—
Interviewed by Alexis Wigodsky
Endnotes
4 To throw down a gang sign means to do a
hand signal with the opposing gang’s sign upside down in a show of
disrespect.
WHY SHOULD I HARASS PEOPLE FOR
STANDING ON THE CORNER?
HARLON KEITH MOSS JR.
Critics claim that street violence in
Chicago has been made worse in recent years by an inadequate number
of police officers on the street. A 2009 analysis by the Chicago
Sun-Times, for example, showed that once various factors were taken
into account, the Chicago Police Department was nearly 2,000
officers short of its authorized strength of 13,500.5 The city
planned to hire 500 new officers in 2013, but Fraternal Order of
Police President Mike Shields insisted that number was far short of
what was needed to keep the neighborhoods safe. “If Chicago wants
to lose the title ‘homicide capital of the nation,’” he said, “it’s
time to get serious about increasing the number of patrolmen and
detectives on the street. We at least need to hire 1,400 officers.
That’s at a minimum.”6
One man who knows the effects of this
manpower shortage all too well is Harlon Keith Moss Jr. Born in the
city, he was a Chicago police officer for more than 20 years until
leaving the force in 2010. He has spent his retirement resting,
spending time with family and traveling with the Buffalo Troopers,
an African-American motorcycle club.
At the time of the interview, he sits in the
comfort of his house, wearing a black jogging suit and still
sporting his Chicago Police Department ring. He eagerly waits to
start the discussion, ready to offer candid views on the lack of
officers on the street and other challenges facing the
force—including infiltration of gang members into the ranks.
When I first started on the job, I trained in
Englewood, which is one of the most dangerous areas in the city of
Chicago and, I believe, the most dangerous area on the South Side
of Chicago. But there’s just more gun violence now. These kids,
they pick up a gun and they’re more apt to shoot you and try to
kill you. And it’s not only other gangbangers they target. They
have no regard for regular civilian life—and it’s gotten to the
point where they have no regard for the police out there
anymore.
Over the years, a lot of people have lost
respect for the police because of the way police deal with them.
Who wants to be walking down the street, minding their own
business, and the police pull up and grab them and throw them up
against the car? You have the right to walk down the street and not
be bothered just because the police pull up, especially in black
and Hispanic neighborhoods, which is where you’re going to see a
lot of this happen.
Why should I harass some people for standing
on the corner? Now I’m just making you mad at the police. Now I’m
making you ready to do something. So, if I see a group standing on
the corner, there are different ways to come up to them. For
example, I might pull up and say, “Yo, listen, fellas, you know
that there’s this lady somewhere on this block and she’s watching
this corner. And, you know, as soon as we pull off, she’s going to
call the police saying that you guys are standing here. But if you
go in your backyard, you can sit there and sit and talk all night.
You can drink all night. Unless you all get loud, we won’t know
about it.”
Instead, the police pull up and automatically
think you’re a gang member, and you may not be a gang member. Once
the police actually start treating people with respect, then some
of the respect, if not all of the respect, will come back to the
police. Because, as things stand, the police disrespect pretty much
everybody.
I always wanted to be a cop, from the time I
first saw Dick Tracy on TV as a 5- or 6-year-old. When I first
started on the force, it was very exciting and I didn’t have any
regrets. But, as I progressed in years on the police department, I
could see things really starting to make subtle, then more drastic,
changes. One of the drawbacks was that the city stopped hiring as
many police officers. Now there’s a shortage of police officers. I
don’t care what the new superintendent says.7 He’s trying, in my
opinion, to do more with less people, and you can ask other police
officers that are actually out in the field and they will agree
with me. With a shortage of police officers, you’re putting the
regular beat officers in more danger. And you’re shortchanging the
citizens of Chicago because you don’t have the adequate patrols
that are necessary in order to stop crime.
But the police need to actually get out there
and do their job a bit different than they do. One thing my
partners and I did was, when I worked the 6th District8 and when I
worked the 22nd District,9 was that we patrolled our
beat—constantly. You never could tell where on our beat we would
pop up, but we were always there. If they wanted to give out a job
on our beat, we would answer up on the radio and say, “We’re here
on the beat; we’ll take that,” because we were there. We got to
know the kids on the beat. We got to know the parents on the beat.
We went to the beat meetings. By being in and out of the alleys, up
and down different streets at any given time, it makes it harder
for perpetrators to do something, because you never know when we
were going to pop up. But if you have an approach that you take
your job assignment and then you go someplace else where you meet
up for coffee, or meet up with your buddies or you do whatever else
is on your agenda, and you’re not on your beat, then people get
used to the fact that, “I never see the police.”
Unfortunately, the only time I see the police
in my own South Side neighborhood is if something happens. But by
then, it’s too late. Prior police administrations, under Jody
Weis10 and some of the other superintendents, what they wanted to
do was they wanted to have the gang unit. They wanted to have the
mobile strike force. They wanted to have a gun task force and any
of these other units swoop into an area, let’s say like Englewood,
after a shooting occurs. That’s a reaction. That’s not
pro-action.
And, unfortunately, you have a lot of police
officers that come on this job just so they can have the
opportunity to go into minority communities and assert themselves
as supposedly superior. I’ve seen Caucasian officers fight black
males only when they have handcuffs on them. I had one Caucasian
officer that got dispatched to the 7th District11 with me, and the
first thing out of his mouth was: “I can’t wait till I get into a
shootout.” We hadn’t been in the district for two or three days,
and he couldn’t wait to get into a fight. Unfortunately, less than
a year later, he got shot.
Most of the gun violence now is done by kids
under the age of 25. They get involved at a much younger age. The
gangs seek them out—and, in a lot of respects, they seek the gangs
out as a means of belonging to something. Sometimes it’s
environmental: “I’m hanging out with Jim over here. And if Jim is a
member of a gang, and a rival gang member comes by and shoots at
Jim, he is going to shoot at me, too. It’s guilt by association.
So, I might as well join this gang so I have some type of way of
being protected.”
Another reason could be the fact that the
work ethic is a whole lot different now than it used to be. If we
look back at history, black people came up here from the South, and
they were some of the most impoverished immigrants of all. But they
still survived. They still made it, and they tried to do everything
they could to make sure that their families made it—get an
education, work hard. Even when I was little, the thing I wanted
most to do was to get a job and be able to make my own money—honest
money. Nowadays, these kids see the gangbangers and the dope
dealers riding around in these nice cars, and they don’t think
about the fact that this guy’s retirement plan doesn’t go past a
certain age. They see the glamour in it, and that’s what they want.
So what do they do? They go out and they start slinging drugs. They
start gangbanging.
But a lot of people consider the Chicago
Police to be a gang. And the truth is that you’re going to always
have some gang members or former gang members that are on the
police department. Some join because they quit the gang and they
want to try and stop other people from joining the gang. But some
gangs actually encourage their members to join the police
department. They want you to go to school. They want you to get
into a high-ranking position on the force. Even if they don’t
exploit you, now they have an “in,” so that other gang members can
join.
I do know some police officers that were gang
members, and some of them actually became very good cops because
they knew the ins and outs of the particular gangs they patrolled
around. One of the best ways to catch a dope dealer is to get
somebody that used to be a dope dealer to tell you how this guy
operates.
Now, the negative aspect of the police
department having gang members is ‘cause now you don’t know who to
trust. You don’t know who to talk to. You don’t know what
high-ranking members are either current or former gang members. So
you don’t know who has your back out there on the streets. For
instance, you could go into a situation where there’s a man with a
gun, and you jump out of the car, and it’s a gang member, and you
don’t know if your partner is a member of that gang. You draw down
and get ready to take this guy out and your partner might pop you.
And that is very scary. But just being a police officer is
scary.
These younger gangbangers are quick to pick
up a gun and they’re
more apt to shoot you and try to kill you. I can remember one
instance where there was a shooting on 75th at about Evans, and,
after my partner and I arrived, a gangbanger drove down Cottage
Grove and opened up
with a TEC-9 semi-automatic pistol towards the police. Fortunately,
nobody was injured. The police all ran to their cars in order to
chase this idiot that was driving down the street. Unfortunately,
he got away from us, but police are the type of persons that,
instead of running from gunfire, they run to it.
But I don’t believe tighter gun-control
legislation would help. For instance, there’s a law that states
that a guy that has been convicted of a felony cannot own a gun.
But you have convicted felons that keep getting guns. Now, if you
cannot buy a gun, how are you getting a gun? Somebody else is
either buying the guns for you or you’re stealing the guns. My
opinion is that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. And
when you take guns out of the hands of the citizens that need them
to protect their own selves, then what you’re doing is outfitting
the criminal element to take advantage of the citizen.
In order to stop the violence, there needs to
be more funding for the police. And until the police and the
community and the school system all get together and decide we’re
going to work together to provide programs, to try and provide jobs
and to provide ways for these students to have some hope for the
future, we will never get anywhere.
Someone once asked me if I would be a cop
again. My answer to that question would be, “No way in the world,
because you’re going to have more police officers getting shot and
more police officers getting killed.”
Right before I retired in 2010, you had three
police officers get killed. One police officer was leaving his
father’s house to get on his new motorcycle and some
gangbangers—who didn’t even live on the South Side of
Chicago—wanted to relieve him of his motorcycle. And they killed
the young man over there on King Drive—right off of 84th or 85th
and King Drive.
Another black police officer got shot wiping
his car off in front of his house. He bought the car, a Buick, as a
retirement present to himself and was going to retire a month later
and got shot in an apparent stickup. Last night, I talked to one of
my friends that’s a police officer in the 22nd District now, where
I was a police officer at one time. He told me a police officer got
shot last night. Did it make the news? I watched the 6 o’clock news
and it wasn’t on there. You know, there are so many instances where
police officers get assaulted, get shot at or get shot that never
make the news. So no, not in the city of Chicago.
—
Interviewed by Adrienne
Moss
Endnotes
5 Fran Spielman, “Police Shortage a Growing
Problem,” Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 29, 2009.
6 Quoted in Fran Spielman, “Hiring 500 Cops
in 2013 Not Enough, Aldermen Say,” Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 10,
2012.
7 Garry F. McCarthy has been the police
superintendent since 2011. He was
formerly the police director in Newark, New Jersey.
8 The 6th District covers the Gresham
neighborhood on the Far South Side.
9 The 22nd District covers the Morgan Park
community on the Far South Side.
10 Weis served as Chicago’s top cop from 2008
to early 2011.
11 The 7th District covers the Englewood
neighborhood on the South Side.
FOUR BULLETS
JOHN McCULLOUGH
In 2012, Chicago’s homicide rate rose for
the first time in four years—an increase that experts attribute in
part to the breakdown of larger street gangs into feuding factions.
According to a Chicago Tribune investigation,12 roughly one in four
of the city’s 506 slaying victims in 2012 was affiliated with the
Gangster Disciples (GDs), a powerful South Side gang that, in
recent years, has splintered into at least 250 smaller, younger
groups—sometimes referred to as “cliques” or “sects”—which now
battle over turf older gang members once shared.
One person who has experienced this bloody
infighting firsthand is John McCullough. Born and raised in the
Englewood neighborhood, he has been shot and incarcerated on
numerous occasions. At age 25, McCullough says he is no longer
involved in gang activity and is attempting to stay out
of trouble.