Black White Blue: The Assassination of Patrolman James Sackett

Chapter 2

23 2 I t had been a generation—twenty-one years—since a St. Paul police officer had been murdered in the line of duty, and the city, waking to the news, was stunned. Because of its modest size, its ethnic and religious composition, and the sentimental self-regard of its neighborhoods and parishes, St. Paul felt a close kinship with its cops. Until the late sixties, police officers and firefighters had been required to live within city limits, and, especially in its heavily Irish, Italian, and German Catholic precincts , many extended families boasted a cop, a priest, or several of both. Sons followed fathers into the department, and brothers, cousins , nephews, and in-laws were common at roll call. Many had been encouraged by older officers they had grown up admiring in their neighborhoods and congregations. The St. Paul Police Department (officially, until New Year’s Day 1971, the St. Paul Bureau of Police), in the eyes of most citizens, provided an admirable way to make a decent living. So for many reasons, even at a time of nationwide disorder , news of Patrolman James Sackett’s murder coursed through the city’s arteries and organs like an electric shock. The fact that Sackett’s shooting had not been collateral damage —the by-product of an armed robbery, for example, or an instance of an officer getting caught in the middle of a domestic scrap (the call that officers feared more than any other)—made it all the 24 Black White Blue more outrageous and difficult to comprehend. This was against the “rules,” such as they were, that had long obtained between the police and criminals, who, out of fear of furious reprisal if not a weird sense of gamesmanship, were loath to attack cops with lethal intent if their freedom wasn’t at stake. That day’s papers, on the streets beginning at sunup, quoted police sources pronouncing the shooting “deliberate and cold-blooded” and described the phony O.B. call that drew the squad into the sniper’s sights. The shot, according to the paper, was believed to have been fired from somewhere across the street, but so far, several hours after the shooting, no suspect, weapon, or eyewitness to the act had been found. Few St. Paulites were more shaken by the murder than Sackett ’s contemporaries in the department, whether they were closely acquainted with him or not. The young cops of Sackett’s cohort had not been in the department—most were not even out of knee pants—the last time a St. Paul officer had been shot to death. That had been Sergeant Allan Lee in 1949. Unlike more senior officers such as homicide commander Ernest Williams and veteran sergeant Paul Paulos, the young men who joined the force in the 1960s had not been hardened by combat in Europe, the Pacific, or Korea. Some of the younger cops had been in the “peacetime” military (the U.S. presence in Vietnam had begun to expand only in the mid-sixties), and a few had served as military policemen, but most had come to the academy from civilian jobs where the greatest occupational hazard was dropping a case of soda bottles on your foot. As recruits, they laughed nervously, probably not quite believing it, when told by an academy instructor that the odds were good that one of them would be killed in action. A St. Paul officer had been shot and killed on the job, on average, once every seven years since the first victim fell in the late nineteenth century, and it had been more than two decades since Sergeant Lee’s death. The young cops had been attracted by the promise of adventure —more adventure at any rate than they were likely to encounter driving a truck or peddling life insurance—and the idealistic if somewhat nebulous notion of making the community a better place to live. But the greatest appeal to the greatest number of them was the certain prospect of steady work starting at about six hundred dollars a month and the opportunity to retire in twenty-five years with a generous pension. Their parents had struggled through the Young Men and Murder 25 Great Depression, and they were brought up with a near-religious appreciation of a dependable job with solid benefits. The possibility of serious injury or death was not yet a preoccupation. “I don’t...