The Fence - Dick Lehr [94]
The diagnostics ran several pages. “Taken together, these symptoms describe a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder with elements of clinical depression (Adjustment Disorder with Depressed Mood) added to it.”
Rogoff was clear about the cause of Mike’s troubles. “Both the timing and the content of these symptoms, coupled with the fact none of them existed before January 25, 1995, leave no question that they were caused directly by the incident of that night.”
It was discouraging stuff. And Rogoff wrote there was no specific treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. But he did end with a note of encouragement. “I was impressed with Michael Cox’s inner strength and integrity of character (personality), and thus I would hope that he would be able to put himself back together psychologically in a fairly short time.”
CHAPTER 12
Dave, I Know You Know Something
Two years before the beating of Mike Cox, a pair of leading experts on police practices were asking: “How can police, who can be exemplary heroes, beat people and then even be prepared to lie about it?” The paradox was the central question explored in their 1993 book, Above the Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force. The two scholars were Jerome H. Skolnick, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and later New York University, and James J. Fyfe, a longtime New York City patrolman who left the force after earning his Ph.D. in criminal justice.
Using cases that included the ferocious beating of Rodney King on March 3, 1991, by Los Angeles police officers—captured on videotape and televised around the world—the authors said the answer was found in the proposition that “two principal features of the police role—danger and authority—combine to produce…a distinctive world view.” It’s an “us-versus-them” perspective, where the high-risk and often violent nature of the job creates a policing culture based on “internal solidarity, or brotherhood.”
The brotherhood, they wrote, controls behavior even when an officer crosses the line—such as in the beating of Rodney King. It almost doesn’t matter that police departments routinely issue policies on integrity and truth telling. (In Boston, it was Commissioner Paul Evans’s new “Public Integrity Policy: Rule 113.”) When it comes to survival on the street, the unwritten codes about sticking together are what matter, even if that means lying and a cover-up. The last thing a cop wants to do is testify against another cop. “The code decrees that cops protect other cops, no matter what, and that cops of high rank back up working street cops—no matter what,” wrote Skolnick and Fyfe.
Mike Cox did not need to read any book to understand the blue wall of silence. “It’s a large part of being a police officer in general and the culture of being a police officer—protecting one another.” In his analysis, the code’s logic began with the presumption that a cop was always right. “Whatever it is that he’s doing is assumed to be right. Because you’re assuming his actions are always right, you don’t look for any wrong.” In other words, there was never any misconduct for cops to talk about. It was why one of the officers on the witness stand in the Brighton 13 police brutality trial could unblinkingly testify he’d never seen a Boston cop doing anything wrong. In his six years on the force, Mike certainly understood the basis for the code—the need to be able to count on your cohorts, virtually without reservation. It was all about survival while working on the edge of life and death to uphold law and order.
But then came his beating. The code’s underlying rationale—“us versus them”—did not fit. Mike was not one of “them.” He was not a drug dealer. He was not a gun-toting gangbanger. He was not Rodney