“Where Are The Good Apples?”
Some of us never made it into the basket.
May 5, 1991, I was working for a uniformed (not plain clothes) detective agency. I had a post on the 4-midnight shift. Most of the time it was quiet, which is how I liked it. If it wasn’t, then that meant there was some sort of disturbance or issue. That only happened once or twice so, cool. I got lucky.
However, all hell broke loose in the neighborhood I was stationed in. Mt. Pleasant, ah the irony, was a quiet little town located inside the D.C. borders. You can read about the specifics of the Mt. Pleasant Riots here.
Here are some excerpts from WAMU 88.5
Two cops are walking the beat.
“They tell this guy, who didn’t speak a nick of English, to ‘get rid of the alcohol’ or ‘put it away’,” says Sueiro. “But he’s drunk and he’s got cohorts around him and they start to… create a ruckus. The street starts to fill up with people.”
The police “begin to get very serious with this guy, like ‘we’re gonna lock you up’,” he continues.
One of the officers points her gun and shoots the guy. [He ultimately survived.] The official report says he had pulled a knife on her. Others, including one D.C. Latino man involved in the riots, say that’s not what happened at all. He asked that his name not be disclosed.
“My uncle was there. He saw it happen. The police woman is trying to arrest a drunken Salvadoran man, and he tried at that moment to take his belt off,” he says.
He explains what the man was probably trying to do. “This is very typical of Salvadoreños, when they get drunk, they fight with their belts,” he says. “Before he could even do that, she shot him in the chest.”
The officers call for back up. And soon there are more police cars on the scene.
By the time all was said and done, the rioting damaged more than 60 police cars, 21 Metro buses, and more than 30 businesses.
This is where I enter the picture.
I’m on duty and one night there was a knock on the glass of the front door. I ease away from my post and look. It’s a D.C. cop in uniform. I pop the door open and let him in. He wanted to know if there were any TVs nearby. I walked him over to the general seating area and flipped one on. He said that they (the police) were in the park next door and had set up their base camp there. But they couldn’t get any information as to what was going on a few blocks away.
He watched the 11pm local news to get updates.
I wish I had known the phrase, WTF back then, but knowing what I did of DC at the time, I wasn’t surprised. He asked if it would be okay if he or some of the other officers came by to use the facilities. A full-fledged riot going on with the burning of Metro busses in use, and the cops didn’t even have a place to pee.
So my shift turned into Battle Station #2, one being their base camp. I moved my station closer to the door where I could keep an eye on things. If our front door was to receive a Molotov cocktail, I’d just assume see it coming and then be surprised.
One night after my shift was over, the cop that I saw the first night turned out to be a Sgt. He pulled over and asked me why was I out walking that time of night alone with a riot going on. I reminded him that Metro had shut down service to the area, and I was not about to spend the night at work.
He gave me a ride home.
He asked me if I had ever thought of being a cop. I told him it had been a dream since I was a kid. He wanted to know if I would like for him to drive me around and show me some “cop things” as I’ll call it here. He showed me how to read license tags (those numbers aren’t as random as you thought), and where some drugs were stashed in what appeared to be an innocent pile of wood waiting for their spot in the family fireplace.
We talked about me joining the DC force and then that’s when the light of day hit, even though the sun was long gone.
Him: If you knew a cop was dirty, what would you do?
Me: Turn them in, of course.
Him: Yeah, that’s what I thought. You’d make a good cop, but the DCPD isn’t the place for you.
Me: Why is that?
Him: You’re a white female. Word gets out that you’d turn in another cop and all of a sudden you’re assigned to the midnight shift in SE Washington. You won’t believe how many officers won’t hear your call for backup when you need it. You’ll just be one more dead cop bleeding out in an alley somewhere.
Yes, I’m paraphrasing as it was 30 years ago, but the sentiment is there. It isn’t something you forget. So when the question was asked,
“Why aren’t they protecting us from the bad ones?”.