The Fence - Dick Lehr [73]
It was as if a paralysis had spread like a virus once everyone realized cops had beaten a cop. The ground was unfamiliar to them—a coworker, a brother, had turned out to be the victim of police brutality, and some cop or cops at the station had either committed the assault or witnessed it. Had a suspect been beaten—well, that was not so otherworldly. Many cops had seen or been part of an altercation where the bad guys got roughed up and sometimes worse. This, however, was not the more typical us-versus-them dynamic that lent itself to sticking together to gloss over the use of excessive force. This was radioactive, a beating that was turbo-charged with a complicated set of competing loyalties—to the individual person, to race, to the code of silence, and to justice.
Daley was apparently not sure what to say or what to do. He was tongue-tied, but he also wasn’t alone in “showing leg,” or offering a hint of information of evidentiary value. Jimmy Burgio, down in the first-floor lobby, walked over to another one of the gang unit officers and said, “I think one of your guys got beat up by mistake.” But, as with Daley, no one followed up in earnest, and Burgio said no more. It became another potential lead lost in the paralysis. Then the most tantalizing tidbit came from Dave Williams. Outside the guardroom, he caught up to Craig Jones walking down the hallway.
“I think my partner hit your partner by accident,” he said.
Craig stopped. His investigatory gears kicked in. He pictured Mike’s bloodied head on the pavement. Where’s Burgio’s flashlight? he asked. Williams said Burgio probably had it with him. Where’s Burgio? Craig then asked. He’s gone, Williams said.
Burgio had already left the station, and no one went after him. No one got the flashlight. Burgio was “8-boy,” police radio code for “nowhere to be found.”
The answers were right there in the guardroom. But no one came clean—and no one took charge and insisted upon it. No one called a time-out on all the bobbing and weaving to demand better. No one pounced on the leads—the incriminating and suggestive statements that in the light of the next day, and in the days that followed, began to be taken back, spun differently, or flat-out denied. The media were expecting police reports to continue its coverage about the hair-raising high-speed chase, portraying the arrests as a hugely successful police moment, and the few hints at the truth were choked off by a toxic blend of cop ego and cop cover-up. Mike’s beating was a public relations disaster that would only steal a great headline about departmental heroics.
Sergeant Thomas allowed Donald Caisey’s flawed injury report to go through—a minimalist composition of twelve handwritten lines in one ungrammatical paragraph: “Officer Cox lost is [sic] footing on a puddle of ice causing him [to] lose his balance and fall forward striking his head on a marked cruiser. Officer Cox then fell backward on the ground striking the back of his head on the ground. As a result of this Officer Cox sustained head injuries causing him to lose consciousness for a short period of time.”
No mention was made of all the blood, of Mike’s cuts on his mouth, the three-inch cut on his forehead and other facial cuts, the stitches, the egg-sized hematoma, the bruising to his midsection, the hand and its torn ligament, the kidney damage. No mention was made of the truth everyone at the station knew by daybreak—Mike was beaten.
The result was this: an initial official record of the event that was false—a record that kept the story simple and singularly about police success and that postponed the negative about Mike. But the phony reports—mirroring Sergeant Dovidio’s handiwork at the scene—were tantamount to a license to lie. Once the lies began, where would they end?
Lying in pain in one of the cubicles