Deadly Force Read online

  Dedication

  For Patricia, Eurina and Jamil

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Preface to the Paperback Edition

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Epilogue

  Afterword to the Paperback Edition

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Lawrence O’Donnell

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface to the Paperback Edition

  Thirty years. I tried to get America to face the problems associated with police use of deadly force for thirty years. And I failed.

  Then, all of a sudden, the country woke up. But Michael Brown had to die first. The people in his Ferguson, Missouri, neighborhood watched as his eighteen-year-old body was left lying facedown on the street riddled with police bullets for over four hours on a hot August afternoon in 2014, the year that changed everything.

  While Michael Brown’s body was still on the street, word spread that he was unarmed and that he was shot multiple times. The next day protest marchers began demanding to know what happened. They got no answers. Later that night two weeks of nighttime rioting began in Ferguson. And America woke up. Nothing snaps America to attention like a riot.

  We have had riots after killings by police for over fifty years, but this was the first one in the era of twenty-four-hour cable TV news and social media. TV reporters held their positions on Ferguson sidewalks for hours on end. The governor declared a state of emergency, sent in the state police and the National Guard, and imposed a curfew. Every night America watched and waited to see if the curfew would hold. Michael Brown’s three-hour funeral was carried live on national television. And Barack Obama became the first president of the United States to acknowledge that police abuse of deadly force is a serious problem.

  Thirty years ago we didn’t know how many people were killed by police. We still don’t. The federal government vacuums up millions upon millions of statistics about almost everything we do, but one thing that isn’t counted is how many people the government kills in the United States. How many people get the death penalty on the street without ever getting their day in court? How many of them deserve it? How many don’t? We don’t know.

  The Washington Post started keeping its own count in 2015 and recorded 991 killings by police that year. Thirty years ago our best estimates indicated there were at least six hundred killings by police in a typical year. Today’s higher numbers reported by the Post are probably not because of an increase in killing by police but because the internet and social media allow the Post to collect much more accurate information than we were able to get decades ago by literally cutting stories out of newspapers around the country. We knew we were missing a lot of cases, especially in smaller towns, but we could only guess how many.

  There are several reasons police are probably killing fewer people now than thirty years ago. The year after this book was first published, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was no longer legal to shoot fleeing suspects simply because they were fleeing. Police rules on the use of deadly force were rewritten to comply with the Supreme Court ruling. Police training is still not adequate but it has improved. Police are no longer completely confident that they can cover up a bad shooting now that the news media is alert and ready to cover possible bad shootings by police. And police are now facing much less crime, which means they are facing fewer bullets fired at them. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has always kept an accurate count of the number of police killed in the line of duty and it has dropped from 129 in 1975 to 66 in 2016.

  Black America has always known there is a problem. A friend, a neighbor, a cousin witnessed or heard about cases of unjustifiable police use of deadly force and passed the word. But it took a series of technological developments for white America to hear these stories: 24-hour cable news, the internet, social media, police dash cam and body cam video, and, most importantly, a camera-phone in everyone’s pocket. This book is about what it was like before all that—before we all knew the names Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Laquan McDonald, Stephon Clark and many others who have inspired protestors to chant, “Black lives matter!” What is shocking is how little has changed except for the new public and political awareness that there is a problem.

  When this book was published in 1983, it was the first of its kind—an exposé of how a badge could become a license to kill focusing on the Boston Police shooting of James Bowden. He was a young black husband and father who was shot and killed by two white police officers right after visiting his mother in a Roxbury housing project. That I was able to gather the facts to tell his story was something close to a miracle at the time. Cracking the blue wall of silence in a police department was virtually impossible. It helped that I was white with an Irish last name and a Boston accent. That made some Boston cops comfortable enough to do interviews with me—too comfortable. Some of the cops spoke to me the way they spoke to each other, including casual use of the N-word. In 1970s Boston, racist language was common and in the police department it was even more common. I wish the N-word was as shocking for me to hear from white Boston cops then as it would be now. Race relations in Boston have improved much more than I expected.

  This book was the single biggest breakthrough in the then slim journalistic history of police use of deadly force. But this story would never have been told if it were not for the extraordinary commitment of one man who used to be a member of the police force that killed James Bowden. Without him James Bowden’s death would have been known only to the Bowden family, and their friends and neighbors. The way he died would have been whispered at his funeral and then perhaps never spoken of again, just held as a private pain too hurtful to discuss.

  My father was a Boston police officer who decided to work his way through college and law school. He was the lawyer James Bowden’s widow found when she wanted to know the truth about what happened to her husband. As soon as my father heard her story, he knew what he had to do. He knew how hard it would be. He knew it would take years. He knew that his old police department would go to war with him. But he knew no other lawyer had the right experience to fight this kind of war—the ex-cop’s inside knowledge of how bad cops try to cover their tracks. So he didn’t think he had a choice. And now we know the truth.

  Prologue

  My father still asks me why I’m not a lawyer. Other people ask, too, as soon as they find out about my family. My father is a lawyer. My three brothers, all older, are lawyers. My only sister, four years younger, just finished law school. My mother is not a lawyer, but she is in the life. She is the financial manager of a small Boston law firm called—to the amusement of the legal community—O’Donnell, O’Donnell & O’Donnell. Senior Partner: Lawrence O’Donnell. Partners: Michael and Kevin O’Donnell. Associate: William O’Donnell. Law Clerk and soon-to-be Associate: Mary O’Donnell.

  As I tell my father, it’s not that I wouldn’t like lawyering. In fact, trial work—his specialty—has always held great appeal for me. I’ve been a devoted fan of his since I could barely see over the bench in front of me. Before I was a teenager, I was tagging along as errand
boy and briefcase carrier in the big trials. I found unparalleled anxiety and excitement in the three minutes it takes a jury to file into a courtroom and announce its verdict. The first one I heard was a “not-guilty” in a murder case. The second was a “guilty” in another murder case. The defendant’s wife, whom I had come to know that summer in Suffolk Superior Court, burst into tears at the sound of the word. She writhed, minutes later, when the judge told her husband he was to die by electrocution. It has been nearly twenty years since I heard those verdicts announced, and in all the baseball, basketball, and football games I’ve played and watched since then, in all the books I’ve read, in all the movies and plays I’ve seen, in all the elections I’ve witnessed, I have known no more suspense and drama. No, there is nothing about the family trade that I dislike.

  It isn’t the family, either. My father is a hot-tempered, moody, unpredictable, difficult man, but I lived with him a long time, still see him almost every day, and we have left our communication problem far behind. We could work together with ease. My mother is a warm, selfless woman whose only flaw is excessive frugality. Her presence is ever a pleasure. Michael and I never agree on our views of the world. We’re always laughing at each other. Kevin and I can go for long stretches without speaking, but the ice melts. William was my childhood best friend. And Mary, well, I hardly know.

  That I write for a living seems to have happened by accident. In college I was an economics student who avoided courses that required term papers. By graduation I had decided that school no longer agreed with me. But I might have eventually succumbed to the inevitability of law school if, of a summer evening in 1977, my father had not left the office and taken a stroll through the grand oaks of the Boston Common with me in mind.

  He emerged from the Common on the corner of Boylston and Charles. The Colonial Theatre was to his left. It was dark for the season. The Playboy Club was to his right. The Trailways bus station was straight ahead. Within a block were several bars featuring three-piece bands and naked dancing girls. Also nearby were about a dozen bookstores open only to adults. Women in loud colors walked the streets in groups. The neighborhood has long been known as “The Combat Zone.” I started working in the Zone as a part-time parking attendant during my second year of college. It was now more than a year since I’d received my diploma, and I was still a parking attendant. My father walked past the bus station, across Eliot Street, and onto my hundred-car lot.

  New York, New York was playing in the Sack Cinema across the street, but Star Wars and the Red Sox, who were on their way to finishing two games behind the Yankees, were playing far from the Zone and pulling in all the parking business that summer. I had time to talk.

  “You should come up to the office and take a look at the Bowden case,” my father said. “There’s a good story in that file.”

  (He liked my writing. His collection of it amounted to four letters addressed to him from Williston Academy, a boarding school one hundred miles due west of Boston. He had sent Bill and me there after we achieved persona non grata status at Catholic Memorial High School. My letters were pleas for a pardon. After eighty-eight days served, they turned the trick, and to Williston’s relief, we found another local parochial school willing to take a chance on us.)

  I knew a little about the Bowden case already. I had been dragged into it in a small and funny way two years earlier, when I was arrested. My father didn’t have to remind me of that.

  “We’ve got the police reports and a bunch of depositions now,” he said, plainly hoping I’d be tempted.

  I had never read a police report, and, as a night-shift worker, I had plenty of free time during the day. I went to the office the next morning.

  The Bowden file occupied its own four-drawer filing cabinet in Michael’s office. In a few weeks, I had read all of it. What was supposed to be in the thirty-two Boston Police reports—the reason two patrolmen shot and killed James Henry Bowden, Jr.—was not there. The reports told a story, but it was obviously false. O’Donnell, O’Donnell & O’Donnell was on the side of truth in this one.

  Michael and I fell into long discussions of the evidence. We talked about the cops a lot, too. The way they thought. Why they said this or that in a report or a deposition. I actually knew one of them; Michael didn’t know any, but he didn’t have to. They were guys like us. They had grown up in our kind of Irish neighborhood, gone to Catholic schools, probably been altar boys, hung on our kind of street corner.

  On such street corners there is always talk about black people—or “niggers,” as they are called. Nigger is still a widely accepted term in blue-collar Boston. (One of the unusual features of life in the O’Donnell home was that though we could get away with profanity, racial and ethnic slurs were forbidden.) There is idiomatic usage like “What are we? Niggers?” which someone might say to a friend when receiving bad service in a restaurant, or one workmate might say to another when assigned an undesirable task. Many of my lifelong friends try not to use the word nigger around me. But I don’t think I will ever stop hearing “nigger” idioms—even from people who believe they have purged themselves of racism.

  There is another usage, one that carries intense malice. It is the talk about how much someone “hates niggers” or wants to “kill niggers.” Sometimes the “kill niggers” stuff is drunken bravado, sometimes it is a joke, sometimes it is serious, but always it is really talk about how much the speaker fears black people. The fear is largely of the unknown, since black life and white rarely intersect in Boston.

  I imagine that squeezing the trigger of a gun is easier when you fear your target. And I imagine that the conscience of the Boston Police Department was at ease with the cover-up of the killing of James Bowden not just because the police instinct is to side with the officers involved in such a shooting, but also because James Bowden was black.

  One day, as we were joking about the cop talk in one of the reports (the author says he yelled to Bowden: “Remove yourself from the vehicle!”) my father walked in with a proposal. “Why don’t you get in this thing with us? There’s a lot you can do. You can be our . . . what do they call them now, Mike?”

  “Paralegal assistant.”

  “Right. What do you say?”

  “Okay.”

  That night was my last in a parking lot.

  I stayed in the O’Donnell office for about a year. When the Bowden trial was over, I started working on this book, and soon found myself studying the national picture of what police rule books call “the use of deadly force.” There was trouble everywhere. New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Houston, Seattle, Baltimore, New Orleans, Nashville, Memphis, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Providence, and Fort Lupton, Colorado, along with many other cities and towns of all sizes, had recently experienced needless killing by police. Some of it was accidental, some of it reckless, some of it vicious, some of it insane. (On Thanksgiving Day 1976, New York City Patrolman Robert Torsney walked up to a fifteen-year-old black boy named Robert Evans and, after a short conversation, shot him point-blank in the head. Torsney originally claimed that the boy had pulled a gun on him. At his subsequent murder trial, however, Torsney, to the jury’s satisfaction, pleaded not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. He spent a year in a mental hospital, was pronounced cured, and was released.)

  In the fall of 1979 I wrote an article for the New York Times that outlined the problems involved in police use of deadly force. Those problems, and the national statistics behind them, have not changed. First among them is that many of the country’s fifteen thousand or so police departments have no deadly force rules. That leaves state law as the only word on when an officer can shoot, and ignores the question of when he should shoot.

  All states allow police to kill in self-defense or defense of others. Most states also allow police to kill fleeing felony suspects. The fleeing-felon law is grounded in centuries-old English common law, which classified only eight crimes—treason, murder, and rape among them—as felonies, all punish
able by death. The American list of felonies has come to include many crimes, such as car theft (and, in one state, spitting on a policeman), that seldom draw a jail sentence in court if you are convicted but can, and all too often do, draw an instant death sentence on the street if a cop suspects you are guilty and you try to run away from him.

  Killing by the police is investigated by the police, if investigated at all. Not surprisingly, less than 1 percent of the killings are ruled unjustifiable by police departments. A much tinier percentage lead to homicide charges against police. And usually zero percent of those lead to convictions.

  Until recently, the general public was unaware of a problem. A 1970 Harris poll showed that 77 percent of the citizenry believed that when a police officer killed while on duty, the killing was automatically justified. In the Times, I said that police have an all but “unlimited license to use their deadly force.”

  A month later the Department of Justice invited me to Washington for a conference it was sponsoring on police use of deadly force. I was surprised to discover copies of my article being handed out to the five hundred or so attendees, who had come from every region of the country. Among them were police officers of every rank (none from Boston), federal and state prosecutors, congressmen, mayors, civil rights lawyers, community activists, and all the researchers whose work I had been studying. It was three days of speeches, seminars, and trading horror stories—amplified versions of Justice’s current log of objectionable killings. A sample:

  Brooklyn, New York. Five police officers fired 24 bullets at 26-year-old Hispanic male (an autopsy report revealed that he was struck 21 times and died instantly). Victim had a history of mental illness, allegedly threatened the police officers with a pair of scissors after his mother requested police assistance because he was tearing up the linoleum in the house.

  New Rochelle, New York. Black male, 18, allegedly approached by police officer as a suspect in a stolen car incident. Youth allegedly fled from officer, who fired one shot, striking victim in the back and killing him.