(2 of 4)
The new black police activism has exacerbated an uneasy relationship between blacks and whites wearing blue. Renault Robinson's caricature, captioned with obscenities, adorns the bathroom walls of more than one Chicago station house. In Omaha last year, after Officer John Loder, son of Actress Hedy Lamarr, was accused of killing a 14-year-old black girl, white officers started a defense fund for Loderwhile black police took up a collection for the girl's family. (Loder was acquitted.)
About 20 of Hartford's 57 black cops took part in a sick-out last year over assignment and promotion grievances. This summer, blacks and whites exchanged punches at the annual Fraternal Order of Police picnic in Pittsburgh. Black and white cops have drawn guns on one another in Washington, D.C. At a convention of the black National Council of Police Societies in Atlantic City this summer, the delegates agreed to try to prevent the killing of blacks by white policemen; if necessary, black cops would arrest white cops.
The Badge Is Enough. Many black policemen echo Renault Robinson's complaint in Chicago: "The police department is basically concerned with protecting white property, not the safety and well-being of black people." Often the accepted way for a black policeman to get ahead has been to accumulate a record of harsh treatment of his own people; there are countless tales of brutal beatings of black suspects by black cops in dark alleys, paddy wagons and station-house cells.
The special hostility between black cops and black criminals is not hard to account for. In times past, says James Draper, a Cleveland narcotics detective, the black community respected a black policeman "because he was a symbol of someone who made it." Now, "generally, a black policeman doesn't boast about his occupation. The job is dangerous enough, and there are some elementsyou may not know them immediatelythat don't see color. The badge is enough." In Detroit last month in front of the headquarters of a group associated with the Black Panthers, one black patrolman, Glenn Edward Smith, was killed in a shootout, and another, Marshall Emerson, caught a bullet fragment in one hand. "Black people put us all in one bag now," says Emerson. "I'm not out there to be an oppressor, but to the community I'm just a pig." Chicago's Octave Richard insists that some blacks "are against authority and against the police department, but I don't think they are against black policemen in general."
Traitors and Prostitutes. Inevitably the Panthers have complicatedas well as imperiledthe lives of black cops. Black undercover cops infiltrated the Panther organization in New York, leading to the arrest and current trial of 13 Panthers for conspiracy to bomb police stations and public buildings. To Leonard Weir, head of the National Society of Afro-American Policemen, such black cops are "traitors and prostitutes."