ALIENATION IS A PARTNER FOR BLACK OFFICERS

The Blues

This is the fourth article of a series examining the challenges and turmoil
facing the New York Police Department. Previous articles concerned the
department's morale problems, the loss of senior supervisors to retirement
and the lack of senior black officers.

One night last December, Officer Eric Josey was driving his Acura Legend on
East 138th Street in the South Bronx. He had just completed a tour
patrolling Harlem, and had changed into a sweatshirt and jeans. A jacket
concealed his 9-millimeter pistol.

Stopping in traffic, he glanced in his rear-view mirror and saw two men
rushing for his car. They were carrying guns.

In the instant Officer Josey had to react, he reacted like a cop. He
reached for his pistol, pushed open his door and turned his 6-foot-2- inch,
225-pound frame to face what he thought was a carjacking. But his gun
snagged on his jacket liner, he said, and the men were upon him.

One pointed a pistol at his head. Someone swore and ordered him to the
ground. Vehicles and men swarmed all around. Officer Josey realized what
was happening. He was being stopped by the police.

"I'm on the job!" he shouted, using police jargon for announcing he was an
officer. The plainclothes detectives, a Bronx narcotics team, looked
flummoxed -- until one found Officer Josey's silver badge under his clothes.

It was in the long moment that followed, as the narcotics team's red
taillights faded down the street, that Officer Josey, standing beside his
idling car, heart pounding, anger rising, saw more clearly than ever the
New York Police Department's capacity to alienate black men, including its own.

"I can't be any more clear about this," he said. "I almost lost my life. If
I had gotten my gun out, I would have been dead, and for no other reason
except I am black."

For more than 25 years, the department has been unable to integrate a
significantly larger proportion of black men into its ranks. In 1974 male
black officers formed 7.7 percent of the ranks. The proportion is now 9.2
percent, an increase dwarfed by the advances of Hispanics and women.

Throughout much of this period, the department's leadership has said that
diversifying the ranks is a priority, and that doing so can improve the
force, deepen public trust and ease the persistent tension between black
men on the streets and officers on the job.

In many respects, the difficulties the department has encountered have been
tied to larger social forces, including competition for a finite population
of qualified black men from private business. But to the black men in
uniform, one of the department's deepest problems is the department itself.

Speaking from an accumulation of personal experiences, a wide variety of
black officers and detectives say the department has struggled with
integration in part because of bungled recruiting efforts, an insincere
commitment and promotion rules that leave few black men at the top.

And they say these problems are compounded by the type of policing that led
to the shooting of Amadou Diallo in 1999 and the stopping of Officer Josey,
which tend to cement the department's poor reputation among the young black
men it most hopes to recruit. Moreover, they say, these tactics, heralded
by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and police officials as a prime factor in the
city's crime decline, have eroded the morale and enthusiasm of what is
perhaps the greatest asset in its diversity recruiting effort -- its black
officers.

"Even those of us who have a zeal for recruiting, and who think the best
way to fix this job is to get more blacks to the Police Academy, even for
us, there are things that haunt us," Officer Josey said. "We talk about it
all the time, about how the department treats black men on the street, and
when we see it first-hand it haunts us even more."

The Community: Notoriety Outweighs Ads

In many ways, Police Officer Raymond S. Skeeter is the face the department
wants on its recruiting effort. He is a 15-year veteran and a former Police
Academy instructor. A Harlem native, he has a master's degree in public
administration and moves comfortably through the city's black middle-class
circles when in civilian clothes.

But as a recruiter, he finds that his blue uniform can instantly make him
and his peers outsiders. "A lot of blacks look at us, like, why are you
even here?" he said.

Two years have passed since an all-white team of officers fired 41 bullets
at Amadou Diallo, killing him at his doorstep. In this time, the department
has undertaken several efforts to spur its diversification.

It has spent more than $20 million in two advertising campaigns and in
nearly doubling the recruiting staff. It has printed new pamphlets
stressing community service, often with photographs of black officers. It
has studied lists of past applicants, looking for minority candidates.
Community affairs officers have set up hundreds of recruiting stands in
minority neighborhoods.

Howard Safir, the former commissioner, who ordered the first campaign, said
the drive to attract more city residents would increase the proportion of
minority police officers, who make up 34.8 percent of the force. "We are at
our highest percentages ever, and we intend to continue them," Mr. Safir
said last year.

The department has also recruited more minority officers through its cadet
corps, a program resembling R.O.T.C. that assists college students with
tuition in exchange for future police service. And police officials are
working with the Board of Education to create a law enforcement high
school, from which it will recruit future officers.

"These are substantive efforts," said Yolanda B. Jimenez, deputy
commissioner for community affairs.

There have been successes. Recent academy classes have had more Hispanics,
Asians and women. The impact can also be seen in the department's changing
demographics. The proportion of white male officers dropped from 61.4
percent in 1995 to 58.6 percent last year, and the current academy class is
47.6 percent white, inspiring the mayor to call it the first "majority
minority class."

But the progress has largely missed black men, who form 10.8 percent of the
current academy class and 9.8 percent of last October's graduating class --
barely different from their percentages in the department.

Police officials give a variety of explanations for the difficulties,
including a recently strong economy, which they say lured potential
recruits away, and extensive news media coverage of police shootings of
unarmed black men and allegations of racial profiling.

The officials also say that the shortage of male black recruits seems tied
to recruiting standards. Applicants must be 21 to 34 years old, have
completed two years of college and live in the city or a band of nearby
counties.

Police officials say the college requirement, added in the mid-1990's, has
become a problem because only a small percentage of that region's black men
attend college. Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociology professor at Queens
College, recently analyzed the city's demographics for The New York Times
and found that blacks make up about 20 percent of the 21-to-34-year-old men
in the recruiting area, but less than 10 percent of those with the required
college work.

And the black men with college experience are being actively recruited by
the corporate world, which generally offers more than the department's
$31,305 starting salary.

"Since the educational standards went up, we seem to have written ourselves
out of the market," said Capt. Timothy J. Hogan, who runs the department's
recruiting division.

But the department faces an impediment of its own making, apparent almost
wherever it turns: its own reputation.

"Everywhere we go, there is at least one person who has a derogatory
comment about the N.Y.P.D., and that person is almost always an
African-American," Officer Skeeter said. "We don't get it nearly as much
from Hispanics, and just about never from whites. Out there on the streets,
young blacks are as wary of us as can be."

The sentiment is strong enough that it appears to create peer pressure as
well. In a survey by The New York Times and Quinnipiac University, 64
percent of young blacks said that if they considered joining the department
their friends would disapprove. For whites, the number was 43 percent.

Hispanics were more narrowly divided, with 45 percent expecting approval,
46 percent expecting disapproval and 9 percent undecided.

While recent polls have shown that the department receives high approval
ratings from residents of many ages, this narrower look, at 18- to
26-year-olds, showed that fear and mistrust of the police contribute to the
department's difficulties in diversifying. The poll was conducted in
January with 721 young city residents. Its margin of sampling error is plus
or minus four percentage points.

Many other divergent opinions, divided along racial lines, were apparent in
the responses. For instance, 47 percent of white respondents said they
thought the police favored whites over blacks, while 77 percent of blacks
thought so. Similarly, 36 percent of whites and 71 percent of blacks said
they thought officers were more likely to use deadly force on blacks than
on whites.

The negative impressions among young black men were strong enough that many
said life as a New York police officer would be socially isolating. When
discussing the idea of attending the Police Academy, some invoked the image
of Uncle Tom.

"My friends would be like, 'How are you going to join them, man, the way
they treat people?' " said Peewee Grant, 20, a security guard in Queens who
said he had been stopped and frisked by the police 8 or 10 times in the
last four years. " 'You want to be part of that, a Tom?' "

Chief James H. Lawrence Jr., the department's chief of personnel, said that
one of the problems in combating these impressions is that recruiters
canvass the city for applicants without enough community support.

If the department received consistent help from social clubs and churches,
sports leagues and politicians, Chief Lawrence said, it could hire more
young black men.

"I don't think enough people have a sense of participation," he said. "I
think that is what we really need."

Many black officers agree, but said the recruiting efforts, while
apparently sincere, were insufficient. And they said that sometimes the
department appeared almost comically clumsy, like the recent practice of
distributing recruiting brochures from stands in station houses.

"We can put out all the applications we want in the precincts, but blacks
are afraid to go in and get them," Officer Skeeter said. "In this city, the
last place in the world a black man wants to be is inside a police precinct."

And there have been times, black officers said, when the department's
apparent unease has come from the top.

Detective Jacqueline Parris, president of the Guardians Association, a
black fraternal group, recalled how little the brass seemed to know about
its own recruiting operation at a moment when it realized it badly needed
more black men.

As Diallo protests raged, she said, Mr. Safir's staff summoned her to a
meeting at which they pressed her for advice on recruiting minority
officers. Upset, she told them that for years blacks who had passed the
entrance exam had been turned down for little reason. The blacks the
department sought, she said, already had applications in the recruiting files.

"It's that simple," she said, "all they had to do was just look in the drawer."

Recruiters pored over the old test lists, found applicants who had not been
hired and urged them to try again. The results can be seen in the academy's
two recent classes, which have a slightly increased proportion of black men.

Detective Parris says the current police commissioner, Bernard B. Kerik,
has improved communications with black officers. But as the department
recruits anew, she said, he has little to work with. The drawer full of old
applicants is empty.

"For the next classes," Detective Parris said, "we'll be starting from
scratch."

Inside The Force: Many Questions About Commitment

The agenda was straightforward when the City Council called the
department's leadership to a hearing in March 2000. Three committees wanted
to know how the department had spent more than $10 million on a recruiting
campaign and yet faced plunging overall numbers of academy applicants.

Councilman Bill Perkins of Manhattan asked Mr. Safir, then the
commissioner, if the more than $1 million the Council had earmarked for the
creation of a diversity recruitment unit had been used for that purpose.
Mr. Safir responded that the diversity unit had not been formed, because of
concerns that an explicit focus on minority recruiting might violate
antidiscrimination laws.

The Council members grew restless. The money was gone, but the diversity
unit did not exist? And the police officials cited no laws, no court
decisions, no advice from other agencies?

To ease the tension, Commissioner Safir agreed to give the Council a
written analysis of the legal opinion.

"I think it's incredible," Mr. Perkins said, before Mr. Safir cut him off.

"We will provide the opinion," the commissioner said. "And then you can
decide on the adjective, whether it's incredible or not."

A year later, the opinion has not arrived.

For many black officers, the tone and outcome of the exchange illustrates
the department's uneven efforts to attract more black men. On one hand,
department leaders have extolled the virtues of diversity. On the other,
through what black officers see as bureaucratic bungling or even veiled
hostility, leaders have signaled that recruiting black men, and improving
the equal opportunity record, is no priority at all.

Consistently, the department -- whether through principled disagreement or
otherwise -- has resisted initiatives intended to bring more black men into
the ranks.

Officer Skeeter recalled that the department's recruiters wanted to work a
Kwanzaa festival inside the Javits Convention Center two years ago. But a
chief effectively ordered them not to attend. "We called down there and
told them we wanted to go, and needed money to pay the admissions fee," he
said. "The answer came back, 'You want to go to that, you can set up
outside in the street.' "

The recruiters skipped the event.

Similarly, many black officers said the department injured its credibility
when Mr. Safir fired Officer Yvette Walton in April 1999, the same
afternoon she appeared at a City Council hearing and testified that she had
witnessed the Street Crime Unit routinely violate the rights of minority
civilians.

Officer Walton was being investigated at the time for possibly abusing sick
leave. But black officers said the meaning of her abrupt firing was clear:
Don't test the system.

"That was the classic," said one senior police officer. "One day you fire
one of us who speaks out about racism. The next day you wonder why more
blacks won't join."

A judge ruled last fall that Officer Walton's dismissal was illegal.

Another example that raised questions of the department's sincerity
involved the city's Equal Employment Practices Commission, the agency that
audits city departments on their record of diversification and compliance
with antidiscrimination law.

In 1995, the commission began a routine audit of the department. Its 1997
report shows that the department repeatedly frustrated the auditors. In one
case, the department took 19 months to provide answers. In others, it did
not answer at all.

"From the outset," the commission wrote, police officials claimed its
requests "were burdensome and unnecessary."

The commission was also concerned that minority applicants who passed the
entrance exam seemed to be failing the hiring steps -- background checks,
medical and psychological exams -- at a higher rate than whites. And it
noted that a senior police official claimed that independent reviewers had
examined those processes four times, but the department never provided
copies of those reports.

Asked about the reports three months ago, the department said it could not
find them.

The commission also recommended that the department conduct studies to
determine whether its selection processes were skewed against minority
applicants. In a written response, Mr. Safir agreed to do them. They have
never been done, the department now says.

Mr. Safir, in an interview last week, said that recruiting black men was
"very high on the list of priorities," but that he did not know why his
staff did not do the studies or send the legal opinion to the Council. He
said there were probably valid reasons for the inaction. "In the overall
scheme of things, I don't think it is significant," he said.

Others said the inaction raised questions about the department's commitment.

"The department has taken an attitude -- perhaps it picked this up from the
public -- that it has three priorities: fighting crime, fighting crime and
fighting crime," said Frank R. Nicolazzi, a commission official. "It seemed
that our auditors' experience was that equal employment was not receiving a
significant amount of attention."

Two Departments: A Double Standard Of Policing

For Officer Josey, life as a police officer has undeniable benefits,
offering a measure of respect and financial security and access to the
close-knit culture of America's most storied police department. And there
have been rich intangibles: the excitement of arrests he made in Harlem's
28th Precinct, the pride he felt as a Police Academy instructor, the
challenge he feels now as he trains for the department's Emergency Service
Unit.

But he also has real misgivings about his department, from his sense that
black men have little chance at promotion to his belief that minority
neighborhoods are policed one way and white neighborhoods another, even
accounting for relative crime rates.

This tacit double standard, he said, is what led to his being stopped at
gunpoint last December, and caused him to file a complaint with the
Civilian Complaint Review Board. "I've been around long enough to know that
there are two police departments here, the one above 110th Street and the
one below it," he said. "Some of the routines you see above Central Park --
the stop-and-frisks, the boxed-in cars, the buy-and-busts at the doorways
- -- would not be tolerated in the white neighborhoods."

Senior police officials declined to comment in detail on Officer Josey's
complaint, saying only that it was under investigation. But the officials
have broadly defended their tactics, noting that the numbers of police
shootings have declined sharply for several years, as have the number of
lawsuits alleging brutality. They also rebut the contention that the
department engages in racial profiling,

And while they acknowledge that police aggressiveness has fueled some
animus in minority neighborhoods, they also note that those neighborhoods
are much safer than they were a decade ago.

"What the department has done is put out more resources where crime is
occurring," Chief Lawrence said. "The upside of that is the reduction in
crime in many neighborhoods where minorities live."

But Officer Josey's feelings were echoed repeatedly in recent months in
extended interviews with dozens of male black officers and detectives.
Some, like Officer Josey, are active members of the Guardians or 100 Blacks
in Law Enforcement Who Care, two fraternal groups. Many are not.

These officers almost invariably said that the satisfactions of the job
were undercut by the department itself. All but three of the several dozen
officers interviewed, for instance, said that at some point in their
careers they been unnecessarily stopped or hassled, when in civilian
clothes, by their white peers. Many spoke of being repeatedly asked to
produce identification at night on subway platforms. One officer says he is
pulled over in his car at least twice a month. Officer Skeeter said a
police cruiser once ran him off the road in Central Park.

"For every African-American who has had this type of thing happen to them,
getting stopped, getting frisked, there are probably 200 who have been
verbally harassed," said one senior black officer. "The verbal attitudes
have more of an effect than dragging people out of their cars, because
there is so much of it."

These repeated observations -- by undercover narcotics officers, by senior
supervisors, by veteran patrolmen and near-rookies in some of the
department's roughest precincts -- echo those noticed by William J.
Bratton, Mr. Giuliani's first police commissioner, who said he held several
focus groups with black officers in the mid-1990's, and never found a male
black officer who had not had a bad encounter with the Police Department
when in civilian clothes. Their experiences, recounted repeatedly, together
create a portrait of a troubled segment of the police ranks.

Differing emotions pulse through these men. Some talk of anger, others of
shame and bewilderment. One said the department was chiefly interested "in
the maintenance of white supremacy." Most were circumspect.

One theme, though, was constant: regret.

It was regret chiefly that an institution in which they saw such promise
had failed to integrate and elevate significantly more black men, even
after a generation of saying it was trying.

And there is a sense that the future looks much like the past. There are
important trends: declining percentages of black male supervisors; the
makeup of recent academy classes lagging far behind the black
representation in the city.

Lt. Eric Adams, president of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, summed
up a common sentiment: "I see that in 26 years we've picked up 1.5 percent
more black men," he said. "You know what this tells me? It tells me that in
another 26 years we'll pick up another 1.5 percent. That's the pace, and
the people who run the department seem comfortable with it."

They also said that greatest cost of such powerful disappointment is that
the department may have lost the enthusiasm of the very officers most
qualified to integrate the job.

Captain Hogan, the recruiting section's commander and a retired police
officer's son, says his recruiters sense the loss. He said that with so few
black men being promoted in the department, it is often hard to recruit
even the sons and nephews of black police officers. For white officers,
intergenerational succession is a robust tradition.

"We just don't see the same number of the children of black cops wanting
this job," he said.

Officer Skeeter said the phenomenon was one of the strongest indicators of
the department's failure; even its own black officers steer their children
away, an outcome that he said puts an asterisk beside the city's steep
decline in crime in recent years.

"Most minority officers I speak to say they would never let their kids come
on this job," he said. "They don't think they've been treated fairly by the
department, and wouldn't ever want their children facing the same thing."