The Anguish of Blacks in Blue

UNTIL the spring of 1968, Renault Robinson was considered a model policeman. After four years on the Chicago force, he had a 97% efficiency rating and had won more than 50 citations for outstanding work. Then Robinson and seven other black policemen formed the Afro-American Patrolmen's League, an organization aimed at improving police service to the black community and at getting more blacks into policymaking positions in the department. Robinson has been suspended five times since; anonymous telephone callers have repeatedly threatened his life and those of his wife and three children. He is now up before the five-man civilian police board on charges ranging from sleeping on duty to insubordination, with a decision expected perhaps this week. Robinson believes firmly that he will be dismissed from the force.

Renault Robinson's case is an extreme example of the difficulties that confront black cops around the U.S. They often face the hostility of their white comrades-in-arms and the enmity of black militants, who consider them Uncle Toms, plus the indifference of other blacks who regard only white cops as "reel police." Says Octave Richard, a black patrolman on Chicago's South Side: "We're in the middle."

James Smith, a black Omaha policeman, puts it this way: "The whites say we don't enforce the law, that we let everybody go. The blacks say we're just doing the white man's dirty work." Adds one veteran black policeman, now a federal official: "The black cop is being told to choose between the department and the black community. He is choosing the community." But the pattern is mixed. While many black cops feel they must fight for their black fellow citizens against what they often see as the incomprehension and aggression of white cops, they are also trying to develop new and healing approaches to ghetto problems of law and justice.

Obscene Captions. Black cops in many U.S. cities are now creating activist organizations of their own. The Afro-American Patrolmen's League claims 1,000 members, nearly half the blacks on the 13,000-man Chicago force, though one department spokesman says he has heard that the dues-paying cops in Robinson's group number no more than 50. In San Francisco, which has 1,800 policemen, all 85 of the blacks belong to Officers for Justice, founded two years ago to redress black grievances. Among them: the regular police organization refused legal aid to black cops charged with off-duty offenses, but hired Jake Ehrlicha well-known California criminal lawyerto defend a white cop accused of manslaughter. The Guardians, once only a social organization of black patrolmen, but now increasingly militant, have chapters in many cities. In New York City, for example, they count 75% of the 2,400 black cops on a force of 32,000. The Chicago group has a store-front office on the city's South Side to help residents who have problems with the police. All the organizations defend black cops accused of violating departmental regulations and work at increasing black police recruiting.

The new black police activism has exacerbated an uneasy relationship between blacks and whites wearing blue. Renault Robinson's caricature, captioned with obscenities, adorns the bathroom walls of more than one Chicago station house. In Omaha last year, after Officer John Loder, son of Actress Hedy Lamarr, was accused of killing a 14-year-old black girl, white officers started a defense fund for Loderwhile black police took up a collection for the girl's family. (Loder was acquitted.)

About 20 of Hartford's 57 black cops took part in a sick-out last year over assignment and promotion grievances. This summer, blacks and whites exchanged punches at the annual Fraternal Order of Police picnic in Pittsburgh. Black and white cops have drawn guns on one another in Washington, D.C. At a convention of the black National Council of Police Societies in Atlantic City this summer, the delegates agreed to try to prevent the killing of blacks by white policemen; if necessary, black cops would arrest white cops.

The Badge Is Enough. Many black policemen echo Renault Robinson's complaint in Chicago: "The police department is basically concerned with protecting white property, not the safety and well-being of black people." Often the accepted way for a black policeman to get ahead has been to accumulate a record of harsh treatment of his own people; there are countless tales of brutal beatings of black suspects by black cops in dark alleys, paddy wagons and station-house cells.

The special hostility between black cops and black criminals is not hard to account for. In times past, says James Draper, a Cleveland narcotics detective, the black community respected a black policeman "because he was a symbol of someone who made it." Now, "generally, a black policeman doesn't boast about his occupation. The job is dangerous enough, and there are some elementsyou may not know them immediatelythat don't see color. The badge is enough." In Detroit last month in front of the headquarters of a group associated with the Black Panthers, one black patrolman, Glenn Edward Smith, was killed in a shootout, and another, Marshall Emerson, caught a bullet fragment in one hand. "Black people put us all in one bag now," says Emerson. "I'm not out there to be an oppressor, but to the community I'm just a pig." Chicago's Octave Richard insists that some blacks "are against authority and against the police department, but I don't think they are against black policemen in general."

Traitors and Prostitutes. Inevitably the Panthers have complicatedas well as imperiledthe lives of black cops. Black undercover cops infiltrated the Panther organization in New York, leading to the arrest and current trial of 13 Panthers for conspiracy to bomb police stations and public buildings. To Leonard Weir, head of the National Society of Afro-American Policemen, such black cops are "traitors and prostitutes."

By no means do all blacks feel that way. Sergeant William Perry Sr. of the New York Guardians group says he would not encourage his members to do that kind of police intelligence work, "but we also won't hold it against them." He adds: "If a unit has to infiltrate the Panthers or the Young Lords, then perhaps the bosses ought to be black so that the attitudes are correct, so that you have control over what's going on." Assistant Chief Inspector Eldridge Waith, highest-ranking black officer on the New York force, suggests: "Infiltration by blacks can help because it sometimes makes for more objective police work."

Since much black crime is committed against other blacks, there is good reason why ghetto populations, instead of feeling hostile to black cops, should welcome more of them. Indeed, one of the major aims of the new militant black police organizations is to increase the numbers of black cops on duty in the ghetto. Blacks remain underrepresented in big-city police forces in the U.S. Some departments are working hard at increasing the proportion of blacks in their ranks. Washington's Chief Jerry Wilson, with a 73% black population in the city, has upped the number of black cops from 25% in 1968 to 35% today. Nowhere yet, though, is the percentage of black cops in U.S. cities proportionate to the local black population. In Pittsburgh, which is 22% black, 7% of the police are blacks. Detroit has a black population of more than 45%, but the police force is only 11% black.

Recruiting blacks to redress that imbalance is not easy. Black youths are reluctant to join a force that many of their peers consider the enemy; some of those who do apply are ill-qualified by education or sometimes barred because of a criminal record. Inevitably, some blacks charge that a double standard is applied to applicants, making it tougher for blacks to join the force than whites.

The black cops' chief argument for a bigger role in ghetto law enforcement is that they can do it bettermore fairly and more intelligently. Says Deputy Chief Inspector George Harge, top-ranking black cop in Detroit: "Language is the biggest barrier. White policemen find it hard to differentiate between riot language and horseplay language. Some black talk implies an imminent riot to whites, but to blacks it is a way of life. A rash decision by a patrolman based on language that he believes is offensive can precipitate instead of quash a riot." Leon Fisher, a black cop assigned to the juvenile bureau in St. Louis, is hopeful. "We are entering a new era," he says. "The image of this department is changing from the brutal sort of thing to a role of assistance. We are assisting people."

Los Angeles' Oscar Joel Bryant Association, named after a black policeman killed on duty, succeeded in obtaining the transfer of a captain and a community relations officer whom it demonstrated to be insensitive to the needs of Venice, a Los Angeles district populated largely by blacks, Chicanos and hippies. According to one Bryant Association organizer, Police Chief Edward Davis has been "amenable to manyI wouldn't say mostof our ideas."

Pull No Wool. Another encouraging development is the effective use of all-black or white-black "mod squad" patrols in the ghettoas in New York and Detroit. But New York's Eldridge Waith was chastised by the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association for allowing himself to be frisked when he entered a church held by the Puerto Rican Young Lords, though by doing so Waith managed to help defuse a potentially dangerous situation. "We are not saying we are going to work with them," Waith notes, "but there's no doubt that in terms of the community there are areas where our goals are the same."

John Grimes, a young black, has spent nearly eight years as a New York City cop and is now a student at Harvard Law School. Says Grimes: "It's really a matter of communication." If black citizens "know where your heart is and that you really want to talk to them and not pull some wool over their eyes, then there's no problem." Grimes, who has written a master's thesis on "The Black Man and Law Enforcement," argues that assignment to black districts should be voluntary duty for the best-trained officers, who would get extra pay. "The black officer must be someone that black youth can look up to instead of looking up to the dope pusher," says Grimes. Ironically, last week Grimes resigned from the N.Y.P.D. after a dispute over his taking an extra leave of absence to attend law school.

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