A poignant story of a Black kid who just wanted to be a good cop
“Why the hell would a young Black kid want to be a cop?”
That’s the first sentence from the book “C.O.P. The Color of Power — The Odyssey of a Black Cop,” written by Tommy Tunson, a retired police chief and professor in criminal justice at Bakersfield College. It’s penned under the name Sylvester Stone, but more on that in a bit. Tunson interweaves his own real life experience and that of four other Black and one Latino officer who shared similar experiences at distinct law enforcement agencies.
He made up the main character Tyrone Washington to tell the stories of all of them.
Growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s in a metropolitan city in California, Tunson points out the greatest causes of death for Black males in his neighborhood appeared to be drugs, gangs and the police. So I asked Tunson the same question he raised in his book.
“Because you want to have a positive significant change on society,” Tunson said. “Historically that has never existed.”
As a child, Tunson recalls historic events that shaped his life. Watching Blacks on TV news getting sprayed by cops with high-pressure hoses at civil rights rallies was a turning point that saddened and angered him at the same time.
“That brought tears to my eyes. I’m a little boy and I’m seeing this and I say, ‘I thought this was America, home of the free and land of the brave. Why are they doing this to other Americans?’” Tunson said.
He decided at an early age to become a policeman, he said, “to show others that policemen can be nice, that they can help society, they can help protect.” He was in for a shock he never imagined.
In the book, Ty Washington joins and completes military service, tries numerous times to pass a written civil service exam and finally gets accepted into the police academy. Upon completion, Ty becomes the first Black officer in allwhite police department dubbed “Hometown Police Department” in Southern California. Despite warnings from his mother about encountering racial hostility, Ty was never prepared for what was to come.
“Ty reported to work one Sunday afternoon and discovered a cartoon cutout on his wall locker in the police department locker room. The cartoon depicted a Black character standing in front of whitehooded Klu Klux Klan members; they were handing the Black man a cake with cross-shaped burning candles, which included another Klansman holding a rope, shaped like a tie,” the book reads.
Incidents like this became common and frequent. Racial and mean “jokes” belittled Blacks and other minorities used by fellow white officers while white supervisors turned a blind eye. To complicate matters, Ty was on probation and could be fired for no cause, so he kept quiet as much as he could. But there was no investigation when Ty informed his training officer about the cartoon cutout. Complaining to his superiors or the police union served no purpose; they were the same ones complicit in these “jokes.” Ty was expected to go with the flow and laugh it off to show the white officers he was one of them, too. His dream of becoming a cop turned into a nightmare. So he reached out to other minority officers at other agencies for support, finding out they, too, had faced the same thing.
“The term hostile work environment did not exist back then,” Tunson told me. “It was hard enough being a rookie cop learning to do report writing, crime scene investigation, collection of evidence etc. Couple all that together with being Black and receiving racial slurs on weekly basis.”
“That wasn’t in the academy training manual,” he said.
Ty eventually left Hometown Police Department for another police agency, but there, too, were similar experiences.
Having to endure such brazen stupidity at work from fellow cops was eating him up, and it took a toll on Tunson’s personal life. Married, he became a recluse mentioning to his wife that more racist stuff was still happening at work. He eventually divorced. But it wasn’t all bad; occasionally he would get home after a good day at work after helping somebody as a policeman. Since the release of the book a few months ago, he’s had some friends from the Los Angeles Police Department call him and say they, too went through the same ordeal.
Black and Latino cops could also face blatant hostility from within their own communities.
“I heard ‘Uncle Tom’ a lot from some of the Blacks that I encountered and I heard the “N” word from whites in the community. I was living in both worlds,” Tunson said.
Despite a very rough beginning, Tunson somehow managed to live through it, eventually becoming police chief in Calexico and in Arvin during his 33-plus years in his career. He is currently teaching at Bakersfield College. Is it any different for Black cops today, I asked him?
“I get a sense from Black and Hispanic cops I talk to that it’s changed a lot,” Tunson said. “I sincerely hope it’s a lot different today.”
So why write under the pen name “Sylvester Stone?” That was the publisher’s idea, said Tunson. So he picked that name and in case you don’t remember, Sylvester Stone was the stage name of Sylvester Stewart, leader of the ‘70s-era band “Sly and the Family Stone.” They were hip, everyday people.
Tunson credits his mother with guiding and supporting him throughout his young life. She would often tell him to keep his mouth shut at work when the racial slurs would fly.
“I wasn’t good at that,” Tunson laughed when I asked him about it. “And I don’t think much has changed today.”
The book is available on Amazon.