Officers face new threat — ambush
The call came in at 12:19 p.m.: Man with a rifle, roaming loose in a park near the Berkeley Marina.
It’s the kind of call police officers always hate to get. But coming Tuesday, just two days after a similar report lured three cops to their deaths in Louisiana, it carried new dread.
As Sgt. Chris Stines rolled up to direct his squad into the bushes, he took inventory of the bulletproof vests he had on hand that could stop rifle rounds. He had enough for less
than half the squad. Rifle rounds were what the African American shooter intent on revenge for police shootings of black men used to kill the cops in Baton Rouge, La., last Sunday. Stines and his officers took up the hunt anyway.
“You have to do your job, but I guarantee you, the shootings in Baton Rouge were at the top of everyone’s minds at that moment,” said Stines, a 17-year veteran of the Berkeley force. He paused for a moment. “I wish we had more vests,” he said.
The latent fear that always comes with being an officer on the beat now has a new edge — the fear of ambush.
It’s nowhere near being a crippling fear, Stines and other officers say. But with national tensions over police shootings of black men already boiling, this month’s quick succession of highly publicized killings has sent hostilities to a new level.
The videotaped killings of two black men by police in Louisiana and Minnesota this month and the slayings of eight law officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge happened thousands of miles from the Bay Area. The hostility effect, though, is local everywhere. It comes in subtle ways every day — in more taunts than usual, like threats yelled at officers as they drive by.
‘We are concerned’
The other day in Berkeley, Stines said, a man drew his finger across his neck as he mocked an officer trying to clear him from the middle of the road, where he was spinning circles on a bicycle.
One of the officers shot dead in Baton Rouge had written about feeling the heat. “In uniform I get nasty hateful looks and out of uniform some consider me a threat,” Officer Montrell Jackson, who was black, posted on social media about a week before he was killed.
The flip side comes in everyday calls of support for police — high-fives in the street, proclamations from leaders including President Obama that police should be respected. But it’s not enough.
“Our officers are stressed. We are concerned. I’d be lying if I said we weren’t,” said Richmond police Lt. Felix Tan. “We are very obvious when we drive around — we’re in marked police cars. Everyone can see us. But we’re going to keep going out there, giving the best service we can provide.
“The main way to eventually get past all of this is in one word: relationships,” Tan said. “Our officers are very focused on community policing, and we just have to keep at it.”
Most people organizing protests against police shootings, and academics studying police and racial conflict, say they welcome efforts to build better relationships, with more cops on foot and at community meetings. But they also call for reforming the rules of engagement — mandating the use of alternatives to lethal force when possible, instituting tougher rules on how to engage potentially dangerous people and the like. And there is momentum toward that, at least locally.
San Francisco, which has had three controversial killings by police since December and threats against its African American interim chief and officers at one of its stations, is instituting de-escalation policies for confrontations. Many departments are re-examining protocols from racial profiling to use of force.
Incitement by fringes
But none of that can tamp down tensions immediately. Fueling emotions on all sides are calls from fringe left groups to attack police and from fringe right groups to attack protesters.
“The violent anger is clearly out there in the hearts of some Americans,” said Jonathan Simon, faculty director of the Center for the Study of Law and Society at UC Berkeley. “And, if anything, we do need to up our discussions of how to reform the policing model,” he said.
“But the media has been giving all of these events, especially Dallas and Baton Rouge, assassination-level coverage, like with President Kennedy or Martin Luther King Jr.,” Simon said. “And that exacerbates things — the rhetoric, the emotions. If we give that much space to shootings, let’s give the same space to discussion of policing, to real grievances, to why these shootings are happening.”
For Cat Brooks, an organizer in Oakland for Black Lives Matter protests, the discussion should go deeper than police policy.
“In communities of color, the way you counteract the genocide of black people in America is to start insisting on things that reduce the need for police,” she said. “Education, economic opportunity, criminal justice reform. These are not new things, but they are every bit as important today as ever.”
It’s ‘gotten worse’
Brooks also said the heightened tensions on the street cut both ways. “Every time the rhetoric goes up, the cops get more aggressive,” she said. “They’re human beings, people with a lot of power, and society says you’re not supposed to challenge them.
“There is an old saying that applies here: Hurt people hurt people.”
In her 27 years on the Berkeley police force, Officer G.Y. Brown said, she has never experienced the level of racial tension on the beat that she’s felt since the shooting of an unarmed black man in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 struck the match that ignited today’s firestorm of anger.
“It’s absolutely gotten worse since then,” said Brown, who is African American. “And I personally experience that when people like protesters say to me, ‘You’re not really black,’ ‘You’re token,’ things like that.
“I tell them, ‘What does that mean? Is it just because I’m black and I wear a uniform?’ I say, ‘You are all people, and I am here to protect the black man, the white man, the Native American, everyone.’ ”
She stood on the sidewalk the other day with other officers as they handled a dispute between neighbors, and said, “You have to try to not take it personally. But frankly, when I listen to the rhetoric on the TV, I just turn it off these days because I get vexed.”
William Davis, who is black and retired at 70, was watching the officers handle the dispute. When it ended peacefully, he called out cheerily, “You’re doing all right. Glad you’re here.
“There’s all this talk that police think it’s OK to kill blacks, but you don’t hear that in Berkeley,” Davis said. “Maybe in the Midwest. I don’t know. All I know is that all of this anger, all of this stuff, has got to be talked out between the people and law enforcement, but nobody is the leader on that.”
Robbery and race
About an hour later, Brown, Stines and others dashed to a robbery scene in Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Center Park and got a starkly contrasting reaction. A young Latino man and two witnesses were accusing a young black man in handcuffs of beating him and stealing his glasses, and the suspect was blaming the accusations on race.
“He’s just naming anyone who’s black,” fumed the handcuffed man. He glared over at his accuser, the witnesses and Stines — who is white — and yelled, “Hey bro, not all black people look alike.”
As another officer led the suspect away, Stines called his comments “a reminder to us that there is bias on all sides. It’s how you react to it that makes the difference.”
Too often, it seems, people expect the reaction will be bad right from the start.
Call on man with rifle
Stines talked about the day this month that police got a call about a black man with a loaded semiautomatic rifle and extra ammunition on San Pablo Avenue. When officers showed up, he refused to put down the weapon, and an edgy crowd had already gathered.
“For some reason, he finally decided that this wasn’t going to be the day everything went bad for him,” Stines said. What Stines found as “terrifying” as anything at the scene, though, was the difficulty in clearing the public to safety — “because everyone had their phones out and insisted on staying to film everything.”
By Tuesday, with the Baton Rouge ambush fresh in the news, the worry for the Berkeley officers hunting for the man reported with a rifle near the marina had become more personal.
And they never found that man.