The Fence - Dick Lehr [39]
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 B–3 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 assigned to stay in B–3 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 B–3. 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 Cox 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 AK–47 semiautomatic