Cops Know Police Departments Are Broken
Black police officers explain what real reform might look like.
Welcome back to What Went Wrong?, a weekly newsletter about the failures, inefficiencies, and screw-ups that define 21st-century American life, written by Harry Cheadle. This week we’re talking to cops.
Nepotism, racism, and the struggles inside police departments
Photo of NYPD cops by Flickr user Anthony Quintano.
Bobby Ramos has lots of stories. When he was hired as a cop in Stratford, Connecticut, back in 1986, he was one of only three officers of color on the entire force, and he endured vicious racism from his superiors. Some told him to stay away from white women; one high-ranking cop mocked him as “African” because he had his hands in his pockets on a cold day. Ramos helped push the department to hire more Black officers by threatening a lawsuit; his work in the largely Black community where he patrolled gave him such a sterling reputation that he got an award named for Martin Luther King, Jr. after he retired. When I talked to him on the phone a couple weeks ago he unspooled yarns about dealing with armed and pissed-off anti-cop protesters in the aftermath of the Rodney King beating and handing out donated computers to people in poor neighborhoods.
He also said that his attitude and public profile (he has a longtime sports radio show and made headlines for asking a weird question during a press conference at the 2014 NBA Finals) turned him into something of a pariah within his own department. This suited him, in some ways—when he was responding to calls, he often would specifically request no backup because there were officers “you knew were lightning rods. They were going to make a situation worse. So I was better off by myself anyway.”
The country is having one of its periodic conversations about the problems cops like Ramos are all too familiar with. Police departments handle protests with too much aggression, cops kill people at an alarmingly high rate, and it’s incredibly difficult to fire officers, even those who have committed atrocities. Police unions have largely handled calls for reform as they have in the past, with a combination of bluster and outright threats: Atlanta cops responded to their former colleagues being charged in the killing of Rayshard Brooks, an unarmed Black man, by apparently engaging in an illegal work slowdown.
But police unions, which often represent the most reactionary, right-wing instincts of law enforcement, don’t speak for all cops. There’s a long tradition of Black officers like Ramos trying to change the system from within, to encourage their departments to become more diverse and convince other cops to think of themselves as guardians of their communities, not warriors sent into a territory full of hostile criminals each day. Their reward is often to be ostracized and sometimes fired. I’ve spent the last few weeks talking to several current and retired cops, most of them Black, about the problems with policing, because these are people who know intimately how departments function, and what needs to change. Here’s what they told me:
Reform needs to start with who you hire
Booker Hodges, a veteran police officer who serves as an assistant commissioner in the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, grew up on the Northside of Minneapolis, a historically Black neighborhood that is one of the poorest and most dangerous areas in the entire state. Hodges thinks the country needs more people who grew up like him to become cops—we know what the alternative looks like, and it’s not good.
“The vast majority of cops are good, but you know, there's a serious racist culture that exists in this profession and nobody wants to deal with it,” he said. “Nobody wants to admit it.”
Many officers in major metropolitan areas are from the suburbs or rural places, Hodges told me; they want to be cops but can’t get a job in their towns because there aren’t any openings. That means they wind up being hired in big cities that are far more diverse than the places they came from. “Now you're faced with a situation where someone's coming into a community they don't know. They're not gonna live there. So in essence, you're a mercenary,” Hodges said. “If you've never dealt with people of color, and then you come to a city, and every person of color you deal with is someone involved in a crime—how quick are you going to form your opinion that everybody is like that of that group?”
A lot of cities do require police officers to live in the cities where they work, and experts generally say those requirements don’t have any kind of positive effect. Just living in a certain area doesn’t confer any kind of virtue on anyone, and a white officer who grew up in the white part of a city might have the same prejudices as someone from a white suburb. Still, it seems obvious that rookie officers who “haven't seen a black person since J.J. on Good Times,” as Ramos put it, are coming to the job at a disadvantage.
Many of the cops I spoke to said that departments needed to hire more Black people, a recommendation that lines up with data from the U.K. suggesting that more diverse police departments have fewer substantiated misconduct complaints. “What seems to be needed is an open discussion of how minority citizens are treated—a discussion that can be prompted by expanding the proportion of minority officers,” the researcher Sounman Hong wrote in the Washington Post in 2017.
Charles P. Wilson, a retired cop who chairs the National Association of Black Law Enforcement Officers, told me that police forces need to actively target people of color as recruits if they’re serious about changing their demographics. “If you tell me your prime candidate is a black female, and you do not tell me that you're putting your recruiting information in hair salons, fitness centers, and shopping centers—where every single black woman I know goes at least once a week—you are not recruiting for black females,” he said.
“We all know who's a racist, or who has a drinking or drug problem. We all know who the cowards are.”
Police departments in the U.S. are consistently whiter than the communities they serve. That can be chalked up to decades of the kind of racism Ramos and many others endured, and also a frequent a culture of nepotism surrounding police hiring.
“If you're hiring your teacher from high school's two sons, which has been done on my job, your mayor's neighbor's three brothers… what kind of attitude do you think those officers feel versus the other officers that maybe just took the test, got hired, found a place to go, and really do the job because they want it?” said Marvise Rennalls, a Black police officer in Ossining, New York.
There are all sorts of ways someone can be unqualified to be a cop—they could be an outright racist, they can come into the job with a sense of entitlement and power, or they could just be a young white man who is nervous to be in an area with a lot of crime and a lot of people of color. The last is an extremely bad combination. “When men are afraid, especially publicly, they have to act like they're not afraid,” Ramos said. “That's where the nightstick will come out. That's where the mace will come out and the guns come up, because I gotta prove I'm not afraid.”
Cops need to speak up about other cops
A police department is in many ways like any other workplace: Everyone knows who is a hard worker, who slacks off and cuts corners, who actually shouldn’t have their job. For cops, that means they know who has the capacity to do something truly heinous. “You know the next Floyd case person,” Rennalls said. “I can identify all of them on my job.”
“We all know who's a racist, or who has a drinking or drug problem. We all know who the cowards are,” Ramos said. “Nobody ever says anything. That's why I always hated that ‘see something, say something’ bullshit. Cops never do that. Never do that. They don't ever tell on each other.”
Some of the cops I interviewed said that they didn’t see a lot of bad behavior from other officers because it was known that they would tell their superiors, internal affairs, or the media. But having that reputation can mean being isolated socially, being passed over for promotion, and sometimes fired.
“There are many police officers who really want to do it right,” said Steve Downing, a retired 20-year LAPD veteran who is part of the pro-reform Law Enforcement Action Project. “There are many who want to pull the guy off when he's got his knee on his neck. But the internal pressure is so great. They don't speak out. And they don't speak out because they fear retaliation and they fear retaliation because they know that the administration won't back them up.”
In one example Downing pointed me to, an officer named Lawrence Alexander in Long Beach, California, reported to his superiors that a recruit he supervised refused to patrol in a “high-crime area.” (That’s how the local news worded it; Downing told me the white recruit straight-up said he didn’t want to be in a Black neighborhood.) Instead of dismissing the recruit as the regulations called for, the Long Beach brass demoted Alexander, who later won a $2.5 million lawsuit against the Long Beach Police Department.
Officers may also be discouraged from speaking out about bad behavior because in many departments, it’s so hard to get a bad cop fired that telling on them does little good. Hodges told me about a case in Minnesota where a sheriff’s deputy lost his job for getting a DWI, but was hired back after an arbitration procedure—his department had to put an ignition interlock in a squad car to make sure he couldn’t turn it on while he was drunk. If some police officers act like there won’t be any consequences for their misbehavior, that’s because there probably won’t be.
Some police officers find hope in the next generation
If you squint, there are signs that things could be changing. Major police unions in California have signaled they’d be willing to support firing racist cops; big cities have hired reform-minded leaders as department heads. A lot of those progressive chiefs were fired relatively quickly, suggesting how hard change is to enact. Often, police unions resist top-down reform and bend politicians to their will (as New York cop unions famously did to Bill de Blasio).
“If the folks at the bottom don't embrace that policy, it ain't gonna work,” Wilson said.
The cops I spoke to said that for policing to change, who does the policing needs to change. That’s a slow process, since being a police officer is generally a well-paid, secure job. “People stay in these jobs for 25 years,” said Hodges.
Hodges is optimistic about the next generation of cops, who he described as more tolerant and also less likely to support the way police unions defend officers who are guilty of crimes. But there are still lots of old-timers around who aren’t so tolerant. And Wilson is worried that if cities start to defund their police departments—as many activists have called for—it will mean that these younger cops will be let go, making true reform even harder.
The cops I spoke to are hoping for a change in the culture, a slow, difficult process that needs to happen within the thousands of law enforcement agencies across the U.S. This process would need to include a lot of cops being fired or forced into retirement, and it’s a process that needs to continue when policing is no longer in the headlines.
“It's nice to see all these chiefs taking a knee and all of that—screw that,” Ramos said. “Do it two years from now, and you'll impress me… I want to see what happens when things quiet down.”
Thanks for reading What Went Wrong?, a newsletter by Harry Cheadle that publishes every Tuesday. If you have questions or comments, please email me at harrydcheadle@gmail.com. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe and tell someone about it.
Well written article. I am a retired black police officer who policed the same communities where I grew up. I have witnessed so much of what other officers of color have witnesses.
Great article. It touched on issues that every black police officer in most departments in America have experienced. I strongly believe that the civil service laws in New York State need to be amended when it comes to hiring, promoting and firing Police Officers. It forces you to choose people based on certain criteria that doesn’t work. We are forced to hire people who we would normally not hire. You get people who are great multiple choice test takers, who have no criminal record, never interacted with black people and have other issues, but you can’t disqualify them. Maybe instead of a multiple choice test, give an aptitude exam. Offer the Basic Law Enforcement Training in Community Colleges, let people complete that course and go apply for a police officer job just like any other job. Some of your best candidates can score a 70 on a written exam and you will never get to them, while you were forced to hire less desirable candidate who scored a 90!