Homicide. David Simon
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finest was for generations merely another plague to endure: poverty, ignorance, despair, police. Black Baltimoreans grew up with the understanding that two offenses—talking up to a city cop or, worse, running from one—were almost guaranteed to result in a beating at best, gunfire at worst. Even the most prominent members of the black community were made to endure slights and insults, and well before the 1960s, the contempt felt for the department was close to universal.
Things within the department weren’t much better. When Worden came on the force, black officers (among them two future police commissioners) were still prohibited from riding in radio cars—legally prohibited; the Maryland legislature had yet to pass the first law allowing blacks access to public accommodations. Black officers were limited in rank, then quarantined on foot posts in the slums or used as undercovers in the fledgling narcotics unit. On the street, they endured the silence of white colleagues; in the station houses, they were insulted by racial remarks at roll calls and shift changes.
The transformation came slowly, prompted in equal part by increased activism in the black community and by the arrival of a new police commissioner in 1966, an ex-Marine named Donald Pomerleau, who took the helm with a mandate to clean house. The year before, Pomerleau had written a scathing report on the BPD, issued under the independent aegis of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. The study declared the Baltimore force to be among the nation’s most antiquated and corrupt and characterized its use of force as excessive and its relations with the city’s black community as nonexistent. The Watts riot that had shaken Los Angeles in 1965 was still fresh in every civic leader’s mind, and with all of the nation’s cities living under threat of summer violence, Maryland’s governor and Baltimore’s mayor took the IACP assessment seriously: They hired the man who wrote it.
Pomerleau’s arrival marked the end of the Baltimore department’s Paleozoic era. Almost overnight, the command staff began stressing community relations, crime prevention and modern law enforcement technology. A series of citywide tactical units was created and multichannel radios replaced the call boxes still used by most patrolmen. Shootings by police officers were for the first time investigated systematically, and those reviews made some difference; together with community pressure, they discouraged some of the most blatant brutality. But it was Pomerleau himself who successfully fought a prolonged battle against the creation of a civilian review board, assuring that in cases of alleged brutality the Baltimore department would continue to monitor itself. As a result, the men on the street in the late sixties and early seventies understood that a bad shooting could be made to look good and a good shooting could be made to look better.
In Baltimore, the drop piece became standard issue in the police districts, so much so that one particular shooting in the early 1970s has become a permanent part of department lore, a touchstone for a particular era in Maryland’s largest city. It happened on one of the side streets off Pennsylvania Avenue, when a sudden spasm of violence struck as five narcotics detectives were preparing to hit a rowhouse. From the darkness of an adjacent alley someone started shouting, yelling to another cop about the man behind him, the man with a knife.
In a rush of adrenaline, one detective fired all six, though he later swore—until he checked his gun—that he pulled the trigger once. He ran into the alley to find the suspect lying on his back, surrounded by five knives.
“Here’s his knife, here,” said one cop.
“Man, that ain’t my fuckin’ knife,” the wounded man declared, then pointed to another switchblade a few feet away. “That’s my knife.”
But the drop weapons were little more than a temporary solution, one that became less effective and more dangerous as the general public became aware of the ploy. In the end, the department could do little more than fight a rearguard action as complaints of excessive force multiplied and police brutality became a catchphrase. In Donald Worden’s mind, the end of the old Baltimore Police Department could be marked with precision. On April 6, 1973, a twenty-four-year-old patrolman named Norman Buckman was shot six times in the head with his own service revolver on a Pimlico street. Two fellow officers about a block away heard the shots and raced down Quantico Avenue. They found a young suspect standing over the dead officer’s body, the murder weapon on the ground beside him.
“Yeah,” said the man, “I shot the motherfucker.”
Instead of emptying their guns, the arresting officers merely cuffed the shooter and took him downtown. Where once on the streets of Baltimore there had been a code, now there were dead police and living cop killers.
Worden was torn. A part of him knew the old ways could not be defended or even sustained, but still, Buckman had been a friend, a young patrolman who had been busting his ass to make Worden’s operations squad in the Northwest District. Called at home by his shift lieutenant, Worden dressed quickly and arrived at the station house with a dozen other officers at about the same moment that Buckman’s murderer was transferred to the lockup. The official story was that the suspect complained of abdominal pains while being processed and photographed, but everyone in the city understood the source of that pain. And when Baltimore’s black newspaper, the Afro-American, sent a photographer to Sinai Hospital in the hope of depicting the suspect’s injuries, it was Worden himself who locked the man up on a trespassing charge. When the NAACP demanded an inquiry, department officials simply stonewalled, insisting that no beating had occurred.
But it was a small, pathetic victory, and in the roll call rooms and radio cars there were hard words for the two officers who, with a .38 already on the ground, had allowed Buckman’s killer to surrender. The words became harder still after the trial, when the man slipped away with a second-degree verdict and a sentence that would allow parole in little more than ten years.
The Buckman murder was one milestone, but the journey was far from over. Seven years later, in an East Baltimore carryout, the department once again came to terms with its future. And once again Worden stood on the periphery, helpless, as another cop, another friend, was sacrificed in an altogether different way.
In March 1980, the victim was a seventeen-year-old kid with the unlikely monicker of Ja-Wan McGee; the shooter, a thirty-three-year-old detective named Scotty McCown. A nine-year veteran who was then working with Worden in CID robbery, McCown was off duty and in plainclothes at a sub shop on Erdman Avenue, ordering a pizza, when McGee and a companion entered and walked to the counter. McCown had already been watching the two teenagers for a few minutes, glimpsing them as they returned several times to the window, scoping the store’s interior, apparently waiting for something. Only when most of the customers left did the two walk inside and make their way toward the counter. McCown had been a robbery detective for five years, and the scene he was witnessing seemed a little familiar. This is it, he thought, slipping his off-duty weapon from its holster and into his raincoat pocket.
And when the flash of silver came out of Ja-Wan McGee’s coat pocket at the counter, McCown was more than ready. He fired three without warning, wounding McGee in the upper back. The detective ordered the other teenager to stay where he was, then shouted for the counterman to call for the police and an ambulance. Then he leaned over the prone victim. On the floor was a black and silver cigarette lighter.
The shooting of Ja-Wan McGee came only weeks after a similarly questionable shooting by a white officer had sparked race riots in Miami. When the picketing began in earnest outside City Hall, everyone in the department could see the writing on the wall. Everyone but Scotty McCown.
Worden had come to the robbery unit in 1977, two years after McCown, and he knew the younger man to be a good cop who was about to be destroyed by a bad shooting. Worden dug out a couple of fresh reports from the Eastern District, robberies in which the suspect had used a small pistol, a chrome .25-caliber.
“Maybe these will help,” Worden offered.
“Thank you, Donald,” the younger detective told him, “but I’ll be okay.”
But he would not be okay. The protests, the whispered threat of riots, grew louder after the state’s attorney’s office declined to present the case to a grand jury, citing a lack of criminal intent on the part of the detective. Three months later, a departmental trial board convened to hear testimony from McCown,