Authors: David Simon
If the shooter was another police officer who fled before Sergeant Wylie arrived, there was nothing in the paperwork that could identify him. In all, fifteen Western and Central officers had been interviewed, but they could offer little, and Wylie, for his part, insisted that he had seen nothing before or after hearing the gunshot. Several officers—including Wylie and two others who were among the first to arrive at the shooting scene—were ordered to undergo lie detector tests. The results showed no deception for all officers with the exception of Wylie and one other, whose results were deemed inconclusive.
The polygraph results, coupled with Wylie’s premature broadcast canceling the description for the suspect, led both Worden and James to conclude that, at the very least, the Central District sergeant had seen something before he discovered the body. But in a two-and-a-half-hour interview with the detectives, Wylie insisted that he had heard only the single gunshot and had seen no other officers near the alley on Monroe Street. He did not know why he would have canceled the description of the suspect, nor did he recall doing so.
Wylie asked the detectives if he was a suspect.
No, he was told.
Nonetheless, it was during that interview that the detectives asked the
sector sergeant to consent to a voluntary search of his house. Wylie agreed, and the detectives confiscated his uniforms, service weapon and off-duty revolver for examinations that would also prove inconclusive.
Am I a suspect? the sergeant asked again. If so, I want to be advised of my rights.
No, they told him, you are not a suspect. Not now. With the sergeant insistent that he had seen or heard nothing apart from the gunshot, what had remained for the investigators was the possibility that some other cop or a civilian had witnessed the shooting or its aftermath. Now, just as that possibility had become very real, a single column of newsprint was threatening to drive their only witness back underground.
Still, if it was a cop who killed John Scott, Worden believed that the incident probably added up to something less than intentional murder. It was, he reasoned, a fight in an alley that went bad, a tussle that ended when a patrolman—rightly or wrongly—used his weapon, or perhaps another .38 he grabbed from John Scott. A second or two later, the suspect is on the ground, a gunshot wound to the back, and the cop is spitting up adrenaline, panicking, wondering how in the hell he’s going to write his way out of this one.
If that was the scenario, if a patrolman fled from that alley because he had no faith in the department’s ability to protect him, then it was an inevitable act. If that was the case, then Monroe Street was the last, twisted curve on a piece of bad road on which the Baltimore department had been traveling for a long time. Donald Worden had been there for the beginning of the journey, and he had seen the full swing of the pendulum.
Only once in that long career did Worden himself fire a weapon in the line of duty. It was a wayward shot, a .38 round-nose with an almost vertical trajectory, spinning high above any conceivable target. That was twenty years earlier, on a summer day when he and his partner caught a robbery on view in Pimlico, witnessing the ever-elusive communion of a criminal with his crime. After they had duly chased the perpetrator for a greater distance than the average cop considers reasonable, Worden’s partner began firing. Worden, feeling an obscure need to show solidarity, then sent his own missile into the ether.
Worden knew the man they were chasing, of course, just as the man knew Worden. For these were the halcyon days of the Big Man’s twelve-year tour in the Northwest, when a rough cordiality still existed among the players and Worden was on a first-name basis with anyone in the
district who was worth arresting. When the gunfire ended the foot chase and they caught up to their suspect, the man was shocked.
“Donald,” he said, “I can’t believe it.”
“What?”
“You tried to kill me.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You shot at me.”
“I fired over your head,” Worden said, chastened. “But look, I’m sorry about it, okay?”
Worden never did manage a taste for gunplay, and the embarrassment of that one stray round never left him. For him, the real authority was a cop’s shield and his reputation on the street; the gun had very little to do with it.
Still, it was entirely appropriate that Worden was the detective assigned to the murder of John Randolph Scott. In more than a quarter century on the street, he had borne witness to more than his share of police-involved shootings. Most were good, some were not so good, a few were genuinely malevolent. More often than not, the outcome was decided in seconds. Often, too, the act of compressing the trigger was precipitated by little more than instinct. Usually the suspect needed to be lit up, sometimes he didn’t, and sometimes there was room for debate. Sometimes, too, the suspect should have been shot and shot repeatedly, but somehow wasn’t.
The decision to use lethal force was inevitably subjective, defined not so much by empirical standards as by what an officer was willing to justify in his own mind and on paper. But regardless of the circumstances, one ethic remained constant: When a cop shoots someone, he stands by it. He picks up a radio mike and calls it. He turns in the body.
But times had changed. A quarter century ago, an American law officer could fire his weapon without worrying whether the entrance wound would be anterior or posterior. Now, the risk of civil liability and possible criminal prosecution settles on a cop every time he unholsters a weapon, and what could once be justified by an earlier generation of patrolmen is now enough to get the next generation indicted. In Baltimore, as in every American city, the rules have changed because the streets have changed, because the police department isn’t what it used to be. Nor, for that matter, is the city itself.
In 1962, when Donald Worden came out of the academy, the code was understood by the players on both sides. Break bad on a police, and there
was a good chance that the cop would use his gun and use it with impunity. The code was especially clear in the case of anyone foolish enough to shoot a police. Such a suspect had one chance and one chance only. If he could get to a police district, he would live. He would be beaten, but he would live. If he tried to run and was found on the street in circumstances that could be made to look good on paper, he would not.
But that was a different era, a time when a Baltimore cop could say, with conviction, that he was a member of the biggest, toughest, best-armed gang on the block. Those were the days before the heroin and cocaine trade became the predominant economy of the ghetto, before every other seventeen-year-old corner boy could be a walking sociopath with a 9mm in the waistband of his sweats, before the department began conceding to the drug trade whole tracts of the inner city. Those were also the days when Baltimore was still a segregated city, when the civil rights movement was little more than an angry whisper.
In fact, most of the police-involved shootings of that time had racial overtones, the deadliest proof of the notion that for the black, inner-city neighborhoods of Baltimore, the presence of the city’s 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.