Homicide. David Simon
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safety and the safety of others. The five-member panel heard from the victim’s companion in the carryout, who explained that he and his friend were not casing the store, that they repeatedly looked through the window before entering because the shop was crowded and they didn’t want to wait in line to buy sodas. Most important, the panel heard from Ja-Wan McGee, now paralyzed at the waist, who testified from a wheelchair that he “was walking in the door, and the guy took two steps and started firing.” The trial board deliberated for an hour, then found the detective guilty of violating three departmental rules involving the use of a firearm as well as acting “in a manner which reflected discredit on the department.” A week later, the police commissioner declined to consider any lesser punishment or rehabilitation for the detective. Instead, Pomerleau accepted the trial board’s recommendation and fired the detective.
“Miami brought justice for us,” declared the regional head of the NAACP, but to police on the street the case against Scotty McCown made it clear that a department that had once refused to discipline even the most wanton acts of brutality was now sounding a general retreat. The question was not whether the Ja-Wan McGee shooting was good or bad; every cop who ever felt the need to draw his weapon winced at the thought of a cigarette lighter on the linoleum and a seventeen-year-old crippled for life. The question was whether the department was going to sacrifice its own rather than confront one of the most unavoidable truths about police work: the institutionalized conceit that says in every given circumstance, a good cop will give you a good shooting.
A heavily armed nation prone to violence finds it only reasonable to give law officers weapons and the authority to use them. In the United States, only a cop has the right to kill as an act of personal deliberation and action. To that end, Scotty McCown and three thousand other men and women were sent out on the streets of Baltimore with . 38-caliber Smith & Wessons, for which they received several weeks of academy firearms training augmented by one trip to the police firing range every year. Coupled with an individual officer’s judgment, that is deemed expertise enough to make the right decision every time.
It is a lie.
It is a lie the police department tolerates because to do otherwise would shatter the myth of infallibility on which rests its authority for lethal force. And it is a lie that the public demands, because to do otherwise would expose a terrifying ambiguity. The false certainty, the myth of perfection, on which our culture feeds requires that Scotty McCown should have shouted a warning before firing three shots, that he should have identified himself as a police officer and told Ja-Wan McGee to drop what he believed was a weapon. It demands that McCown should have given the kid time to decide or, perhaps, should have used his weapon only to wound or disarm the suspect. It argues that a detective who fails to do these things is poorly trained and reckless, and if the detective is white, it allows for the argument that he is very possibly a racist capable of viewing every black teenager with a shiny lighter as an armed robbery in progress. It doesn’t matter that a shouted warning concedes every advantage to the gunman, that death can come in the time it takes for a cop to identify himself or demand that a suspect relinquish a weapon. It doesn’t matter that in a confrontation of little more than a second or two, a cop is lucky if he can hit center mass from a distance of twenty feet, much less target extremities or shoot a weapon from a suspect’s hand. And it doesn’t matter whether a cop is an honorable man, whether he truly believes he is in danger, whether the shooting of a black suspect sickens him no less than if the man were white. McCown was a good man, but he let go of a .38 round a moment or two before he should have, and in that short span both victim and shooter became entwined in the same tragedy.
For the public, and the black community in particular, the shooting of Ja-Wan McGee became a long-awaited victory over a police department that had for generations devalued black life. It was, in that sense, the inevitable consequence of too much evil justified for too long. It made no difference that Scotty McCown was neither incompetent nor racist; in Baltimore, as in other police departments nationwide, the sons would be made to pay for their fathers’ crimes.
For cops on the street, white and black, the McGee shooting became proof positive that they were now alone, that the system could no longer protect them. To preserve its authority, the department would be required to destroy not only those men who used and believed in brutality, but also those who chose wrongly when confronted with a sudden, terrifying decision. If the shooting was good, you were covered, though even the most justified use of force could no longer occur in Baltimore without someone, somewhere, getting in front of a television camera to say that police murdered the man. And if the shooting was borderline, you were probably still covered, provided you knew how to write the report. But if the shooting was bad, you were expendable.
For the department, for the city itself, the consequences were predictable, inevitable. And now, every cop who knew his history could look at Monroe Street and see the bastard child of an earlier tragedy in an east side carryout. Maybe John Scott was killed by a police, and maybe it was a calculated murder, though it was hard for Worden or anyone else to imagine a cop consciously risking both his career and his freedom to ace a car thief. More likely, the death of John Scott was nothing more or less than a chase, a scuffle and a half-second of fearful deliberation in a dark alley. Perhaps the gun was leveled and the trigger squeezed by a mind haunted by memories of Norman Buckman or any other cop who hesitated and lost. Perhaps, in the echo of a gunshot, a cop wondered in panic how it could be written, how it would play. Perhaps, before driving away from Monroe Street with headlights dimmed, a Baltimore cop thought of Scotty McCown.
“Roger Twigg done put our shit out on the street,” says Rick James, reading the article a second time and lapsing into west side vernacular. “Somebody ’round here been doin’ some talking, yo.”
Donald Worden looks at his partner but says nothing. In the main office, D’Addario is finishing up with the last items on his clipboard. Two dozen detectives—homicide, robbery, sex offense—are clustered around him, listening to another morning’s allotment of teletypes, special orders and departmental memoranda. Worden listens without hearing any of it.
“That’s the problem with this whole investigation,” he says finally, rising for a second pass at the coffeepot. “This place leaks like a fucking sieve.”
James nods, then tosses the newspaper on Waltemeyer’s desk. D’Addario ends the roll call and Worden wanders out of the coffee room, looking at the faces of at least a half-dozen men who were tight with some of the Western and Central District officers now under investigation for the Scott killing. Worden allows himself a hard thought: Any of them could be a source for the newspaper story.
Hell, Worden feels some obligation to put his own sergeant on the list. Terry McLarney had no stomach for chasing other cops, particularly those he had worked with in the Western District. He had made that much clear from the moment John Scott hit the pavement, and it was for that reason that the Monroe Street probe had been taken away from him.
For McLarney, the notion that his own detectives were being used to pursue his old bunkies from the Western was obscene. McLarney had been a sector sergeant in that godforsaken district before returning to homicide in ’85. He was damn near killed in that district, shot down like a dog while chasing a holdup man on Arunah Avenue, and he’d seen the same thing happen to some of his men. If you were going after cops in the Western, you were going without McLarney. His world did not allow for that much gray. The cops were good, the criminals bad; and if the cops weren’t good, they were still cops.
But would McLarney leak? Worden doubts it. McLarney might bitch and moan and keep his distance from the Scott case, but Worden doesn’t believe he would undercut his own detectives. In truth, it was hard to imagine any detective consciously leaking details to thwart an investigation.
No, thinks Worden, dismissing the thought. The newspaper story came from within the department, but probably not directly from a homicide detective. A more likely source would be the police union lawyers, trying hard to portray the fresh witness as a suspect so as to take the heat off any officers. That made sense, particularly since one of those lawyers was quoted by name near the end of the article.
Still, Worden and James both know that the newspaper story is largely accurate and up to date—a bit leaden in its suggestion that the new civilian