It is becoming increasingly difficult to think about policing without focusing on race, especially given the events of the past couple of years.
However, I recently spoke with a cop whose experiences seemed unique. He had worked for nine years as an officer in a small New Jersey town – a town whose population was almost 100% black.
The police department he worked for was also almost entirely black. This cop however, was white. I asked him about his experience. Had he been subjected to any prejudice? Did he encounter any discrimination from his colleagues or from the townspeople?
When he had initially applied for the police department, he had been aware that the town and the department were black but it never occurred to him that there would be any issues with him being white.
“I didn’t know what was going to happen,” he told me. “I just thought this is a job in law enforcement and I wanted to be in law enforcement – I don’t care if the folks are blue, green or orange. The job is what it is.”
The police department was small so his fellow officers’ were just happy to have him; any help was welcome. But what about the local citizens who had had only ever been policed by black officers?
How did they feel about a white cop coming into the town? It shouldn’t matter of course, but of course to some people, it does.
“Actually, a lot of folks welcomed me with open arms’’ he said. As it turned out, many of the police officers that worked in the town had family or friends within it. Being related to the very people that you are locking up doesn’t bode well and can lead to accusations of favoritism or corruption. So the very fact that he was an outsider resulted in the town seeing him as a welcome addition to the force.
In all the years that he worked in the town, only once was he the victim of racism.
Although, even then, he isn’t so sure it was racism, in the real sense. “This junior high school kid was with his friends and I guess he wanted to act tough, so he called me ‘cracker'”, the cop recalled. “I just pulled him to the side and I asked him if he even knew what that meant. He said he didn’t. He had just heard it once and was repeating it.”
The term, ‘cracker’ was a reference to the white slavers, cracking their whips. “I gave him a history lesson,’ the cop continued. “He said he thought the word had something to do with crackers that you eat!”
So the black townspeople were primarily welcoming and grateful he was there. Every week, at a town luncheon for the senior citizens in town, the cop would attend and help serve. He was well liked and his race never came into play.
It was only when he hoped for promotion that he experienced any kind of prejudice. With the way the department worked, there was a ‘pool’ of ‘suitable officers’ to be promoted to the rank of sergeant. Each officer took a turn at working as a provision sergeant, before the next officer was given the opportunity.
The officer I spoke to was number four on the list and after the first, second and third officer had taken their turns, it was now his go. However, instead of giving him his chance, the department went back to the first officer and gave it to him again.
The white cop challenged the process and the department was forced to change its practices. A written exam was introduced and when the white cop took it he came top and was finally awarded the rank of sergeant.
“I would say that the fact I was white had something to do with why I was passed over for promotion,” he told me. “When that happened, it was like a punch in the stomach.”
There are often claims of race discrimination when it comes to police promotion so I found this an interesting situational reversal. But apart from this one incident, he had never had any other issues.
“I didn’t know what to expect when I joined,” he said. “I was kinda nervous. ‘Were these folks going to accept me? Are they going to reject me, just because of my skin color?’
“All that was in the back of my mind. But it was a deep-rooted community and there were a lot of good people there, so I never really encountered any prejudice for being a white officer.”
What had I expected him to say? That the other officers and the town would turn against him? Perhaps. With the subject of race, it sometimes feels that we are conditioned to believe this would be the case.
Of course the truth is most people really don’t care what color you are, despite the best efforts of the enormous race relations industry to convince us otherwise,
However the attitude from people who lived outside the town had surprised him. “When I told people that I worked in an all-black community, they were kind of shocked and it was like, ‘Well, isn’t there a lot of crime there?'” he said.
The cop could barely believe what he was hearing and it bothered him. “I was surprised,” he continued. “I mean, here we are in 2017 and people are still talking like this! But I never saw it that way.”
The reality is that the people in the town and the cops that serve the law just get on with life without excessively dwelling on race. And of course that’s exactly how it should be.
So with all the loud talk about the current difficulties between the police and the black community, here was a tale that showed something completely opposite.
What I heard was heartening but it shouldn’t even have to be a consideration or a revelation.