Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy Longo Sr. is no slave overseer. But he knows the specter of the slave patrol colors the way some people see police officers.
In early September, Longo addressed about 15 people attending this fall’s Citizens Police Academy. The annual 10-session class trains neighborhood residents in the basics of police work. In the process, Longo gives the trainees a frank lesson on why “community policing” is one of the toughest jobs in the city.
Longo said last month that a “slave patrol” is the “oldest model of a police-like force.”
In a later interview with C-VILLE, Longo said he used the slave patrol example to acknowledge that many people, particularly African-Americans, look at police against a backdrop of deeply ingrained history and culture. The view, he admits, is often negative.
“In my opinion, the slave patrol met a policing function. That’s what they did,” Longo says. “You just don’t forget that. That doesn’t change overnight.”
As a strategy, “community policing” has been tossed around the Charlottesville Police Department for a decade. It refers to a style of policing where officers work with neighborhood residents, gathering tips that make crimes easier to solve and, ideally, preventing some crimes altogether. As a practice, community policing began in earnest when the City hired Longo, a Baltimore police veteran, in February 2001.
In the past several months, two much-publicized incidents—uproar in April over a DNA dragnet of black men, and the shooting of an unarmed 31-year-old black man, Kerry Cook, by a white police officer at Friendship Court in August—brought the issues of race relations and law enforcement again to the foreground in Charlottesville. Opinions varied, with some defending Longo and his department, while others declared race relations were worse than anytime since the 1960s.
The stakes are high, and the pressure on Longo seems tremendous. After all, the City has pinned its economic future on luring middle-class homebuyers into Charlottesville neighborhoods, including those traditionally home to low-income African-Americans. Longo believes making those neighborhoods safe for current and prospective residents demands a close relationship between police and neighbors.
“There are going to be entire communities that I’m going to have to win the trust of,” Longo said to the Citizens Police Academy’s attendees. “I’m not sure we’re there yet. I think we’re a whole lot closer than we were.”
DNA disputes
Last spring, the national news media descended on Charlottesville, and for once it didn’t have anything to do with Sally Hemings, Dave Matthews or a new “No. 1” ranking.
Chief Longo was in a tight spot. News of a serial rapist, responsible for a series of violent attacks across seven years, had people wondering: “Why can’t the police catch this guy?”
Each new attack heaped more scrutiny on the department. Police posted composite sketches of the rapist—described as a muscular black man in his late 20s—and pleaded for citizen tips, but to no avail.
Under pressure to crack the case, Longo ordered a DNA dragnet. By seeking voluntary DNA samples (taken by swabbing the inner cheek) from 195 black men, police kicked open a hornet’s nest.
The backlash began when police asked Steven Turner, a black graduate student at UVA’s Curry School of Education, for a DNA sample in March. It was the second time police had approached Turner for a sample. He refused both requests—one of only 10 men who rejected the swab—and began loudly blasting the dragnet.
Turner caught the attention of local and national media, and received backing from local African-American leaders, among them Dr. Rick Turner, no relation, UVA’s outspoken Dean of African-American Affairs, and Pastor Bruce Beard of Transformational Ministries First Baptist Church.
Critics argued that the voluntary samples amounted to racial profiling, claiming that police were taking samples from men who looked nothing like the composite, or who hadn’t been in the area long enough to have committed the first rape, in 1997. Others said the chief should have at least conferred with black leaders to explain the dragnet and ask for their help before officers started demanding swabs.
If Longo caught hell for not trying hard enough to catch the rapist, he caught twice as much hell for trying too hard. It wasn’t long before Longo ended up live on CNN, sitting next to Steven Turner to defend the dragnet. During one frenzied week in April, Longo fielded calls from network TV producers, held a feisty town hall meeting and, eventually, suspended the DNA sample collection.
When Longo revived the dragnet a few days later, he applied much stricter guidelines to when and how to collect a sample. He also reiterated the promise that samples would be destroyed after being checked against the perp’s DNA. The new plan met largely with approval from black leaders. Dean Turner, Beard, the ACLU and others praised Longo’s response to the furor.
But not everyone was slapping Longo on the back. Some local blacks grumbled that they’d been complaining about the dragnet since it first began, but nobody paid any attention until a UVA student started fussing.
“Until it made national news, it was fine and dandy,” says Raymond Mason, a fierce critic of the DNA dragnet. He attended Longo’s town hall meeting, and says police shouldn’t be asking people to submit their DNA more or less at random.
“I know someone who got stopped twice. He didn’t fit the description at all,” says Mason. “They told him, ‘Why don’t you prove yourself innocent?’
“According to the Constitution, you’re innocent until proven guilty. They flipped the script,” Mason says.
Escalating force
On August 21, a single gunshot on a summer night sent another shockwave through the city’s African-American neighborhoods.
That night two officers, while responding to a 911 call from a woman in an apartment in Friendship Court, had a violent confrontation with Kerry Cook, the woman’s ex-boyfriend. Cook, a Fluvanna resident, was wanted on several fairly minor warrants, but had a lengthy rap sheet and violent past. He had also previously been arrested by Officer William Sclafani, one of the two officers who responded to the call at the subsidized housing complex on Garrett Street.
According to a police statement, after the two officers used “escalating force” while trying to subdue Cook, Sclafani then shot Cook once in the stomach. Witnesses say police repeatedly hit Cook in the head with their batons, adding that the fight lasted for several minutes and that perhaps 100 residents witnessed at least some of the violence.
Civil rights attorney Deborah Wyatt represented Cook’s family in the shooting’s aftermath, and appeared likely to take some form of legal action on the behalf of Craig Lawson, 36, claiming that he was unfairly swept up and arrested in the chaos of that night at Friendship Court. Lawson was charged with a felony assault of a police officer, disorderly conduct, obstructing justice and crossing a police line. Wyatt is also handling a harassment lawsuit against City police over the DNA dragnet. A man who claims he does not fit the serial rapist’s description and therefore should not have been asked to provide a DNA sample filed the suit.
Police and the City Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office are still investigating the Cook incident. Cook, who went into a coma after being shot, spent more than three weeks recovering at the UVA Medical Center. He is now being held at the Albemarle/Charlottesville Regional Jail.
Cook’s mother, Patricia Cook, complains that her son was released to the custody of the jail too quickly, saying he still has a fever and can’t walk or eat.
“We’re afraid this man is actually going to die in there,” Cook says.
Taken together, the DNA dragnet and the shooting incident had some local African-Americans fearing a backward slide toward the bad old days, when cops and black people stood on opposite sides of a battle line. When asked about those incidents, nobody was talking much about community policing.
“A lot of people don’t trust the police,” said Harold Foley, who works for Public Housing Association of Residents, in the days after the shooting. “The trust has broke down.”
That’s not what Chief Longo wants to hear. The central tenet of Longo’s strategic plan, which he introduced six months after assuming the post in February 2001, is to sink deep roots in historically high-crime neighborhoods, many of which are mostly black.
“Whachya gonna do when they come for you?”
Before Longo arrived, community policing was more of a catch phrase than a serious strategy.
The department’s first stab at such a policy was in 1994, when the City hired North Carolina native John Wolford to replace longtime chief John “Deke” Bowen.
Bowen’s so-called community policing initiative had involved putting officers on horseback. It made for good PR, but many cops didn’t understand how riding high in the saddle would help them to make inroads in high-crime neighborhoods, according to City Police Captain J.E. “Chip“ Harding, who in 2000 wrote a report on community policing.
Wolford had his own ideas about community policing. When he took over, he created a team of officers to work in troubled neighborhoods for three months at a time. That didn’t solve the problem, says Harding.
Wolford resigned after less than three years, when one-third of his officers and 90 percent of supervisors signed a letter questioning the chief’s credibility and management style.
Next came former police lieutenant J.W. “Buddy” Rittenhouse, who took over for Wolford. “He wasn’t very high on the whole concept of community policing,” says Harding.
The Rittenhouse method for cleaning up crime was a tactic called “saturation deployment.” For about three consecutive days, the department would send in a posse of officers and bust as many bad guys as possible.
“Like they do on ‘Cops’,” Longo says, before singing “Bad boys, bad boys” in homage to the show’s theme.
This approach may make for good television, but it doesn’t do much for ridding a city of drug dealing, gunplay, petty theft or even vandalism—a crime community policing believers tag as a the start of the slippery slope that leads to a neighborhood’s worsening decay.
Longo likens the outcome of saturation deployment to squeezing a balloon—by pushing on one neighborhood, crime shrinks there and swells somewhere else.
“You’ll never fix the problem that way,” Longo says. “A long-term strategy means a long-term commitment.”
While speaking at the Citizens Police Academy, Longo described the old-school policing style by leaning back, wrist draped over an imaginary steering wheel, pantomiming an officer who scans the sidewalk for bad guys as he rolls by in his cruiser.
Under Rittenhouse, the force was a “very military-style, highly structured, traditional form of policing,” says Harding, a 20-year veteran who served under Rittenhouse.
Near the end of his tenure, City Hall pressured Rittenhouse to try community policing. He created a five-officer squad to roam undercover around neighborhoods with a reputation for high crime, such as 10th and Page, Hardy Drive and Prospect Avenue, similar to the Neighborhood Task Force former chief Wolford had installed. In true Rittenhouse style, he dubbed his community policing squad the “Street Hawks” because, he reportedly said, the Neighborhood Task Force sounded “too Mr. Rogers.”
The predatory moniker was a curious choice, particularly for a squad that was supposed to reach out to minority groups, and its mention provokes a chuckle from Longo. Like other community policing squads, the Street Hawks came and went mostly because no one in the department had a clear idea of what they were supposed to do. “They were just kind of set off to the side,” says Harding.
The “here today, gone tomorrow” history of community policing in Charlottesville made Longo’s job even harder, because African-Americans were justifiably suspicious of any grand strategies and big promises from a new chief.
But as director of the Quality Community Council (QCC), Karen Waters was ready to give Longo’s strategy a chance. The QCC works on community-centered solutions to public safety, housing and other common problems in its target neighborhoods, most of which have large black populations. The group was formed in response to a random shooting on Prospect Avenue in 1999 and is funded by the City and private sources.
Waters defends Chief Longo, touting his positive influence on the force. Though Waters admits that the two incidents have upset people, she says Longo has worked hard to reach out to black neighborhoods.
“Are there individual officers that do things that are not just or correct? Yes,” Waters says, but adds, “I don’t recall ever being invited to sit down with Buddy Rittenhouse and being asked about the concerns of the African-American community.”
New day rising?
Not everyone shares Karen Waters’ view.
Mary Carey is president of the Friendship Court Neighborhood Association, and has lived in the apartment complex for 22 years. Carey is angry. She can’t talk about the recent police shooting that occurred 75 feet from her apartment without raising her voice.
“These people will never forget that night,” Carey says of the shooting. “I can see that cop shooting him…I can’t get it out of my mind.”
Carey’s loud denunciations of the police force were heard all over local media, angering some cops, who thought her superheated charges were not representative of a community they say they’ve worked hard to get to know.
Carey says the shooting was a turning point for her faith in Longo and police.
“I used to feel like Longo would make a difference, but now, I don’t know,” she says.
The day after the shooting, two detectives came looking for Carey at the Food Lion on Fifth Street, where she works. They wanted a statement from her about the shooting, but she wasn’t in that day. Carey says the detectives’ visit was “humiliating” and “almost damaged my credibility with my employer.”
She left an angry phone message with Longo, accusing him of crossing the line. The next day, a detective came to apologize for the Food Lion visit, she says, but the apology didn’t curb her anger.
“I grew up with this shit back in the ’60s. I’m not going back,” Carey says.
Asked about missteps that may have a racial angle, Captain Harding says Longo has vigorously stressed respect among officers in their dealings with citizens, and within the force.
“Yeah, you’re going to have people messing up occasionally…Anytime you’ve got 120 sworn police officers there’s always going to a knucklehead in the group somewhere doing something sometime,” Harding says. He says the difference is that the 41-year-old Longo—who holds a law degree and sports an impressive career in which he rose from a cadet to a colonel in 18 years with the Baltimore police force—sets the tone for a culture that does not tolerate insensitive behavior. Longo’s example, Harding says, is “permeating the whole environment.”
Even so, some residents, particularly in black neighborhoods, aren’t buying that it’s a new day over at the police station. The tension between African-Americans and the police reaches deeper than any particular chief, policy, or specific incident, says DNA dragnet critic Raymond Mason.
“The problem is not just the chief, or the police department. It’s the community itself,” says Mason. “Charlottesville just got named the best place to live, but for black people that’s just not true. It’s the same way in every city.”
Echoing a fact the chief himself explained to the Citizens Police Academy, Mason says that a suspicion of white society, including police and government, has long been part of African-American culture.
“It’s not just resentment against the police department,” says Mason. “It’s resentment against white society.”
That’s not what Charlottesville likes to hear about itself. Whether such resentment is fair, both police and African-American leaders admit Mason’s point of view is not uncommon; indeed, it’s a fact that both blacks and whites must recognize and confront if any progress is to be made in Charlottesville’s race relations.
Mason is a convicted felon, guilty of cocaine distribution and heroin possession, and he now works for Gaston Wyatt, a woodworking company. He says his first encounter with police was when he was 11 or 12. A white woman accused him—falsely, he says—of stealing her pocketbook. An officer apprehended him, twisted his arm behind his back and hollered to his buddies, “Yep, I caught another one.”
Mason says he escaped prosecution when the woman couldn’t positively identify him. “She said, ‘You know, judge, they all look alike.’”
Mason points to little examples—the way a police car cruises by a group of black men standing on the corner, then turns around and cruises by again, slowly. It’s the condescending attitude he says some officers exude towards black people.
“Cops talk to white people, and they say ‘Sir, is there a problem,’” says Mason. “They talk to black people and say ‘Hey, what’s the problem here?’”
Mason says he recently gave an officer roadside directions. “He said, ‘You ‘da man!’ I’m not the man. You don’t have to talk black to me. Just be respectful.”
Another incident—recently two plainclothes police officers were walking along UVA’s Corner district when a young white man drove past in an SUV blaring hip hop. “Hey, you’re white!” one of the officers yelled to the driver, mockingly, unaware that a C-VILLE reporter was walking behind them.
It’s unclear whether they were City officers. But their badges and guns were clearly on display, and so was the kind of cocky swagger that many people find offensive. It’s what Harding would call “knucklehead” behavior, and it reinforces the deeply ingrained stereotypes that Longo is striving to overcome.
“There are always going to be people that say, ‘You know what, I’ve been hurt too many times. I’ve seen things too many times. [Police] are not going to change my mind,’” Longo says. “You can’t [further] alienate that person. You just gotta accept that and move on—with or without them.”
Longo put this belief into action on a recent day, when he returned a call from Mary Carey about setting up a meeting. Still steamed, Carey plays the Longo’s message for a reporter. His voice is business-like, but friendly, as he says he looks forward to meeting with her.
A matter of perception
Safety—no politician can promise it, no police program can guarantee it. Safety is more than just a function of crime statistics or number of officers on the street. It’s also a subjective feeling that depends on how people perceive their environment.
To illustrate that point, Longo describes what he says is the No. 1 complaint his department receives. It’s laughable—when people complain to Longo about crime, the place they talk about the most frequently is that bourgeois bastion, the Downtown Mall.
Longo himself sometimes patrols the Mall on Friday nights, and says the typical troublemaker he runs into is a loud teenager who might be sitting ona planter.
“I hear all the time that people don’t feel safe on the Downtown Mall,” Longo says. “But the reality of it is that you don’t read about a lot of crimes happening there.”
Yet some residents say police should be arresting more of those unruly teenagers and other alleged Mall troublemakers—many of whom are black. At a recent meeting of the Downtown Business Association of Charlottesville, several merchants gave City Police Lt. Gary Pleasants an earful about crime on the Mall, claiming that officers are allegedly issuing warnings rather than arresting Mall urchins.
Sometimes, police can’t catch a break. Last year Charlottesville saw a 10 percent dip in reported, serious crimes, yet critics continue to harp on the department for not being able to catch the serial rapist—the proverbial needle in the haystack. While some business owners and real estate developers push police to “lock ‘em up,” minority neighborhood leaders say aggressive tactics only alienate the people whose help police most need.
When Longo moved into his office three years, ago, his problems went even deeper than inconsistent notions of community policing. The City’s police department constantly struggles to retain officers tempted by higher-paying jobs, and the chronic officer shortfall (currently, the department is seven officers short) means community policing units are perpetually shorthanded.
“Rather than just take a bunch of cops and throw them at a neighborhood, we started small,” Longo says. “And we picked 10th and Page first.”
In addition to the two cops at 10th and Page, who are set up in a substation, City police have two officers at a substation in the Orangedale/Prospect Avenue neighborhood. Longo says the first priority for these four officers is meeting people and building relationships.
“If it takes you 10 years, then prepare to say here 10 years,” Longo says of the neighborhood cops’ marching orders.
To help restore faith in local government, police hold regular meetings in target neighborhoods, giving residents a chance to make requests for amenities—repair for a broken sidewalk, a speed bump, a new stop sign. Then police go to City Hall and make it happen.
The thinking is that if these officers can earn neighbor’s trust, maybe cops will be steered toward big problems, such as when an out-of-town drug dealer moves into the area. Because, as Longo says, people are far more likely to phone in a tip to a cop they know and trust.
“I wish we could just wave a magic wand and expand [community policing],” says Waters of the Quality Community Council.
Though Waters admits that this year has posed challenges for police in working with the black community, she says Longo’s plan has definitely improved peoples’ opinions of cops, and City government. Furthermore, Waters actually thinks the DNA flap could help get people engaged with police, claiming that her office gained several volunteers who signed up because of outrage over the incident.
“Crisis is what forms leadership,” Waters says.
Cyndi Richardson, a lifelong resident of Sixth Street S.W., is enrolled in this fall’s Citizens Police Academy. She says she’s excited about talking to local drug enforcement, SWAT and internal affairs officers. She’s also looking forward to seeing the firing range, but wouldn’t mind missing the tour of the jail.
Richardson currently serves as an informal block rep for police, a role she says grew out of her concern over drug dealing on her street in the mid ’90s. The dealers moved to her street when police cracked down on an open-air drug market in 10th and Page.
“Now, it’s gone,” Richardson says of the imported drug problem.
Richardson says she praises police to her neighbors, defending their actions with “a clear conscience”—a stance that isn’t always easy.
“I’ve gotten flack for it,” Richardson says, noting that she supports police because “I’ve worked with the police department.”
Even as community policing apparently makes slow but steady inroads into the African-American community, the system is still hampered by budget issues. While the federal government feeds departments across the country millions of dollars for guns and gas masks to fight drugs and terrorists, federal and State budget cuts have left localities strapped for cash.
For example, The Washington Post reported last week that the Justice Department’s Community Oriented Policing Services Program (COPS), which helped local departments boost their ranks with 118,000 officers nationwide, would no longer fund new hires. The move comes after years of cuts from the Bush Administration. Since 1995, the COPS program gave the Charlottesville Police Department $662,069, allowing it to bring on 14 new officers.
Budget woes mean Charlottesville is often short on police officers. The seven-officer shortage in Charlottesville has left four vacancies in the department’s Neighborhood Services Bureau. That means two neighborhoods, including Friendship Court where Kerry Cook was shot, are denied a community policing squad. Furthermore, Harding says, the department is constantly losing officers to higher salaries in other cities or to jobs with the Drug Enforcement Agency, Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms bureau, and FBI. And in a new twist, Harding says three experienced officers have been lured away from Charlottesville in the last six months by local sheriffs’ departments that offered the bonus of a take-home police car.
“We get discouraged,” says Harding.
Police work, it seems, is often an exercise in dealing with frustration. Money’s tight, demands are high, and sometimes the progress seems to come in drops while setbacks seem to come in torrents.
“You’ve just got to be patient,” says Longo. “You can’t just throw your hands up and say, ‘There’s nothing we can do.’ You’ve got to stay the course. You’ve got to show people that this is for real.”
Welcome to the neighborhood
COMMUNITY POLICING HITS THE STREETS
Lt. Mike Dean of the Charlottesville Police Department is an ex-Marine who worked for the Jefferson Area Drug Enforcement squad for 15 years. During that time, he says, busting dealers was “my singular focus.”
So it was a major shift for Dean when he was promoted in 2002 to run the CPD’s Neighborhood Services Bureau, which directs the department’s “community policing” efforts from a headquarters in the former Frank Ix building. Since then, Dean has become a true believer in the hands-on approach of working with residents to stop crime.
“Community policing is about leveraging all our resources, because police can’t do it alone” Dean says. “What we think the problems in the community are, are not always what people in the neighborhood think the biggest problems are,” Dean adds.
To better learn what’s going on around town, City police hold monthly meetings with a group of 30 informal block reps from primarily low-income neighborhoods, also drawing City officials to the huddles.
Police also go door-to-door delivering surveys in historically high-crime neighborhoods. Among the questions on the straightforward questionnaire are whether people think police are respectful, whether they feel safe and what they think are the biggest ills in the neighborhood, with choices ranging from gun violence to littering. Dean flips through a big book that contains detailed results from the survey, saying they help City cops know where work needs to be done.
Many of the tactics used in community policing arose in the early ’90s in New York City, during Rudy Giuliani’s stint as mayor, a time in which the NYPD orchestrated a remarkable decrease in crime. The strategy is about far more than, as Police Captain J.E. “Chip” Harding says, “just birthday cakes and gifts for children.” When it’s working, community policing garners a steady stream of tips about crime and also helps one hand talk to the other, so to speak, on the force.
One tactic local cops have taken from the NYPD’s community policing playbook is a regular meeting to track crime trends. At the meeting, Chief Longo says shift commanders and sergeants huddle at a round table with detectives, school resources officers and neighborhood cops to look at clusters of “calls for service” on a map up on the wall. Longo says the group can focus on specific streets and ask questions such as, “Why do we have three domestic calls here and what are you doing to stop it? Have you booked them into counseling?”
Longo says the approach gives cops a fuller picture of likely criminals. It’s part of a far more comprehensive crime fighting plan than what Charlottesville’s finest have used in the past, which Longo describes as, “Go in there guys, be real aggressive policing, lock some people up, kick down some doors, execute some search warrants, get some people off the corner, you know, board up some houses and then once it’s stabilized, O.K. 10th and Page, you’re on your own.
“This is different,” Longo says. “It could take years.”—P.F.
Back in black
THE CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT STRUGGLES TO RECRUIT AFRICAN-AMERICAN OFFICERS
An obvious way for the Charlottesville Police Department to better relations with black citizens is to have more black cops patrolling the city. But with only 13 black officers on the 112-member police force, the percentage of black cops is about half the percentage of African-American residents in Charlottesville proper, which is 22 percent.
Chief Timothy Longo says this relatively low number is not for lack of trying, citing “focused minority recruitment” of blacks, Hispanics and women.
“The problem with recruiting African-Americans, particularly African-American males, is that it’s not a popular profession,” Longo says, with understatement. “There’s a certain stigma.”
With the force not having much luck recruiting black men, Longo decided to call for backup. About 18 months ago, he sent a letter to 35 local black leaders.
“Basically what I was asking for is help,” Longo says.
With only a handful of phone calls and a few meetings resulting, the response to the letter was disappointing.
Asked what might turn things around, spurring local leaders to help and bringing minority recruits to his door, Longo says, “People are just going to have to see that this is a department in which they feel respected and valued.”—P.F.
Police salaries
Police work is rarely easy, no matter what city you live in. Charlottesville cops endure the same frustrations and dangers as officers elsewhere, but they get far less in return.
Statistics show that Charlottesville’s men and women in blue earn less than their counterparts in other cities. The chart below compares starting salaries for patrol officers in Charlottesville and other Virginia cities and elsewhere nationwide.
In the past six months, Charlottesville’s police department has lost three officers to other departments with higher pay, according to City Police Captain J.E. “Chip” Harding. The department is currently short seven officers, with four vacancies in the community-policing bureau. It’s frustrating, Harding says, because it’s usually the most talented officers who leave.
Last spring, in the thick of budget season and City Council campaigns, there seemed to be no dearth of rhetoric about how raising salaries would help the City retain good officers. What does seem in short supply, however, is money.—J.B.
STARTING SALARIES FOR POLICE OFFICERS IN VIRGINIA
Charlottesville $29,250
Albemarle County $28,888
Virginia Beach $36,622
Danville $27,951 (without college degree), $30,746 (without college degree)
Arlington $38,126