CHAPTER 3
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TWO NIGHTS I COULD HAVE BEEN KILLED (and WHY I WASN’T)
It is important—and that is why I have tried to make it clear—that public servants at all levels of government are not just like us; they are us. In fact, the reason I am so sympathetic to the view of public service as a seamless extension of the community is that, as a law enforcement executive who started out as a deputy sheriff, I saw myself as a community member who chose to become a police officer. That choice did not change the fact that I was also a member of the community. The connection between my enduring status as one of the public and what was in 1977 my new status as a deputy sheriff was seamless. I couldn’t tell you where the one role left off and the other began. I still lived where I had lived before. My neighbors before I joined the department were still my neighbors.
As a new deputy in Leon County, Florida, I thought no job was better than the three-to-eleven patrol shift on Friday nights in Tallahassee. Back in the 1970s, Pensacola Street came alive during that shift, as university students and locals mixed and, not infrequently, mixed it up. I thrived on the crackle of the radio calls, and I relished the knowledge that more than a few things were bound to happen during the shift, usually at an accelerating pace as the hour passed through nine and ten on the way to eleven.
I had been with the department going on seven months, and there weren’t a lot of surprises left—at least not where being the only black deputy on a squad of good ol’ boys was concerned. Don’t get me wrong. These guys were professional, and they took pride in performing like professionals. You also need to know that being black in the Florida Panhandle in the 1970s was a world apart from being black in that part of the country, say, in the 1950s. Nevertheless, there was always an edge to the life, both on the job and in the community. You weren’t being paranoid when you detected something in at least some of the eyes that met yours, whether those eyes belonged to a fellow deputy or the white driver of a car you pulled over for running a red light.
I was coming in off a three-to-eleven shift one of those Friday nights, driving along Pensacola Street. It was the usual low rumble-jumble of voices and laughs and occasional shouts—sometimes angry, sometimes happy, sometimes hard to tell which. It was the soundtrack of my shift, and I liked the way it raised my pulse—just a little, just enough. The traffic was what you get in the late evening along a strip with bars and eateries in a Gulf Coast climate where people spill out of the joints and onto the sidewalks all the time. Noise, a lot of lights, a lot of motion, energy, distraction. Those are the nights, the hours, and the streets in which the molecules go into motion, and when molecules are in motion, actions produce reactions that produce new actions.
There’s always an edge to life, whether you are black in a mostly white place or white in a mostly black place—and always, always, when you are a police officer on patrol. Your job, after all, is to look for trouble, even at the weary end of your shift.
That night, I was driving in the right-hand lane of two traffic lanes, slowing down for the approaching intersection. When you’re just driving, you look ahead. When you’re driving a radio car, you scan, ahead as well as to the right and left. Your eyes and your attention are always in motion. So, my eyes flicking back and forth, I saw, rolling up next to me on my left, these three white boys in a pickup with a miniature rebel flag attached to the radio antenna to the right of their windshield. One of them pointed a shotgun out the window and straight at me.
We were rolling. The signal changed to green, and my eyes flashed ahead for an instant to the traffic in front of me. I picked up speed with the traffic, and I looked back to my left. The weapon was in motion within the vehicle, but no longer pointed straight at me.
The time it took for me to see the boys roll up and the shotgun point at me and the light change and the weapon move was a matter of seconds and fractions of seconds. All during that span, I was aware that a lot of people in Leon County drove pickup trucks, and just about everybody who drove one in that place had a shotgun or two or more on a rack across the rear window. So that boy might—maybe might—have just been repositioning the shotgun. Three guys in the cab of a 1970s F-100 didn’t have a lot of elbow room. Add forty-some-odd inches of shotgun, barrel and stock, and you pretty much have to stick it out the window to move it.
Now the weapon was in motion—but I wasn’t going to wait to see where it ended up, not while the hairs on the back of my neck, every single one of them, stood at right angles to my flesh. I took my right hand off the wheel to grab the radio mic.
“I’m on Pensacola Street. I’ve got three white males in a pickup truck with a shotgun.”
That was the sum and substance of the radio call. I let the mic fall to the seat beside me and used my now free right hand to draw my service revolver. Back then, we could put anything we wanted in our cross-draw holster—a holster on my left side. The weapon I chose was a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum with a six-inch barrel. And down on the floorboard was a department-issued 12-gauge shotgun. I held the .357 in my right hand now and drove with my left. If there was going to be shooting, I damn well intended to be doing some of it.
I slowed down to give the pickup a chance to pull ahead of me, still in that left lane. I meant to stay on that truck until more units arrived—however long that might take. But no sooner did I formulate this plan in my head than blue lights approached from every direction, it seems.
Those good ol’ boy deputies heard my call and, going off shift or just coming on, responded—in strength. Everyone continually monitored everyone’s radio calls back then. They, too, were part of that wall-to-wall soundtrack of your shift. And those deputies who heard my voice knew it was me, the black guy. Not that it mattered one way or another. When they heard me, they responded to the voice of a deputy, not a black, white, male, female, short, tall, Irish, Polish, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or Hindu deputy.
But it wasn’t just radio cars pulling up as the traffic stop was being made. It was also a whole bunch of pickups with gun racks and shotguns and little rebel flags flying from their radio antennas or plastered as decals across their back windows. I pulled over as cruisers pulled up behind and in front of the pickup that was carrying my “three white males.” The other pickups pulled over, too, and behind the wheel of each or getting out of the trucks were guys who looked exactly like the three white males who were the subject of my radio call. This was the 1970s, when every store from Radio Shack to 7-Eleven sold CB radios and police scanners. In Leon County, if you were male, drove a pickup, and had a shotgun in the rack, odds are you had a CB and scanner mounted under the dash as well. And if you were in or anywhere near your vehicle, that scanner was always on with the volume turned up.
These boys heard my call, and, like my fellow deputies, they knew who I was—by which I mean they knew I wasn’t a white cop calling for help. Like the deputies who came running, these men, rebel flags flying, answered the call of a police officer—a member of their community who had sworn to protect that community. Now they were all standing by, pulled over on Pensacola Street, watching the traffic stop in progress. Many of those “rednecks”—they were proud to call themselves such—cradled their shotguns as they looked on. Not one of us deputies so much as thought of ordering them to put their weapons down.
Now I watched as the “three white males” emerged from the cab of their pickup, one after the other, looking about as tough at that moment as a litter of Labrador puppies.
“We were just movin’ the gun around is all!” one of them meekly offered. It is one of the most earnest, plaintive, pleading, and respectful explanations I’ve ever heard by the side of the road. A galaxy of blue lights was flashing on three very pale faces and very wide eyes.
One of the deputies turned away from the “subjects” and walked my way.
“What do you want to do with them?” he asked, jerking a thumb back in the direction of the downcast trio.
I shook my head.
“Let ’em go,” I replied. From the looks of things, most of my fellow deputies were ready to eat them alive. “Turn ’em loose.”
I got back into my cruiser, but before I closed the door, I took one last look at the pop-up roadside attraction my call had conjured. Blue lights and pickups with shotgun racks, shotguns, and rebel flags. Had it all been just a false alarm—or, more professionally, an abundance of caution?
To this day, more than forty years later, I can’t say for sure what that boy was doing with his shotgun. But there were no arrests. Should I have been embarrassed by the whole thing? All I can say is that embarrassment is not what I felt as I looked out the open door of my car. Thinking back on it, I’m still not embarrassed.
What I felt—and what I feel still—is the camaraderie, loyalty, and got-your-back solidarity that is the glue holding together every viable, healthy, high-performing police unit. This is not a theoretical conclusion I’ve reached. It is strictly empirical, based on working patrol as a deputy, serving as a police chief and in other law enforcement executive roles, and, as a clinical psychologist, counseling first responders. It is what I’ve seen over and over as a member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, as a member and president of NOBLE, and as a member of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing.
But—even more important—there was that other dimension to that night: the arrival of all those dudes in pickups. If my “three white males” had been stood up with those men in a police lineup, you could not have picked them out. They were cut from the same cloth, except that they had arrived with shotguns unambiguously at the ready to save my life. Truth is, for all I knew at the time and know even now, if those “three white males” had been on their scanner, they might also have shown up to help me—without even realizing they were the subjects of my call!
At first glance, each civilian on that scene was a white man who apparently had just three things in common with the others present: pickup trucks, shotguns on gun racks, and a propensity to display the Confederate battle flag. That symbol was just as common in the 1970s Panhandle as the trucks, gun racks, and shotguns. Many people—people of color especially—knew what the banner historically signified, and that made it a truly hateful symbol. I suppose it was not as acutely resented in the 1970s and 1980s as it became more recently: in the days and weeks following the massacre—by a “young white male”—of nine members of a Bible study class gathered in Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church on the evening of June 17, 2015, and after a conclave of far-right, alt-right, self-proclaimed neo-Confederates, neofascists, neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and militiamen converged on Charlottesville, Virginia, for a “Unite the Right” rally during August 11–12, 2017. Three died during that “rally”—two police officers killed in a helicopter crash, and Heather Heyer, a thirty-two-year-old local paralegal, who was mowed down by an automobile deliberately driven into a crowd of counterprotestors and onlookers. The driver, James Alex Fields Jr., convicted on state charges of hit-and-run, first-degree murder, and eight counts of malicious wounding, was sentenced to life imprisonment. He subsequently pleaded guilty to twenty-nine of thirty counts of a federal indictment for hate crimes in exchange for the prosecutors’ agreement not to seek the death penalty.1
It was a scene in which Confederate flags flew side-by-side with Nazi swastika banners.
In recent years, many Americans have decided that swastikas and the heraldic “saltire” X of the Confederate Battle Flag are equally unacceptable for public display in America. Well, back in the day, there were plenty of us who didn’t like the Rebel imagery either, not one bit. But I can tell you this. That night on Pensacola Street in Tallahassee, none of this mattered. Neither my black skin nor that ugly racist rag mattered one bit. Because that night, in that moment, we were all equally members of a community who valued law and order and believed, without anyone having to remind us, that law and order preserve lives.
My voice went out over the radio, and dozens gathered not just to support one deputy sheriff but each other. Put it another way: they revealed themselves to be a community, a community that ran far deeper than their guns, flags, race, religion, or regional origin. As soon as I got back to the station to finally end my shift that night, Bob Smith, my sergeant, a little guy with a crew cut, tightly built, looking every inch of him like a Marine Corps drill instructor, winked at me from behind his desk: “I was gonna come,” he said, “but it looked like everybody else already went!”
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To tell the truth, I can’t remember what my thoughts were when I went home that night. Honestly, I doubt I was thinking anything remotely resembling “Tallahassee sure came together like a community in a democracy!” No, all I was probably thinking was what most first responders think: Thank God, I got home tonight.
But I never forgot it. And I’ve thought about it over the years.
True, maybe I just got lucky. Maybe those three white boys really were just repositioning their shotgun. Or maybe the end of one shift and the start of another meant nothing more than that a lot of deputies had nothing better to do than answer my call. And maybe the rednecks with their scanners in their pickups were just in the mood for a little excitement. But, over the years, I’ve never convinced myself that the events of that night were just a matter of luck or otherwise essentially meaningless. You see, that night in Tallahassee was only one of two nights I could have been killed but wasn’t.
Early in 1980, I left Tallahassee and the Leon County Sheriff’s Department to serve in Miami as a state arson investigator. I was there just six months before I decided to go back to county-level policing, as a deputy with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department in Orlando. These days, most people know this Central Florida city as the home of Disney World and the Universal Studios theme park, but it is also a city of considerable racial, political, and cultural diversity. Still, policing in Orlando in the 1980s had more similarities with Tallahassee than differences. This was especially true in the rural outskirts, far from downtown and far from the resorts and theme parks. It was an undeveloped area, the home of what some people called good ol’ boys and others, less affectionately, called crackers.
Part of my Orlando beat in the early 1980s was a tract deep in the woods, far beyond the place where the pavement stopped. It was a place where the gravel roads rarely felt the touch of the grader’s blade, a place without street lights and, for that matter, without street signs. Although it was thinly populated, it was the source of frequent calls for service. Those calls were almost always from neighbors complaining of loud honky-tonk music, partying, and general carrying on by the local—well—crackers.
Loud can be a pretty subjective adjective. One man’s loud is another man’s soothing. But, in this place, neighbors were few and far between, and if one of them said the party was loud, you knew it must be blasting. Still, these calls were always a pain to reach—remote batten-and-board, tin-roofed lean-tos mostly, sited on ragged lots that had been chopped and barely weed-whacked out of the swampy woods. Those gravel roads soon gave way to dirt, and that dirt turned to mud whenever it rained. It rains a whole lot in Central Florida. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t the Everglades. You could drive all those roads—if you had the wide-tired pickups the residents drove. But a standard-issue police sedan, a four-thousand-plus-pound rear-wheel-drive Crown Vic Police Interceptor? That was an altogether different matter. Depending on the weather, I’d estimate getting stuck in the mud to be about a 50–50 proposition.
So it was night, of course. That’s when those calls always came. And when I’d take the call, I was always on my own, alone. I made it a point never to roll up on the subjects of the complaint with lights flashing, let alone a siren. I drove up as though I was just visiting, and my approach was as respectful as I always tried to be with everyone. It is just the way my parents brought me up. Back in 1980, I wouldn’t have come up with a special explanation for it. But I realize now that what I was doing was approaching those people not as “crackers” but as fellow human beings and, what is more, as fellow residents of my county and my community—even if they lived outside the built-up city limits of Orlando. Looking back, I understand that I never let the word cracker screen out the concepts of person, resident, and neighbor.
I’d respond to each of these calls the same way: roll up in the radio car, stop, get out of the car, and just venture into the party.
Guys,” I’d say, “you gotta bring this down a little bit. Your neighbors are complaining about the noise.”
If I had to describe my approach—which, at the time, just seemed natural to me—I’d call it informational. I didn’t point to my badge. I didn’t put a hand on my gun. I didn’t demand ID. In fact, I made no demands at all. They were loud. I was calm and quiet. I never accused them of breaking a law or violating a county ordinance. I made no reference to a ticket, citation, summons, or fine. I just informed them that I was responding not to a police radio dispatch and not to a violation of section such-and-such of the penal code of this-and-that, but to a phone call from their neighbors, and I needed to let them know that they were disturbing them. No, I didn’t threaten them, and I certainly demanded nothing of them. All I wanted was for them to see that I, a deputy sheriff, their public servant, had a little problem, which they were in a position to help me solve.
Now, none of this altered the existential reality that we were alone together. I had a radio in the car, but no walkie-talkie at my shoulder, and body cams were thirty some years in the future. There was one of me, a lone black skinny deputy, and I couldn’t tell you how many backwoods white guys—who probably called themselves crackers—were there, staring at me and at the close-set trees through very thick beer goggles.
What might they have done? They could have told me to get lost. They could have laughed in my face. They could have run me out. They could have beat me up or even killed me.
What did they do?
They listened to me and were as respectful as could be. “All right,” one of them said. “Sorry, deputy. We’ll take care of it.”
I knew they would, in fact, “take care of it.” And they did. The party didn’t stop—I didn’t ask them to stop having a good time—but the volume went way down. Of course, as I’ve said, this was never a one-time thing. They would quiet down each time I came out there, but, sooner or later, there would be another party. Each time, when I asked them to hold it down, they did. And more than once, I had a hell of a time pulling out of their little corner of the county. If there had been recent rain or the road was sufficiently rutted from earlier downpours, my wheels would spin and spin, the Ford’s eight cylinders pulling me that much deeper into the soup with each touch of the accelerator. It was more embarrassing than anything, but, whenever it happened, I could count on one of those guys calling out: “Deputy, need help?”
I wasn’t too proud to say yes, and, when I did, a couple of them would back a pickup into position, run out some chains, hook me up, and pull the car to a dry spot on the road. You won’t be surprised to hear that the pickup was decked out in rebel flags, but that made no difference to me. Crackers? Toward me, they were behaving like fellow members of the community, my neighbors, folks giving their local deputy a hand. The Confederate flags? They were decals or rags. All that counted were actions and behavior. These people showed me the respect I showed them. The symbols they chose to display? Nobody in the community had called to complain about decals and flags.
I looked very different from the residents out where the pavement ended. No doubt, in many ways, I was very different from them, and they from me. But when I came to them with one problem (they were disturbing others nearby) and then with another (my big-ass cruiser was stuck in the mud), we found we had two very important things in common. Number one, we all wanted me to get going and be on my way. Number two, we were all members of the same community. I didn’t congratulate myself on being the world’s best cop for the way I got those good ol’ boys to turn down the volume. It was simply the way things were supposed to be.
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Having spent most of my career in law enforcement, I freely admit to a bias toward seeing policing as a microcosm and a model of what Fourth Branch government should look like. No public service profession distills the essence of public service more purely than law enforcement. It serves. It protects. It is the interface between the legislating, policymaking, and law-interpreting branches of constitutional government and the people. The three constitutional branches are like the software apps of government, but the Fourth Branch is the operating system. It makes what the three constitutional branches plan and propose actually work, work with and for the nation’s people. An unenforced law, after all, is nothing more than an idea, a concept, and an aspiration. It is as inert as a software program before the operating system boots up. A police department can falter and fail for many reasons, but there is one quality without which no police agency can succeed. It is the ability to create person-to-person relationships between department members and community residents. Departments whose officers do this consistently, day after day, are doing police work the way it is supposed to be done. Without police working one-on-one with one person at a time, respectfully, the state, its laws, and its values are just so much aspiration and theory. It is precisely the same with the unelected government, which is the interface between the policymaking and lawmaking units of government on the one hand and the public who are served by those policies and those laws on the other. The Fourth Branch delivers to the people nothing less than everything meaningful the government does.