It was bad enough that the prosecutors did not preempt the defense on the Fuhrman issue, but even failing to do that they still could have perhaps saved the day if they hadn’t literally folded their tent on Fuhrman. Winning is often simply getting up off the ground one more time than your opponent. After the Fuhrman tapes surfaced, the prosecution stayed away from Fuhrman the way the devil stays away from holy water. He was a leper, a pariah, to the prosecution. As for the defense, they couldn’t get enough of him. They loved him. He was like the manna miraculously supplied to the Israelites in the wilderness. On the one hand, the defense vilified Fuhrman, yet it also embraced him for the lifeline he represented to them.
But did the prosecution have to distance itself from Fuhrman the way it did? I’m not so sure. Since the prosecutors continued to believe firmly that however much of a racist Fuhrman was he did not plant the glove or try to frame Simpson, why didn’t they try to rehabilitate Fuhrman with the jury? I know I would have. It had long been reported in the media that many who knew Fuhrman well not only rejected the notion that he would have framed Simpson but said his racism, if any, was limited to the black street criminal element.
The best piece on this was a November 8, 1995, article in the
Los Angeles Times
. The reporter, Greg Krikorian, interviewed partners and coworkers of Fuhrman’s in his years at the
LAPD
. As you read the comments, ask yourself if you agree with my assessment that they could only have helped the prosecution in mitigating the damage done by the Fuhrman tapes, Kathleen Bell, and the other civilian witnesses. Also be aware that even on the Fuhrman tapes, the last time Fuhrman used the word “nigger” was in 1988, seven years before his testimony in the Simpson trial. My excerpts from the article are lengthy, but since Fuhrman was such a central figure at the Simpson trial, a wit ness around whom the defense built its main contention that the police framed Simpson because of his race, I feel they are necessary. Some have said that Fuhrman has become one of the most hated men in America. But just as God always gets good press, and we never hear the devil’s side of the story, I think it’s important that Fuhrman, who has become reclusive, be heard from through those who knew him.
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“The person that the world knows…on the tape…is racist, who made terrible remarks, who probably represents all the filth the world has to offer. The Mark Fuhrman I know…is not that. He’s not a racist,” said Sergeant Roberto Alaniz, a Latino whom Fuhrman sought as a partner in 1984.
Sergeant Ed Palmer, an African-American who first met Fuhrman at the West Los Angeles Station last year [1994], said: “I am as shocked as anybody…. If Mark were a racist and especially as big a racist as he sounded on the tapes, I would have no trouble telling him he was the scum of the earth. But I really can’t.” And this from Carlton Brown, a black homicide detective who was Fuhrman’s partner for most of 1993: “I really can’t say whether Fuhrman was racist or not, but if he harbored those feelings, it was not evident to me. I don’t know, maybe I’m naive. But I don’t think so.”
Recent interviews with more than half a dozen
LAPD
officers, all but one of them black or Latino, do not prove that the now-infamous former detective did not commit the brutalities he bragged about on a series of taped interviews between 1985 and 1994. Nor do they prove he did not mask racist views while sharing a patrol car, meals, even an apartment, with the officers who worked with him, trained him, and even partnered with him. But the portrait that emerges from these interviews is clearly one at odds with the Mark Fuhrman whose conduct and comments have sparked investigations of the Los Angeles Police Department—including a new probe by the U.S. Justice Department. Instead of the rogue-racist cop whose very presence in the O.J. Simpson case has again put the
LAPD
on trial, interviews suggest that Fuhrman was aggressive, even arrogant, but if he harbored the vile views expressed to others, he concealed them from many with whom he worked.
Not unlike Clint Eastwood’s fictional San Francisco film detective Harry Callahan, several
LAPD
officers said Fuhrman could be sullen and purposely shocking. But that was just his personality, they added, and it never overruled his logic when it came to arrests. Maybe, some say, he never shared his true feelings with them. Or maybe, they suggest, he changed after he underwent psychological counseling in the mid-1980s. But their view of Fuhrman, the officers insisted, was not based on naiveté. Palmer said: “Being African-American, when you come into contact with someone, you listen to them and pick up on things. There have been times I have worked with people [and] you wonder about them. I never wondered with him. I knew he was aggressive. I knew he was a little arrogant. But I never got racism at all. If he were that way, and as much a racist as the tapes indicated, then it would have come out somewhere, and somebody would have spoken up. That code of silence nonsense,” Palmer said, “you get to that point, somebody would have spoken up.”
Sergeant Paul Partridge, who has known Fuhrman since the two were rookies 20 years earlier, said about Fuhrman:
“If he were back on the job [today] he would risk his life for anyone on the job or anyone in this city, just like he always had. And he wouldn’t care who they were.”
Partridge recalled that Fuhrman had one long-term girlfriend who was a Latina—a fact some might find curious for a man many see as an uncontrollable racist. And, he recalled, the woman was not one to tolerate any racial slights. “She was very vocal, very proud of her heritage,” Partridge said. And [Fuhrman] had no problem with that.”
Partridge and other officers told the
L.A. Times
reporter that in the language of police work, where officers can risk their lives each day confronting the worst society has to offer, a distinction is made between what is said in the moment and how someone really feels. After hearing the Fuhrman tapes, Partridge said that he was angered that someone he knew would say such things, but he was still convinced that in Fuhrman’s mind the remarks were directed at criminals, not an entire race. Alaniz agreed. When Fuhrman returned to work in 1982, after being denied a stress-induced early retirement, Alaniz had a talk with Fuhrman.
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“I asked him [his feelings about minorities] after he told me about his stress thing,” Alaniz said. “He said he never had problems with blacks, that he only had problems with the criminal element. He told me what he said [to the pension board]…that having worked his assignments, he couldn’t stand the criminal element, that he couldn’t stand gang members. He hated them. [He said] that it got to the point that he would probably shoot them rather than give them the benefit of the doubt” in a standoff.
Several months after Fuhrman was back on duty, Alaniz said, he asked Alaniz to be his partner—a move Alaniz and some others say flies in the face of Fuhrman’s reputation as an officer who disdained minorities. “I just don’t understand how a person that is very racist would choose to work with a minority officer in a two-man car,” Alaniz said.
Before they became patrol partners, Alaniz said,
LAPD
superiors decided that Fuhrman’s true feelings about race should be put to the test by making Fuhrman’s first partner—after his pension hearings—a black female officer. Fuhrman was paired for two months with Officer Toish Ellerson. Alaniz said Fuhrman told him he enjoyed working with Ellerson. And he recalls Fuhrman saying, “They have this idea that I can’t stand working with a black person and a woman. But they are wrong. She is a very pleasant person to work with.”
For her part, Ellerson, now a sergeant in the West Los Angeles Station’s Community Relations office, also had no unpleasant recollections of her time as Fuhrman’s partner.
“To be blunt, I never had any problems with him,” she said.
Alaniz says that Fuhrman was known as a solid cop. “His uniform was impeccable. He kept himself in shape. Shoes shiny. His tactics were good. He didn’t do anything reckless.”
It should be noted that Fuhrman placed second in his class at the police academy when he was receiving training to become an
LAPD
officer, and a review of his police file revealed that in his nineteen years on the force there were only four citizen complaints filed against him, an average number. Alaniz said the only time he saw Fuhrman lose his temper was during the arrest of a long-haired transient who Fuhrman, a former Marine and a Vietnam veteran, learned had avoided the Vietnam War by fleeing to Canada.
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Alaniz said Fuhrman told the transient, “You know what I was doing when you were in Canada?” Alaniz said it was the only time he had ever seen Fuhrman really loud with somebody. “He got pretty hostile.”
Detective Carlton Brown, Fuhrman’s black partner in 1993, said he got along fine with Fuhrman, adding that race “was never an issue. He treated everyone fairly. I never observed him violate civil liberties.”
And as recently as last year [1994], Fuhrman never offered any hint that he harbored racist views, according to officer Palmer, who met Fuhrman at the West Los Angeles station about a month before the murders in Brentwood. As often as several times a week over a period of six months, Palmer said, he and Fuhrman met before the day shift to play basketball, often with other African-Americans. Palmer said, “We would get there at 6:30 in the morning and sometimes it would be just the two of us. I would think this man had to get up at 5:40 in the morning to play basketball with me. Why…if you really hate African-Americans, why would you do that? In fact, you know how some guys joke [to African-Americans] and say, ‘you guys are all quick’ or, ‘you guys can all jump’? He never even said anything like that,” Palmer said.
“Ask yourself this,” Alaniz said. “What do you do with the racist? You just show them a better way…so they can learn. Here is a person who told the department that he was having problems dealing with minorities…then they put him through the psychological program and they said at some point he was rehabilitated. And later in his career he was hanging out with minority officers.”
For those who may say the remarks of Fuhrman’s fellow officers in the
L.A. Times
piece merely reflect the officer’s code of silence, that code, which does exist to a certain degree, only applies to official inquiries about an officer’s misconduct, the type that could get the officer arrested, disciplined, or fired. It doesn’t apply to a statement to a reporter about a retired cop like Fuhrman. Moreover, the code of silence means you don’t talk. You say you didn’t see or hear anything. You don’t, as in the
Times
story, say very positive, affirmative things, particularly if you are a black police officer.
And there were others besides police officers who disputed Fuhrman’s racism. In an October 1994
CNN
report on Fuhrman, two African-American women spoke to correspondent Art Harris. Connie Law, who met Fuhrman when he was one of the investigators on the murder of her uncle, told Harris: “As far as O.J. Simpson goes, I think he’s innocent. As far as Mark Fuhrman goes, I think he’s a great detective. He was great with us…. He didn’t show any signs of racism towards me and my family.” Fuhrman also investigated a case in which a black woman, Patricia Foy, resisted a purse snatcher and chased him after he fled with the purse. She told Harris that Fuhrman “told me I was incredibly brave, but I was also incredibly foolish and I should not do that again because I could end up dead. He’s not a racist. They’re just trying to hang something on him so they can cover up for the defense. That’s all they’re doing.”
Another black who is convinced Fuhrman is not now a racist is Danette Meyers, a Los Angeles deputy district attorney. Although Ms. Meyers has refused to talk to the media, her close friendship with Fuhrman is well known. It started when a defendant she was prosecuting (and whom Fuhrman had investigated) made a death threat to her. Fuhrman took it upon himself to personally guard her on his own time. They became good friends and on several occasions he had her over for dinner with his wife and two children.
Despite the positive remarks made by Fuhrman’s former fellow officers and others that he was not a racist, it would seem that you don’t, even in jest or to embellish a movie script for effect, say the things Fuhrman did without having some amount of racism coursing through you. And the president of an association of black
LAPD
officers told the
Los Angeles Times
reporter who wrote the article that several officers had approached him and told him racist stories about Fuhrman, but he never furnished any names to the reporter. In fact, Fuhrman was perceived as a racist even by those who knew him growing up in his small hometown of Eatonville, Washington, at the foot of Mount Rainier. In life there are nuances, shades of gray, and degrees, to virtually everything. But the prosecution in this case permitted the defense to paint Fuhrman before a predominantly black jury as the biggest and most virulent racist ever, someone who would’ve embarrassed George Wallace in his segregationist days. The jury never heard one sentence, one word, one syllable from the prosecution in defense of Mark Fuhrman. The DA treated him as if he were beyond redemption or rehabilitation. The defense, of course, treated Fuhrman as if he were the devil himself, a soul mate of Attila the Hun, Torquemada, and all the other great villains of history. Cochran, in his summation, called Fuhrman “a genocidal racist, a perjurer, America’s worst nightmare, the personification of evil,” even compared him to Adolf Hitler—all this without one word of rebuttal from either Darden or Clark, who even joined in the vilification. In speaking to the jury on how she was “disgusted” with Mark Fuhrman, Marcia Clark actually said: “Do we wish there were no such person on this planet? Yes.” Darden told the jury: “I’m not even going to call him Detective Fuhrman if I can help it because he doesn’t deserve that title.” There’s no question that Mark Fuhrman was defamed, vilified, maligned, and slandered far, far more at the trial than Simpson, who was accused of a brutal and gruesome double murder.