What did Tom Wolfe write about cops? They all become Irish? That's a line in Bonfire of the Vanities. When Ed and I reported The Corner, it became clear that the most brutal cops in our sector of the Western District were black. The guys who would really kick your ass without thinking twice were black officers. If I had to guess and put a name on it, Id say that at some point, the drug war was as much a function of class and social control as it was of racism. I think the two agendas are inextricably linked, and where one picks up and the other ends is hard to say. But when you have African-American officers beating the dog-piss out of people theyre supposed to be policing, and there isn't a white guy in the equation on a street level, it's pretty remarkable. But in some ways they were empowered. Back then, even before the advent of cell phones and digital cameras which have been transforming in terms of documenting police violence back then, you were much more vulnerable if you were white and you wanted to wail on somebody. You take out your nightstick and youre white and you start hitting somebody, it has a completely different dynamic than if you were a black officer. It was simply safer to be brutal if you were black, and I didn't know quite what to do with that fact other than report it. It was as disturbing a dynamic as I could imagine. Something had been removed from the equation that gave white officers however brutal they wanted to be, or however brutal they thought the moment required it gave them pause before pulling out a nightstick and going at it. Some African American officers seemed to feel no such pause.
What the drug war did, though, was make this all a function of social control. This was simply about keeping the poor down, and that war footing has been an excuse for everybody to operate outside the realm of procedure and law. And the city willingly and legally gave itself over to that, beginning with the drug-free zones and with the misuse of what are known on the street in the previous generation as humbles. A humble is a cheap, inconsequential arrest that nonetheless gives the guy a night or two in jail before he sees a court commissioner. You can arrest people on failure to obey, its a humble. Loitering is a humble. These things were used by police officers going back to the 60s in Baltimore. Its the ultimate recourse for a cop who doesn't like somebody who's looking at him the wrong way. And yet, back in the day, there was, I think, more of a code to it. If you were on a corner, you knew certain things would catch you a humble. The code was really ornate, and Im not suggesting in any way that the code was always justifiable in any sense, but there was a code.
