The Fence - Dick Lehr [42]
Mike preferred to brush aside the close call. He’d taken to police work and liked the feeling that he and Craig were having an impact on the streets. “I loved the job, and it was more than what I expected,” he said. Mike could almost sound golly-gee about it. The job, he said, “meant integrity. It meant—gosh, respect. Loyalty to your community, and just to the people around you. It meant a lot of things to me.”
Sure, the work could be a grind. He wasn’t wild about the paperwork. And while others enjoyed the pageantry that might accompany working a parade or major city function, Mike did not. “You are just standing there in uniform, either in the heat or the cold, not really doing anything for long periods of time. It was just tedious.” And he did not enjoy appearing in court to testify in a case. “Just answering ridiculous questions,” he said. Mike viewed those as chores getting in the way of what mattered most. “The actual police work. Going out and thinking that I was making a difference somehow, you know, by arresting people who were truly bad and helping people who really, really needed help. Those two aspects were the two things I liked the most.”
His was a truly satisfying start to a career—especially for someone who’d dreamed of becoming a police officer but was insecure whether he was good enough to serve. “I really had these high standards for what police officers were,” he said. “I didn’t know if I really necessarily measured up to those standards.” Very quickly Mike had learned he did measure up. “I took a lot of pride in it. I don’t want to say I got self-esteem from it, but what I did was certainly something I was proud of.”
His wife saw it too. “I was a little nervous in the beginning,” Kimberly said. But she realized her husband had indeed made the right choice. “When he was going through basic training, you know, he loved the friendships that he made, the people he met.”
Kimberly had hit on something. The brotherhood aspect of policing was a big part of Mike’s satisfaction with the job. Mike and Craig Jones were more than friends, for example. They experienced a deep trust from working side-by-side. “When you’re in dangerous situations and you work in dangerous places, you have to have a certain bond,” Mike said. “Just to go in and out of those places and feel comfortable, knowing you’re going to come out okay, in the sense of watching your back.” Their closeness was rooted in the very ethos of big-city policing—the us-versus-them mentality, where it was the law against the lawless. Mike embraced the loyalty flowing both ways.
And he enjoyed the ebb and flow of their nights, from the intensity of a crime scene to the relaxed banter back in the office. During a shift, Mike and Craig often grabbed a bite in the cafeteria of Carney Hospital in Dorchester just outside their Mattapan district. They’d meet up with other officers working through the night. One was David C. Williams, a black officer working in Dorchester in Area C–11. Williams, born in Trinidad, had moved to Boston when he was nine and grew up in Dorchester in Uphams Corner. He’d been a police officer for almost four years, joining in 1991, or two years after Mike. There was Richie Walker, a black officer who wore his hair in braids and worked in Mattapan in the area known as B–3. Of the group, Walker had been on the force the longest—since 1985—although his ten-year run was interrupted when, while off duty, he’d pulled a gun on a civilian after a traffic accident. Walker was actually fired, but he appealed the dismissal through labor arbitration and won his job back. All in all, the eating club was a chance to connect in a setting more relaxed than a crime scene.
For Mike and Kimberly, home life was nothing if not hectic. Mike was still a rookie cop when Kimberly began commuting to Philadelphia in the fall of 1989 to attend medical school. Mike Jr. was ten months old and she was expecting their second, but she