "We had conversations about that. His thing was
'Mom, if they could do this to me in broad daylight with everybody watching,
what would they do in the dark?'" Whatever else went through Thomas's
and Roach's minds as they faced off in the alley, neither was in the
presence of someone he instinctively trusted. Then the only one of them
holding a gun fired it.
To those who believe
there is great wisdom to be found in this passage I will say this: All
too often it is not just the police officer who is holding a gun. A few
weeks ago I joined thousands of my fellow police officers at a funeral
for David March, a Los Angeles County deputy sheriff. At about 10:30 on
the morning of May 1, March made what he must have assumed would be a
"routine traffic stop." (We're supposed to know there is no
such thing.) According to sheriff's detectives, the driver he stopped
was Armando Garcia, a 25-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico, who got
out of his car and shot March several times before the deputy could draw
his own weapon. Deputy March, a husband and father, was 33 years old.
Yes, Timothy Thomas
was unarmed when he was shot, and his arrest warrants were for minor violations.
But he would indeed be alive today if he hadn't run from the officers
who were doing their job by trying to arrest him. Thomas chose his own
path. A wiser man might have seen where it would end.
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hen
one has worked into the small hours picking up shell casings, following
blood trails, and otherwise mopping up in the path of the criminal rabble,
sleep can sometimes come hard. After one particularly grueling night spent
on some of the meaner streets of Los Angeles recently, I was relieved
to come home to find the May 20 issue of The New Yorker in the
day's post. As a mere provincial, one of the unwashed who occupy the vast
hinterland beyond the Hudson River, I recognize that I am not expected
fully to appreciate the wisdom contained within the pages of The New
Yorker. But any given issue is nonetheless valuable to me, especially
in the circumstances just described. When one is lying in bed and has
finished perusing the cartoons, a random turn of the page to almost any
article can serve as the ideal soporific. Haunted as I may be by just-absorbed
images of bullet-riddled bodies, a few paragraphs into "The Talk
of the Town" and I'm fast, fast asleep. 
