Allegedly some of the most vicious cops out on the force.
How does race figure into this? It's a city with a black majority and now a black mayor and black police chief, a substantially black police force.
What did Tom Wolfe write about cops? They all become Irish? That's a line in Bonfire of the Vanities. When Ed and I reported The Corner, it became clear that the most brutal cops in our sector of the Western District were black. The guys who would really kick your ass without thinking twice were black officers. If I had to guess and put a name on it, I'd say that at some point, the drug war was as much a function of class and social control as it was of racism. I think the two agendas are inextricably linked, and where one picks up and the other ends is hard to say. But when you have African American officers beating the dog-piss out of people they're supposed to be policing, and there isn't a white guy in the equation on a street level, it's pretty remarkable.
But in some ways they were empowered. Back then, even before the advent of cell phones and digital cameras—which have been transforming in terms of documenting police violence—back then, you were much more vulnerable if you were white and you wanted to wail on somebody. You take out your nightstick and you're white and you start hitting somebody, it has a completely different dynamic than if you were a black officer. It was simply safer to be brutal if you were black, and I didn't know quite what to do with that fact other than report it. It was as disturbing a dynamic as I could imagine. Something had been removed from the equation that gave white officers—however brutal they wanted to be, or however brutal they thought the moment required—it gave them pause before pulling out a nightstick and going at it. Some African American officers seemed to feel no such pause.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026592577
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