Death On The Beat

(2 of 5)

Police brutality in New York City. Racial profiling in New Jersey. Quick trigger fingers in Chicago, where two unarmed black motorists were killed by police in separate incidents on a single day earlier this month. Judging by the national headlines, it is a season of cops gone mad. The story in Phoenix is different, but it is part of the same drama--the constantly stressed marriage between mostly white police forces and the minorities they work with, who are at once disproportionately the victims of crime and its perpetrators. The great majority of hardworking, law-abiding minority residents need the police for protection, just as the police need their help to catch the bad guys. But it is a relationship that can easily spiral into mutual recrimination, triggered by a cop killing or by police brutality.

Phoenix has had its share of both. Last year the city paid $5.3 million to the family of a black 25-year-old who died as the result of a neck hold during a 1994 altercation with police; he was a double amputee whose prosthetic legs came off during the struggle. And a civil trial awaits in the 1996 police killing of a 16-year-old Hispanic, shot 25 times while armed with a butcher knife.

Arizona state representative John Loredo, 29, a Mexican American, says that since 1990, he has been pulled over by police "six or seven times for no reason other than racial profiling." Once, while pulling up to his grandmother's house on Christmas Eve, his car lit up. Five police cruisers were behind him, a helicopter overhead. He was ordered onto his knees and handcuffed. "They said there'd been a drive-by shooting," Loredo says, and he presumably matched a suspect description. "Situations like that happen all the time," Loredo claims, judging by calls he receives from constituents and by the way that police have come at him with sass and swagger until they find out he is a public official.

Loredo says most of his west-side neighbors want the police responding quickly to their calls, locking up gangsters and shutting down drug dens. But they don't want their kids harassed--good kids who go to school and to work--as part of the deal. "That type of aggression has an extremely negative impact on people."

Davila, who works the very neighborhood where Loredo lives, answers, "We've got nearly 3,000 officers in this city. Do we have some bad apples? Yes. But we're trying, and this is a department I'm proud of."

Davila got laughed out of elementary school when his family moved 40 years ago from Mexico to Douglas, Ariz. He couldn't speak English, and kids made fun of him, so he ran home, only to have his mother drag him back. One day the teacher had the class write a letter. Put the principal's name at the top, she said, followed by a comma. Davila dutifully wrote down the principal's name and then drew a picture of a bed. The Spanish word for bed is cama. The teacher slapped him, the class roared, and his mother told him to find a way to endure. Without an education, he would have no chance in America.

Davila is now 49, and on July 20 he'll complete the course work for a master's degree from Northern Arizona University. His grade-point average is 4.0, and his wife Sue hangs his report cards on the refrigerator along with their son's and daughter's, both community-college students. And still he must endure. He is called "coconut"--brown on the outside, white on the inside--by some Mexican Americans. And when he made sergeant in 1982, he overheard a white colleague say, "We got another spic promoted. Let's see how long this beaner lasts." Yet Davila believes as passionately in the goodness of his officers as he does in the goodness of struggling immigrants.

As he retraces Atkinson's route, wheeling through the last moments of his life, Davila comes upon the shrine where the officer died. Davila had tried, in his quiet way, to live beyond the stereotypes that divide police and community, white and Hispanic. And now there were people out there stirring it up, the vultures and hacks, politicizing Atkinson's death before he was in the ground. At the spot where the afternoon sun still draws a cross on the wall, Davila's spirit breaks again. "You had people calling the radio talk shows to take their shots. It started with illegal aliens, and then it was, 'Let's send all the Mexicans back.'" Some of his officers were jumpy too--ready to crack down on immigrants. "I told people that it's not whites or Hispanics who killed Marc," Davila says. "It's drug-dealing cop killers. The issue isn't ethnicity--it's crime and drugs." Losing Atkinson was bad enough. Davila was determined to lose nothing more.

Tom Martinez, 59, has been on block watch for 18 years in the neighborhood where Atkinson worked and died. "You see this older woman out front? She's undercover. Reports everything to us." Martinez works for the recreation department. The friends who ride civilian posse with him work construction jobs and return to their well-kept homes each day with aching backs and cracked hands, and then they take turns pulling night duty, trying to pass pride of ownership and safe streets on to the grandchildren. "We've been burglarized 10 times, and nobody ever sees a vehicle or a person," says Tom Sapien, 51, who peers into the twilight from Martinez's backseat and misses nothing. "People are afraid to get involved."