The Fence - Dick Lehr [158]
Mike followed Louima. He’d sat there stiffly, looking straight ahead, rarely turning sideways to look at Louima or any of the other speakers. “It’s tough for me to be here right now and talk about this kind of stuff,” he told the audience. “For two reasons: One, it’s personal to me, and two, I’m still a police officer.” He began by describing generally what happened at Woodruff Way. When the moderator interrupted to ask for specifics, Mike refused. “I think I feel comfortable with just saying [I was] brutalized.”
His remarks lasted less than eight minutes. The point he wanted to make, he said, was that the problem of police brutality and the failure to confront it was rooted in “the police culture, and the lack of addressing the police culture by most organizations.
“The culture is just so strong,” he said. “Police don’t even like to talk about brutality, and ending and stopping it and doing something about it. Many of them don’t participate in brutality but they don’t realize they are participating by not saying anything.”
As the years passed, Mike stayed on at the Boston Police Department. “First, I’m not a quitter,” he said by way of explanation. Besides, he’d always felt safer on the inside and had never wavered in his belief that law enforcement was an honorable profession. “I like doing police work,” he said. “There are many good things done on a day-to-day basis that you never hear about.”
Mike was promoted to deputy superintendent in early 2005 by a new police commissioner, after Paul Evans left the force to take a job with the British government, evaluating the effectiveness of law enforcement agencies in that country. Mike even began taking courses at Suffolk University Law School in Boston.
But nothing would ever be the same, even if Mike felt vindicated by his successful lawsuit. When it came to police work, he was the first to admit this. “It’s different for me now,” he said. “That trust, I don’t have it anymore, no doubt about that.”
The change went further, though. “He’s not the same guy, not the same cheerful guy,” said Mike’s best pal from boarding school, Vince Johnson. “I recognize his voice, but that’s it. His whole demeanor—there’s not that confidence.”
Whereas Mike’s self-image was once built around cop and career, he now talked about no longer letting the work define him. He focused instead on family and took pride in his kids, watching his sons excel in ice hockey and football as they made their way through high school. The boys were college-bound and still he’d never sat down and talked to them about the night everything changed on January 25, 1995.
Mike was different, he knew that. But the thing he wasn’t sure about was whether the police culture was different as a result of his quest for justice. Sure, on the one hand, he’d observed a “heightened awareness of some of the issues.”
But the big question was: Could it happen again? Could another police beating like his happen again, where the assailants were shielded afterward by a powerful blue wall of silence?
“I don’t know,” he said. “I like to think not. But I don’t know.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank the Boston police officers and law enforcement officials who helped me in my research. I want to thank, especially, Mike Cox. He was always a reluctant player in this project. Not surprisingly, Mike never wanted to be in the position of beating victim, and he was not enthusiastic about the case becoming the basis for a book. Given that, he nonetheless did not seek to obstruct the research and,