Cop’s son wonders whether more Black faces would help

Back in my teens, when a pair of white police officers ordered my brother and I, at gunpoint, to get on the ground because we “matched the description” of some carjacking suspects, I had a quick thought: I wish my dad was here.

For most of my childhood, my father worked in law enforcement. Through a few panicked breaths while laying on the ground, I wondered how differently the situation would have played out if the cops were Black, like my dad. Would they have been less aggressive and more communicative? Would they have mistaken us for the suspects at all?

The truth in the world we live in today is unavoidable: Black men are arrested at a higher rate than white people, and according to a recent study by Harvard researchers, we’re also more likely to be killed in interactions with police in this country. There’s a direct correlation between the inherent racial bias in policing and national data showing how U.S. police departments are generally whiter than the communities they work within.

Since the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., police departments across the country have been vocal about their struggle to attract minority applicants. This makes sense since young Black folks are acutely aware of how the justice system has historically discriminated against them, so they make valid arguments about how it’s easier to tear the system down from the outside if it were to be rebuilt into a more equitable form.

In some ways, this very same thinking actually drove my father to the department 30 years ago instead of away from it — he wanted to fix policing in his community, but from within the force. What’s interesting is how he never encouraged me or my brothers to become cops. Nor did my mom. None of us followed my dad’s path, but with the world as it is, I recently wondered what stance my parents would take on the issue today. So, I called them.

“I never wanted to make that choice for you. I always felt like if you thought you could make a difference as part of the police, change it for the better, and it was something you wanted to do, then go for it,” said my dad, Larry Phillips. “There could be more Black cops now, but it only works the right way if they’re getting into it for the right reasons. That’s how things change for the better.”

My dad spent about 13 years working for law enforcement agencies in multiple Mississippi cities, including Gulfport and Jackson. He did everything from working as a patrol officer to being an undercover detective. He launched a D.A.R.E. program for high school students and started a bicycle patrol program in Gulfport.

The only time he ever mixed work with his home life was when my older brothers participated in a junior cadet program my dad organized over a couple of summers. He included my brothers in it because it was a way for him to spend more time with his kids without taking vacation days.

Over speakerphone, my mom, who works as an emergency room doctor, said when she has an officer as a patient, she tells them “to get home safe,” because in those moments, she thinks about my dad’s time in uniform. Rarely, she said, are the cops people of color.

“Black, white, whatever, I tell them to be safe. They have families at home, and I remember those days,” she said. “But I also think about who sees me doing that in the emergency room, and how important it is for officers to be a part of the community they work in, and not just see it as a job and the people as strangers.”

I know my childhood wasn’t normal. I didn’t grow up fearing cops’ lights because these guys would come to the house for barbecues, and spent nights with my dad laughing and playing dominoes. Cops were in the stands of my peewee league football games, cheering me on. Sometimes while in uniform, they played basketball in the street with kids in our neighborhood. With every kiss on the cheek my mom would give my dad as he left for a shift, I could see how the household I lived in inherently believed blue lives mattered, because to us they were also Black lives.

With his law enforcement days far behind him, the only policing my dad does lately pertains to his boxer puppy, Jack, and the weeds in my mom’s gardens. He still pops into neighborhood watch meetings and homeowners association events when he can. But each day, he said he does find himself watching news of police shootings and thinks about how the country’s police forces can improve.

“The main thing is the culture of police departments has to change,” he said. “We need cops that want to calm situations down, not come in and make them worse. Having more Black officers could be a start, but some of these issues, they’re deeper than that.”