town.
One of the cops, a man named Jerry, sat staring at me the entire time. I felt sure I’d seen him before. He was quietly drinking whiskey shots with beer chasers. Once in a while, he’d spit out a question: “So you think you know a lot about gangs, huh?” or “What are you going to write about, Mr. Professor?” I got a little nervous when he started calling me “Mr. Professor,” since that’s how I was known in J.T.’s building. Was this just a coincidence?
The more Officer Jerry drank, the more belligerent he became. “You university types like to talk about how much you know, don’t you?” he said. “You like to talk about how you’re going to solve all these problems, don’t you?”
Reggie shot me a glance as if to say that I’d better defend myself.
“Well, if you think I don’t know something, why don’t you teach me?” I said. I’d had a few beers myself by now, and I probably sounded more aggressive than I’d intended.
“Motherfucker!” Jerry leaned in hard toward me. “You think I don’t know who you fucking are? You think we all don’t know what you’re doing? If you want to play with us, you better be real careful. If you like watching, you may get caught.”
A shiver ran over me when he said “watching.” Now I knew exactly where I’d seen him. In J.T.’s buildings Officer Jerry was well known, and by my estimation he was a rogue cop. Some months earlier, I’d been sitting in a stairwell interviewing a few prostitutes and pimps. I heard a commotion in the gallery. The stairwell door was partially open; looking out, I could see three police officers busting open an apartment door. Two of them, one black and one white, ran inside. The third, who was black, stayed outside guarding the door. He didn’t seem to notice us.
A minute later the cops hauled out a man and a teenage boy. Neither of them resisted, and neither seemed very surprised. The teenager was handcuffed, and they forced him to the floor. The mother was screaming, as was the baby in her arms.
Then a fourth cop showed up, swaggering down the hall. It was Officer Jerry. He wore black pants, a black and blue fleece jacket, and a bulletproof vest. He started to beat and kick the father violently. “Where’s the money, nigger?” he shouted. “Where’s the cash?”
I was shocked. I glanced at the folks I’d been talking to in the stairwell. They looked as if they’d seen this before, but they also looked anxious, sitting in silence in the apparent hope that the cops wouldn’t come for them next.
Finally the man relented. He, too, lay on the floor, bloodied. “In the oven,” he said, “in the oven.”
Officer Jerry went inside and returned with a large brown bag. “Don’t fuck with us,” he told the father. “You hear me?”
The father just sat there, dazed. The other cops took the hand-cuffs off the teenager and let him back into the apartment.
Just as Officer Jerry was leaving, one of the pimps sitting next to me accidentally dropped a beer bottle. Officer Jerry turned and looked down the gallery, straight at us. I jumped back, but he stomped into the stairwell. He cast his eye over the lot of us. “Get the fuck out of here!” he said. Then, noticing me, he smirked, as if I were no more significant than a flea.
Once he left, I asked one of the pimps, Timothy, about Officer Jerry. “He gets to come in the building whenever he wants and get a piece of the action,” he said. Timothy told me that Sonny, the man that Officer Jerry had just beaten, stole cars for a living but had apparently neglected to pay his regular protection fee to Officer Jerry. “We always joke that whenever Officer Jerry runs out of money, he comes in here and beats up a nigger,” Timothy said. “He got me once last year. Took two hundred bucks and then my girl had to suck his dick. Asshole.”
In the coming months, I learned that Officer Jerry was a notorious presence in the building. I heard dozens of stories from tenants who said they’d suffered all forms of harassment, abuse, and shakedowns at the hands of Officer Jerry. It was hard to corroborate these stories, but based on what I’d seen with my own eyes, they weren’t hard to believe. And to some degree, it probably didn’t much matter whether all the reports of his abusive behavior were true. In the projects, the “bad cop” story was a myth that residents spread at will out of sheer frustration that they lived in a high-crime area where the police presence was minimal at best, unchecked at worst.
Now, sitting across the table from him at the Lounge, I started to feel extremely nervous. What if he somehow knew that I had recorded all these incidents in my notebooks?
He sat there sputtering with rage, shaking the table. I looked over at Reggie, hoping for some help.
“Jerry, leave him alone,” Reggie said quietly, fiddling with his beer. “He’s okay.”
“Okay? Are you kidding me? You trust that motherfucking Ay-rab?!” Jerry tossed back his shot and grabbed the beer. I thought he might throw the bottle at me. He let out a nasty laugh. “Just tell him to stay out of my way.”
“Listen, I’m only trying to get a better understanding of what you do,” I said. “Maybe I could tell you a little bit about my research.”
“Fuck you,” Jerry said, staring me down. “You write any of that shit down, and I’ll come after your ass. You got me? I don’t want to talk to you, I don’t want you talking to nobody else, and I don’t want to see you around these motherfucking projects. I know who you are, motherfucker. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing.”
Reggie grabbed my arm and threw a twenty-dollar bill on the table. “Let’s go,” he said.
When we got to the car, Reggie started the ignition but didn’t drive away. He began to speak gently but firmly, his tone almost parental. “Sudhir, I brought you here today because these guys wanted to know who you are and what you’re up to. I didn’t want to tell you that, because I knew you’d be nervous. They know you’re watching, they know you’ve seen them in the building, they know you’re going to be writing something. I told them that you were a good person. Jerry was too drunk-I’m sorry about that.”
Reggie held his silence for a few minutes, looking out at the busy street.
“I think you have to make a decision, Sudhir,” he said. “And I can’t make it for you. I never really asked you what you’ll be writing about. I thought you were just helping the club, but then Autry told me last week that you’re writing about life in the projects. You and I have talked about a lot of things. But we never talked about whether you would write what I say. I hope not. I mean, if you are, I’d like you to tell me right now. But that’s not really the problem, because I’m not afraid of what I do or what I am.”
Up to this point, Reggie knew that I was interviewing families and others for my graduate research. A few months later, we wound up talking further about my dissertation, and he said it would be okay to include anything he’d told me, but we agreed to change his name so he couldn’t be identified.
At this moment, however, what really concerned me was the reaction of his colleagues. “Reggie, are you telling me I need to worry if I write about cops?”
“Police don’t talk a lot to people like you,” he said. “Like Jerry. He doesn’t want people watching what he does. I know you’ve seen him do some stupid shit. I know you’ve seen a lot of people do some stupid shit. But you need to decide: What good does it do to write about what he does? If you want to work around here, maybe you keep some of this out.”
I left Reggie that evening not knowing what I should do. If I wanted to write about effective policing-like the good, creative work that Reggie did-I would feel compelled to write about abusive policing as well.
A week later I was talking to Autry about my dilemma. We were having a beer in the South Shore apartment where he lived with his wife and children. South Shore was a stately neighborhood with pockets of low-income apartments that someone like Autry could afford. He had moved there to keep his children away from street gangs.
Autry insisted that I not write about the police. His explanation was revealing. “You need to understand that there are two gangs in the projects,” he said. “The police are also a gang, but they really have the power. I mean, these niggers run around with money and cars, but at any moment the cops can get them off the street. They know about you. They’ve been talking with me, and I’ve been telling them you’re okay, but they want to know what you’re looking for.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” I asked.
“I didn’t want to worry you, and you haven’t done nothing wrong,” he said. “But you need to do what I do. Never, never, never piss off the police.”
