Black Police, White Society

Introduction

INTRODUCTION Black Police) White Society is a book about the working world of the black police officer. The idea for the book, as well as the research for it, came from my own experience as a member of the New York City police department (NYPD). In the mid-1960s I worked in the NYPD as a uniformed police officer, then as a detective in plainclothes for approximately nine years, and cllrrently as a patrol supervisor in predominantly black areas of Ne'N" York City. During this time I have met and worked with a large number of black patrolmen and black detectives, and as a result of the many friendships that developed with these officers I found. myself becoming increasingly sensitized to and interested in the ()ccupational world of the black officer. An academic background in sociology provided me with the added curiosity and tools to pursue the various lines of inquiry which finally ended up as this book. There was something else to(), however , and that was the conspicuous absence of anything written on black police. Aside from a few articles in professional j()urnals, government reports (which dated back to the 1960s), arid scattered newspaper accounts, black police as an occupational group simply had not received much attention. The one substantial exception was Nicholas Alex's Black in Blue) 1 a book which dt~scribed the problems facing black New York City police officers in the early 1960s. Yet even this penetrating analysis of the black officers' working world has proved to be incomplete; since then important developments have taken place in the struggle of black Anlericans to secure a more equitable place in society and especially in the efforts of black police in New York City and elsewhere to achieve greater acceptance and equality within their departments. In short, the rapid pace of social change in this country since the mid-1960s has required both an update and clarification of much of the data contained in earlier studies and reports. It was for these reasons 2 Introduction that I undertook the task of gathering data and reporting on black police. I can only hope that the material in this book serves the purpose in which it was collected- to present both an objective and inside view of the impact of changing political, legal, and ()rganizational structures on the position, role, and identity of black police officers in New York City, and by extrapolation in all of urban America. My approach to this study involved rounds of intensive interviewing over considerable periods of time of 46 black New York City cops, although material was also collected fro~ a variety of other sources including newspapers, magazines, journals, books, and periodicals. The bulk of the statistical data relating actual changes in the racial composition of the police department in New York City and its various divisions, subunits, and ranks was provided by the department's Office of Equal Employment Opportunity and by Roger Abel, an officer in the Guardians Association, a black police (fraternal/political) group. My efforts to penetrate the working world of the black officer, while I was simultaneously serving as a member of the department , have presented special difficulties beyond the ones normally experienced by the "native" as researcher. From the onset of the project, for example, I found myself occupying a "deviant" status in the eyes of many friends and colleagues on the job. Why, most of them wanted to know, would a white cop want to study and write about SUCll a potentially controversial subject as black police? From white colleagues (and immediate superiors) the subject matter evoked varying degrees of reactions: surprise, bewilderme11t, annoyance, and occasionally outright hostility. I can recall, for instance , a comment made by a white detective in my team while a number of us were having lunch together. He had just returned from a lengthy vacation and apparently heard that I was speaking to black cops about such matters as discrimination and working relationships and questioned my motives for conducting such an inquiry. Before I could respond to what appeared at the moment to be an innocllouS question he added, "What are you, a nigger lover or something?" At the time this comment caught me completely off guard. As I would soon come to learn, however, the subject matter I had chosen to delve into sparked the resentment of more than just this one white policeman. From my black colleagues, who occasionally found themselves [18.221.85.33] Project MUSE...