The Fence - Dick Lehr [41]
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 fuck 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 classic Mike Cox: 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-class 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 identity 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 identity 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 attitude 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 fuck are you guys doing?” he screamed. Craig ran up shouting at the officers, “Are you guys stupid! He’s a cop! What the fuck!”
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 Cox, along with other officers, was chasing a suspect armed with a handgun. During the foot pursuit Officer Cox 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