INTRODUCTION
On a mild late spring night in 1993, a police officer in Berkeley, California, stopped a black-and-yellow two-door Chevy for a traffic violation. The officer was twenty-one years old, white. He was working a midnight shift in a lower-income neighborhood adjacent to North Oakland that had seen more than its share of violence, much of it linked to the trade in crack cocaine. The year before, 12 people were murdered in Berkeley, then a city of 103,000. Nearly 900 were robbed—someone coming up to them to demand cash, or jewelry, or their Walkman—and more than 700 were victims of aggravated assault, putting Berkeley’s violent crime rate at twice the national average.
At 1:30 a.m., the officer was driving north on a mixed commercial and residential street, Sacramento. A block ahead, the Chevy was stopped at a red light in the left turn lane. Not waiting for the light to turn green, the driver of the car lurched forward, veering out of the lane to continue straight. This was hardly a serious offense. The streets were empty, no oncoming traffic. Still, it was illegal. The officer hit his overhead lights. “Adam 13, 11-95,” he called on the radio. Car stop. One of a dozen he’d probably make that night.
Except the driver accelerated. The officer couldn’t tell whether he was trying to get away or hadn’t noticed the police car.
As the officer slowed to clear the intersection, the driver opened more distance between them. The policeman gunned his accelerator to catch up, the engine on his cruiser roaring to life. At the next street, the Chevy went left. The officer followed but the car had vanished. The only place it could have gone was Stanton, a small street that branched off, and as the officer drove past, he caught sight of the car’s brake lights. He slammed on his own brakes, backed up, and barreled down Stanton until he reached the Chevy, which had parked in the driveway of a stucco house.
Like most small- to midsize police agencies, the Berkeley police department, with 180 cops in the early 1990s, didn’t have its own police academy. When the officer joined as a recruit, he was sent to the academy run by the city of Sacramento, held on the grounds where the California Highway Patrol trained. There tall reeds billowed as future men and women of law enforcement took their morning runs; the recruits all idealistic in their own way, projecting impenetrability, driven to scratch some inner itch by pinning on a badge. Trainers taught them that car stops can be dangerous, even for minor infractions. Usually drivers and passengers are cooperative. But you never know—you might pull over someone with a felony warrant who’ll do anything to keep from getting arrested, or a dealer with a stash and a gun hidden under the front seat, or a guy with anger issues looking for a fight.
Posters hung in the gymnasium, where the recruits practiced defensive tactics. One showed the CHP Survival Creed: “The will to live, to survive the attack, must be uppermost in every officer’s mind. Fight back against all odds.… Don’t let them kill you on some dirty freeway.” CHP officers were trained to be on high alert when stopping cars. So were Sacramento police academy recruits. The cardinal rules were that you had to keep everyone contained, and hands had to be visible at all times.
There was no containment happening on Stanton Street. As the officer pulled up, a young man about his age, Black with cornrows, stepped from the passenger side of the car. He was shirtless, with pale blue shorts and blue Nikes. The driver had stayed at the wheel. The officer got out of his vehicle and yelled to the passenger, “Get back in the car and close the door!”
The man said flatly, “Why?”
“I’m stopping this car. Get back in and close the door.”
The man ignored him. He began walking toward the porch of the house, only a few paces away. The officer, trying to keep his eye on the driver, ran to the passenger and put his hand on his shoulder. The man flung it off. “If you touch me again, I’m going to kick your ass,” he said.
The two were face-to-face. The man had threatened a cop; he was going to jail.
“Get on the ground, you’re under arrest,” the officer ordered. He wanted the man seated or prostrate so it would be harder for him to make good on his threat. The officer, a recent graduate of UC Berkeley, had followed every twist of the Rodney King case, which had sparked protests and riots when the cops who’d beaten the Black motorist were found not guilty. But he wasn’t thinking about the symbolism of a white police officer ordering a Black man to the ground. He was thinking: if this guy’s willing to fight rather than sit in a car while I write his buddy a ticket, there must be something he doesn’t want me to know or find. His other thought was, don’t let them kill you on some dirty freeway.
He called for cover.
The driver, also Black and in his twenties, was out of the car now, too. The passenger again made a move toward the porch. This time, the officer grabbed him, pushing him against the hood of the Chevy, intending to apply handcuffs. The man pulled loose and swung at the officer, clocking him on his cheek. The officer stumbled a couple of steps and drew his baton. Few police had access to Tasers back then (the LAPD officers who assaulted Rodney King were an exception), so batons were the best nonlethal option.
As the passenger and driver squared off against the officer, on the radio he upped his request to “Code 3” cover—for an emergency. Sirens kicked on in the distance along with the intermittent beeping on police frequencies that signals trouble.
“Get on the ground! You’re under arrest!” the officer kept repeating, thwacking the passenger in his leg while the man stood ready to box. He grabbed the baton, but the officer wrested it back and hit him again in the leg, then once in the abdomen, a jab he’d been taught in defensive tactics.
His partner from the next beat over came running to cuff the driver. As the two of them fought, her baton tumbled from her hands. The driver went to snatch it off the ground and she tackled him. Meanwhile, an older couple had emerged from the house—the passenger’s parents, it would later turn out—and were trying to restrain their son. The officer saw why: he was holding a sizable rock over his head and was about to throw it. Rocks are serious business.
A third cop arrived and rushed to help arrest the driver. The first officer unholstered his handgun, a stainless steel .40 caliber Smith & Wesson, and pointed it at the rock-wielding passenger, lining him up in his sights so he’d have a clean shot. “Put the rock down!” he screamed.
After a tense moment, the man did as he was ordered. The officer wasn’t faced with the choice of shooting him in front of his parents or taking a rock to the head.
That Berkeley officer was me.
* * *
WE NEVER FIGURED OUT WHY the passenger had fought. He had an arrest record but wasn’t on probation or parole. He had no warrants and no contraband on him. He’d been drinking but wasn’t drunk. Taken into custody, all he would say was, “I’ll be out, Gross. I’ll find you.”
* * *
THE STOP THAT NIGHT ON Stanton Street should never have escalated as it did; the outcome could have been horrific. The passenger wasn’t blameless. He should have gotten back in the car when I asked. He shouldn’t have threatened me or punched me in the face or tried to throw a rock. But I wasn’t blameless either. Nor was the police institution that molded me into the cop I was.
As a rookie, I checked all the right boxes. I was born and raised in the Berkeley area and would be policing my hometown. I was educated. I was young but not completely inexperienced: I’d worked part-time for several police agencies while in college, including as a dispatcher. I had a clean record. I’d gone into policing with the best of intentions, to help people and make the community safer. And yet there I was, gun in hand, fighting with a young Black man over what? Over nothing, really.
What went wrong? I served as a Berkeley police officer for eleven months before quitting and going to graduate school to get a PhD in sociology, looking for answers to questions just like that. I’ve been a social scientist for more than two decades now, and I’ve thought often about the Stanton Street fight, with a mixture of guilt, sadness, and dismay.
At Colby College in Maine, where I teach courses about the police, I sometimes assess proposals for police reform by asking whether they would have prevented the kind of escalation that occurred. Could the whole incident have been avoided if my training had been different? If the department had different policies in place? If the police academy hadn’t taught me to be paranoid about car stops, perhaps I wouldn’t have perceived a passenger walking away as such a threat. If California had mandated meaningful de-escalation training for officers, maybe I would have thought to use a calmer tone or to say something less hostile than “get on the ground.” Maybe I would have retreated after the man threatened me and waited for the arrival of more officers so that we could have arrested him safely through sheer strength of numbers. If department policy had established that lethal force could be used only when there was absolutely no alternative, maybe I would have ducked for cover when it looked like rocks were about to fly instead of drawing my weapon.
Maybe. But probably not. You can train and rewrite policy all day long, but done in isolation, that won’t get you very far. If you’ve got a department full of cops who think of themselves as aggressive crime fighters locked in a life-or-death struggle against the forces of evil—which is how many officers saw themselves, even in liberal, educated Berkeley—then alienation and resentment are bound to spread in heavily policed neighborhoods. In the heat of the moment, you won’t see police backing down.
Policy change is crucially important. But to fix policing, we need to change cop culture: the values, beliefs, and assumptions, the worldview of those in law enforcement. Right now, not enough people are talking about how to do that.
Copyright © 2023 by Neil Gross
